NEWSCLIPS

1.   Imperial fantasy

      ABC News (Laura Tingle), 6-7 January 2026

The kidnapping of the Maduras from Venezuala "has ripped up the final vestiges of expectations that nation states will act in a way which recognises international and legal and international norms. It reflects a view of the world which is carved up by great powers within an implicit agreement that they will not intervene in each other's backyards: In Russia's case, Ukraine, and in China's, Taiwan."

America's President Trump "is seeking to run not just Venezuala but the broader 'Western Hemisphere' by threat of further action" on punitive tariffs, marine asset seizures, or sanctions ... This revisionist policy "was formalised in the release of the U.S national security strategy last month. At the heart of the strategy ... is a focus on controlling the Western Hemisphere ― the broader Americas ― that it says is there to serve U.S. purposes."

      The United States must be pre-eminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity ― a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.

      We want a hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.

This must be one of the boldest statements of expansive arrogance and ambition made by an American administration since the nineteenth century. Memories of the long discredited Monroe Doctrine notwithstanding, the mood from the rest of us (not including Russia or China) can only be one of despairing deja vu. How can the world's leading democratic nation act as if it is entirely unaware of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's dystopian science-fiction novel first published in 1949 (and which has held a virtually unchallenged place on school curriculums ever since)?

To refresh our minds, with the assistance of <en.wikipedia>;

"The story takes place in a fictional future ... Much of the world is in perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Party's Thought Police. The Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and, through the Ministry of Truth, historical negationism [ie 'historical denialism ― falsification, trivialisation and distortion of the historical record'] and constant propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking ... The novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated."

"In George Orwell's [1984], the world is divided into three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, which are all fighting each other in a perpetual war [over] a disputed area mostly located around the equator ... during Hate Week, Oceania's enemy suddenly changes from Eurasia to Eastasia, which mostly goes unnoticed ...

[Oceania state] is composed of the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, including the British Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa. [It is stated that Oceania formed after the United States merged with the British Empire].

[Eurasia state] comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass from Portugal to the Bering Strait. [Eurasia was formed after the Soviet Union annexed continental Europe].

[Eastasia state] consists of China and the countries south to it, the Japanese islands, and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet. [Eastasia was formed a decade after Eurasia and Oceania ... after confused fighting between its predecessor nations]."

"The perpetual conflict among Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia takes place over a large disputed area bordering the three states, which includes Northern and Central Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, the unstable Eurasian-Eastasian boundary, the Arctic icepack, and the islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans ... 

These [super]states are all similar monolithic regimes ... they do not [necessarily] war over natural resources, nor is the destruction of their opponent a primary objective ... [the beliefs may differ but] their purpose is the same, to justify and maintain the unrestrained leadership of a totalitarian elite."

2.  Zombie politics

     <abc.net.au/news/2026-02-12/xi-jinping-acknowledges-army-corruption-crackdown/106333834>

Zombie politics is practiced by those who regularly make public utterance, but do so without any intent to communicate something of meaning or sense. 

Accomplished practitioners of ZP simply do not set out to add to the (meagre) sum of human knowledge and understanding. 

Their instinctive response to questioning of all sorts is to fill the subsequent void with words of such vacuity that we retreat ― stunned into silence, not by the power of their argument, but by our own incomprehension.

Exceptional skill in 'leached-language' is demonstrated by the Maoist-trained mind of China's Xi Jin Ping. His explanation of how the Chinese Military Commission, (of which he is Chair), started off with seven high-ranking generals a year or two ago but is now reduced to two survivors, (including himself), is a master-class in emptiness.

"Speaking to soldiers in a virtual address on Tuesday [11th Feb], Mr Xi was reported in state-run media as saying that the military had

               'undergone revolutionary tempering in the fight against corruption',

using a phrase commonly associated with strengthening military and and party loyalty.

              'The People's Liberation Army has advanced in-depth political rectification    

               [and] effectively responded to various risks and challenges',

Mr Xi said, according to state broadcaster CCTV."

Wow! 

Any poor bastard caught trying to decipher this string of nonsense words can expect a nocturnal knock on their apartment door ― and probably a blindfolded bus trip to wherever those five dismissed soldiers went. The real answer given here by Xi is "Shut up, Stupid!"

The relevance of the label Zombie politics (ZP) to this exemplar of the Dark Art can be misunderstood. It requires clarity on the term Zombie (from the Haitian noun zonbi).

Historian Laurent Dubois (Haiti : The Aftershocks of History, 2012, Picador, NY) has noted 

"an unending stream of zombies traipsing through U.S. popular culture. The 1934 film White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi ... helped spawn an entire genre, which fixed Haiti in many minds as a place of dark ritual and wandering undead, animated by an unending soundtrack of threatening drumming. By making zombies into generic horror-film monsters, such representations obscured the fact that in Haitian folklore, the zonbi is a powerful symbol with a specific, haunting point of reference. 

      It is a person devoid of all agency, 

             under the complete control of a master: 

                      that is, a slave.

Sometimes the term is used as an insult ― to this day independent farmers in Haiti might call wage workers zonbi, insisting that to sell your labor is to sell your freedom. Tales about zonbi often reflect fears of an individual or collective loss of control."

Dubois goes on to cite a persuasive example of these fears manifesting in Haitian culture: "When the HASCO [Haitian-American Sugar Co] sugar mill opened in 1918, for instance, a rumour circulated that some of the workers were zonbi. One of the middlemen hired by the company to bring a gang of field laborers, the story went, had arrived with a group of particularly ragged, dazed, and silent workers whom he had zombified so that he could steal their wages ... telling stories about zonbi workers at HASCO was probably a way for the local community to articulate the feelings evoked by the reappearance of the plantation in their midst ... it is the American zombie cliches that have functioned as a kind of intellectual sorcery. They took a religion [ie Voudou] developed in order to survive and resist slavery ― one that had served as central pillar in the counter-plantation system at the core of the Haitian struggle to secure autonomy and dignity ― and transformed it into nothing more than a sign of barbarism, further proof that the country could never progress unless it was guided and controlled by foreign whites ... As they watched increasing numbers of outsiders arrive in their country, meanwhile, some rural Haitians similarly saw them as carriers of old but vividly remembered barbarism."

In summary, becoming zonbi is feared, not venerated, in Voudou religion. The process of zombification represented the loss of personal freedom, a transformation into a dull and compliant mental state, the creation of catatonic automatons, the reinstitution of slavery. The  undead were about what was done to the victims, not any imagined effect of those unfortunates on others. And so it is with Zombie politics. The stunned and powerless are not the problem. The perpetrators, the practitioners of 'leached language', are the problem.