The Danger Zone (DZ)

Today we know that China is doing fabulously well and winning the cyber and technological wars. How do we know this? Because China is telling us it is. Hang on. China said there was no terrible new virus breaking out from its laboratory in Wuhan and went out of its way to hide the story. Problem with a pandemic is that sooner or later you have to fess up. Well they didn’t fess up but the rest of t...

Woody Allen started performing as a stand up comic in New York. Some really funny stuff. But who would ever have thought that he was a prophet! I mean he’s Jewish, which has a history going back thousands of years of having some extraordinary prophets. But this will really throw you. I’m going to tell you that the Chinese Communist Party probably has you under surveillance inside your home right n...

Liu Xiaobo is a dangerous man. The Nobel Peace Prize website tells us this about how serious a threat he poses to the freedom, peace loving Chinese Communist Party. Liu was born on the 28th December 1955. He studied literature and philosophy. Then he worked as a literary critic and university lecturer in Beijing. He took a doctorate in 1988. After that he was a guest lecturer at universities throu...

The Chinese Communist Party has emerged as the major threat that Australia is facing today to our national security and even our national sovereignty. But the news isn’t all bad. In the event of a military conflict, the technology that Australian scientists have developed give, at least, them a guaranteed successful outcome. That might sound a ridiculous thing to say but I say it with absolute con...

Here’s a bit of fun. Complete this sentence: “ There is a common sentiment in China that government officials will only speak the truth when … ” – over to you. Finish that sentence. I’m sorry times up. If you said “ when they are drunk or careless ” you were right. That question was read out of a standard book, “ Human Resources Management ” by Raymond J Stone, then used at Monash University in Me...

I love this story. In 2014, Prime Minister Tony Abbott made his first visit to China. One of the people who went with him was his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. They were attending the Boao Forum. A Chinese Communist Party initiative for meetings of high level leaders from government, business and academics to share their visions on the most pressing issues in this part of the world. It also enjoys...

In February 2019, a female Chinese born and resident student, attending the Australian National University in Canberra, made a comment in class. To an Australian who heard her comment, they would think nothing of it, the comment she made was just part of the normal exchange of ideas and thoughts that happen all of the time in class and interacting with other students on campus. But that isn’t the...

There are over one million people in Australia of ethnic Chinese descent. World wide there are over 50 million ethnic Chinese, living in countries other than China. The earliest date when the first Chinese visited Australia isn’t known for sure. But maybe this gives us a clue. In one book by Confucius, in his “ Spring and Autumn Annals ”, written in 481 BC he recorded that two solar eclipses were...

Myths and legends. It’s funny how some ideas get a hold on your head and you either never realise it, or it’s just so against what you know that you just refuse to believe it. I’ll give you a for example. A lot of people think that the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, is a body funded by the Australian government, independent with its own charter, that provides a neutral, even handed,...

People have wandered the earth over many many centuries predicting the end of the world – the climate alarmists continue this ancient tradition. So far no one has gotten that right – not even close. But something remarkable, although not as remarkable as the end of the world, happened in 1948. In that year a country of 9.6 million square kilometres ceased to exist. What replaced it is something ve...

It’s 30 January 1933 and we’re in Berlin. Well I can’t believe what I’ve been seeing happen. It’s beginning to look a lot like Adolf Hitler is going to become the new Chancellor of Germany. Incredible! If Hitler isn’t made the Chancellor today, and soon, the rumour is that the Army’s going to stage a coup – and that’s for sure and certain. Then they’ll put von Schleicher back in charge. Everyone a...

Thank God it’s Sunday. The shabat, the sabbath, but of course it’s Sunday 29thJanuary 1933, so not the Jewish sabbath but the Christian one. And the less I say about anything Jewish in a nice way the better. Anti-Semitism is pretty much a thing today. The cold bite that has been freezing Germany for a few days now still isn’t really let up. Grey, overcast day. I don’t think it’s going to get any b...

It’s Friday 27 January 1933. The weekend is coming. Everyone knows that Chancellor Schleicher is going to be kicked out but who is going to take his place. No-one in the know, knows. André François-Poncet, the French ambassador, who always knows what is happening on the political scene in Berlin – doesn’t know. He’s heard rumours that Schleicher, the Chancellor, will soon be going. He’s sent that...

Hi, today’s Thursday 26 January 1933 and here’s the weather report. A powerful anti-cyclone has settled over Europe, driving cold air from the Baltic and northern Russia towards Germany. The nights will be clear and icy. In East Prussia and Pomerania the temperatures are going to plummet to -28 degrees. The Rhine River is freezing over and drifts of ice are making for difficult and dangerous condi...

It’s still Thursday 19 January 1933. Chancellor Schleicher has an entirely unexpected visitor. It’s Ernst Torgler, the head of the parliamentary Communist Party. An unlikely visitor to the conservative, army officer, Chancellor. The’s here because the Nazi brownshirts are going to march outside the Communist Party’s headquarters in Berlin – Karl Liebknecht House – on Sunday 22 January 1933. The Na...

Do you think football will ever turn professional? Today is Thursday 12th January 1933 and the news is that Italian football club AS Roma has just signed the Argentinian striker and World Cup veteran Alejandro Scopelli after paying a transfer fee of a whopping 80,000 marks to his former club, Estudiantes de La Plata. The Germans didn’t want to go down this route. In 1930 they‘d banned fourteen foo...

It’s 22 December 1932 and Adolf Hitler is still as far as he has ever been from becoming the leader of Germany – hopefully he never will. That’s what most people think – but not everyone. Bella Fromm was a woman with a coquettish mouth and dark eyebrows. She was forty one years old and a journalist. She worked for the Vossische Zeitung newspaper. This paper was a must read if you wanted to try to...

Today is Thursday 8 December 1932. History tells us something that seemed impossible on that date was soon going to happen. That was that in just under two months, Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, would be the Chancellor of Germany and in under 13 years after that, 60 million people who were alive then, or were born during those next 13 years, would be dead. Countless millions of other...

Germany after World War I found itself a Republic and a democracy. Neither of which its people wanted. This was all new and all came out of what happened at the end of the First World War and was forced on the Germans by the victorious allies. If you were a German back in those critical days, the first thing the returning German soldiers from the trenches did was to be paraded through the streets...

During the war, especially in the first four years from 1939-1941, Germany took many prisoners of war. A continuing stream of prisoners of war were always falling from the skies over occupied Europe –British and American airmen. Australians and other nationalities too. The majority of the prisoners were housed in Germany’s eastern territories, mainly Poland or eastern Germany. In late 1944-1945 th...

From the time Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 until the defeat of Japan, World War II, or The Great Patriotic War, as the Russians like to call it, had been an absolute bonanza for Stalin. Sure tens of millions of Russians had died, been shockingly wounded, been psychologically damaged, but for Stalin that was all a cost of doing business – building an enormous empire in just 6 short yea...

It’s a fact of life that your bargaining power is at its weakest when you’re at your weakest. As I’ve discussed before this, paradoxically, didn’t apply to Stalin in World War II. Stalin could as easily have swapped sides, again. He had already been aligned to Hitler, during World War II. He could have joined with Hitler again if the right deal was offered. For the English, who should have done a...

On 3 September, 1939, England and France, and as a consequence, the dominions of the Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, found themselves at war. The declaration of war followed the German invasion of Poland. The war was to preserve the independence of Poland as a free nation. Freed from the yoke of a tyrannous regime. 60 million lives lost later, including in the Pacific, the last meeting...

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, steered by the Communist agent, Harry Dexter White, had done as much as anyone to bring about the war in the Pacific. Now he was manoeuvring to have Germany dismembered mainly for the benefit of his boss, Joseph Stalin. He also was hoping to bring about the deaths of 30 million Germans by starvation, and the mass shootings, without trial or...

In Sean McMeekin’s book, “Stalin’s War”, with the benefit of extensive access to what had been the secret, and closed to Western eyes, records of the USSR, until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, we are given a breathtaking view into how Communist spies in Washington, with the willing, if uninformed enthusiastic support of President Roosevelt, had successively led America to vast and unl...