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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 28, No. 7. 1965.

MRA, from across the puddle

MRA, from across the puddle

Salient Reporter

"The test of an ideology is 'Whom does it tend to enlist?' " Mr. K. E. Beazley told an audience of about 100 at university recently.

He was speaking on the subject "Ideological aspects of foreign policy." He is secretary to the Australian Labour Party Foreign Affairs committees.

"An ideology must be a philosophy bigger than one national interest," he said. "With an ideology you can appeal to people over the heads of their government. You can change, you can undermine governments. If all that the West stands for is self-interest, it is not enough.

"In an ideological age negotiation has changed its meaning," he said. "Lenin said that we enter into compromises and negotiations with our opponents in order to destroy them. As the idea of negotiation is destroyed, so we move towards nuclear annihilation.

"There are no settlements post World War II, only compromises," he said, and went on to instance Korea. Germany and Vietnam.

Malaysia is, he thought, a potential dis-solvant of Indonesia. From this resulted the Indonesian antagonism to Malaysia.

The USA doesn't want Indonesia to drift into the communist orbit, he said. Accordingly, they pushed the Dutch into handing over West Irian to Indonesia. This wasn't because the USA thought that Indonesia could take West Irian, but rather because they thought it would fail and Nasution would be discredited.

The West must put forward a policy which will answer corruption.

"This is the greatest test of Western leadership," he said. "In dealing with the problems of Asia we must lose without ideological backing.

"It is my personal belief that ideology is Moral Re-Armament."