From “Friend”, To “Threat” – In Just Five Years.

New Zealand’s Most Profitable“Friend” Dangerous “Threat”: This country’s “Five Eyes” partners, heedless of the economic consequences for New Zealand, have cajoled and bullied its political class into becoming Sinophobes. They simply do not care that close to 40 percent of this country’s trade is with China.  As far as Washington, London, Ottawa and Canberra are concerned, Wellington is simply paying the price of putting all its milk powder in one basket.

WELL, THANK YOU, JACINDA! In just five years, you and your government have turned New Zealanders decisively against their country’s most important trading partner. According to research released today (22/6/22) by the Asia New Zealand Foundation, the number of Kiwis who view China as a “friend” has fallen from 62 percent in 2017, to just 13 percent today. Meanwhile, the number viewing the People’s Republic as a “threat” has risen from 18 to 58 percent, over the same period.

That dramatic rise (40 percentage points!) in the “threat” perception, is the entirely predictable result of a relentless, American-led, campaign to demonise, isolate and “contain” China. New Zealand’s “Five Eyes” partners, heedless of the economic consequences for New Zealand, have cajoled and bullied its political class into becoming Sinophobes. They simply do not care that close to 40 percent of this country’s trade is with China. None of them are willing to make good its loss by opening their markets to New Zealand exports. As far as Washington, London, Ottawa and Canberra are concerned, Wellington is simply paying the price of putting all its milk powder in one basket.

It is difficult to grasp the precise cause of the West’s falling-out of love with China. Since the late-1970s, the leading industrial powers have been falling over themselves to invest in the Chinese economic miracle. Without compunction, or compassion, they relocated Western industrial production to an authoritarian state where labour costs were low and unions docile, eliminating in the process the factories that had kept millions of their own workers gainfully employed. There were no complaints then about China’s lack of democracy, indeed, its absence was pretty much the whole point!

Ask them, today, what they were thinking, and they’ll spin you the usual yarn about how certain they were that this new, mutually beneficial, economic relationship would lead to the gradual liberalisation of the Chinese regime. Just as it had in the Soviet Union, democracy was coming to the PRC. You are invited to imagine their surprise and horror when Beijing opted, instead, to combine the Chinese people’s economic prowess with the Communist Party of China’s authoritarian political impulses. Western investment hadn’t created a friend, it had produced a monster!

To which we are all entitled to call “Bullshit!”.

Let’s just consider the counterfactual that China had, indeed, embraced democracy, or something approaching it – a la Singapore. According to the West’s own theories, the country would have become even more powerful, economically and culturally. It’s people, freed from the tutelage of the Communist Party, would have grown even more confident and productive. In other words, China’s inexorable rise to global economic dominance would have happened faster under democracy than it did under authoritarianism.

It is simply implausible to argue that the United States would have behaved any differently when faced with a democratic Chinese hegemon than it has in relation to the real-world’s authoritarian China. What can be asserted, however, is that if China had adopted democracy, then the United States would have found it a great deal easier to destabilise and dominate.

That’s the great attraction of democratic political systems to powers like the United States, they are just so pathetically easy to subvert. Pick a colour – any colour – and Uncle Sam will organise a “revolution” in no time. Don’t believe me? Go ask Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine. Or, dig out Time of 15 July 1996, and read the Cover Story: “Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win.”

There are, of course, many ways to destabilise and break-up a rival nation. If its authoritarian political system makes the organisation of a “colour revolution” impossible, then a global superpower can always stir up ethnic and religious communities in border regions with sympathetic neighbours. Arms can be smuggled across mountain and desert frontiers. Jihadists can be schooled in terror. Bombs can go off in crowded marketplaces. Innocent people can die. The Chinese have watched and learned, and in Xinjiang they have applied the lessons.

Once again it helps to examine the counterfactual. Imagine a China whose leaders were unwilling to take the measures necessary to suppress an Islamist insurgency. Very quickly, Xinjiang would have come to resemble Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Terrorist atrocities would have become commonplace. Beijing would have been forced to field substantial military and intelligence resources to its autonomous region. Communal hatreds would have grown and spread. Hundreds-of-thousands of the native Uighur population would have fled, or been interned. How different, in terms of repression, suffering and death, would it be from the present situation?

Not that these sort of questions are ever posed by the political classes of the Five Eyes powers and their Asian allies. Roughly six years ago, America’s strategic thinkers finally abandoned their dream of a democratic China that the USA could control, and began to intensify its parallel policy of containment. An important part of that effort was the co-ordination of elite opinion across the Indo-Pacific.

It is necessary, now, for earlier narratives of co-operation and friendship with the Chinese – of which New Zealand was a leading exponent – to be abandoned in favour of Washington’s new narrative of a dangerous and expansionist China, hellbent on establishing, first, regional hegemony, and then, full global dominance.

How easily that change of narrative was achieved by Washington should prompt New Zealanders to query the robustness of their own democratic institutions. That there has been no significant divergence of opinion concerning New Zealand’s pivot away from its largest trading partner – with all that entails for the health of New Zealand’s economy and society – should, surely, give us pause. This country’s much vaunted “independent foreign policy” stands revealed as rhetoric – not reality.

Uncle Sam has informed us that New Zealand is at war with Eurasia: that New Zealand has always been at war with Eurasia. Dutifully, our politicians, academics and journalists all contribute lustily to the compulsory “Five Minute Hate” against the People’s Republic. The “friend” that made us rich, has become a “threat” to be contained.

When the export orders dry up – and they will if China decides we’ve become her enemy – then we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves. Oh, and our “very, very, very good friends” – the Americans.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 23rd June 2022.

Why I'm A 'Russlandversteher' - A 'Russia Understander'.

Political Hard Man: Is Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, a hard man? Yes, he is. But after the democratic delights of the Yeltsin years, a hard man was exactly what the Russian people were looking for - and are happy to keep voting for.

BEFORE CRITICISING THOSE who continue to treat Russia as an “evil empire”, I should first explain why I am happy to embrace the German title of Russlandversteher - Russia Understander. It’s not only because I know that without the extraordinary sacrifices of the Russian people during the Second World War (twenty million dead!) the United States and British Empire losses would have been much, much higher. It is also because our side – the West – has consistently demonstrated the most appalling bad faith towards the Russians. How any nation on the receiving-end of such strategic malevolence could end up being anything other than defensive and mistrustful is difficult to imagine.

Consider the fact that the Manhattan Project (the United States and British effort to create an atomic bomb) was deliberately kept secret from the Soviets. A weapon which, had it been used against Nazi Germany, could have saved millions of Russian lives (as it almost certainly saved millions of American lives when used against the Japanese) was withheld from the nation that was doing all of the heavy-lifting against fascism.

How would you have reacted to the news that your allies were developing a new super-weapon without you? Do you think it would have increased your level of trust in the USA and the British Empire? Or, would it have pushed your paranoia to new heights? Would it have caused you to be relaxed about the political complexion of post-war Eastern Europe? Or, would it have led you to create a series of socialist buffer-states under strict Russian control?

Never forget, the Cold War began at a time when the Soviet Union lay in ruins: its people and economy utterly exhausted; and its armed forces completely vulnerable to the USA’s growing stockpile of atomic weaponry. Was Joseph Stalin really going to risk the total annihilation of what remained of the Soviet population by ordering the Red Army to advance all the way to the English Channel?

It is also worth remembering that even after the Soviet Union acquired its own atomic weapon in August 1949, not one Russian combat-boot was ever stamped upon the soil of the so-called “Free World”.

Fast forward to the collapse of the Soviet Empire between 1989 and1991. Was there ever a more auspicious moment to turn the page on mutual and assured destruction and demilitarise the entire European continent? The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, certainly believed that such a moment was at hand. He sought – and was given – the personal assurance of the American president, George H.W. Bush, that the Nato powers would not attempt to fill the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

Did Nato keep its promise? Like hell it did! Within the space of a very few years, new Nato members ringed the territory of the Russian Federation. Stalin’s worst fears had become the Russian Federation’s strategic reality.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. With the collapse of Communist Party rule, the Russian state and its vast portfolio of publicly-owned industries and natural resources was asset-stripped bare. With the “help” of the West’s economic “shock therapists”, the Russian Federation was transformed into a corrupt kleptocracy: a “mafia-state” ruled by a collection of “oligarchs” whose twisted characters Dostoevsky would have struggled to depict. Not surprisingly, the life-expectancy of the average Russian began to track backwards.

This was the Russia that greeted Vladimir Putin when he was finally in a position to replace the Western powers’ favourite drunk, Boris Yeltsin. Was Putin, a former KGB colonel, a hard man? Yes, he was. But after the democratic delights of the Yeltsin years, a hard man was exactly what the Russian people were looking for. Was his arrival generally considered to be bad news for Russia’s oligarchs? You bet! Especially after Putin arranged for one or two of them to be put on trial in cages – to encourage the others. Was anybody in Russia, aside from a handful of Western-aligned politicians and journalists, unduly upset by their President’s actions? Not really. Not when soaring oil and gas prices were delivering higher living-standards to millions of ordinary Russian citizens.

A prosperous and self-confident Russian Federation under strong political leadership was not, however, in Nato’s script. The deep-state denizens of the Western alliance looked at their maps and concluded (as so many geopolitical strategists had done before them) that the best way of getting their hands around Russia’s throat was through Ukraine.

Putin watched with growing alarm as Ukraine’s very own colour revolution (i.e. Western-inspired protests followed by a Western-assisted election campaign) installed an anti-Russian regime just a few hundred kilometres from Moscow. When Putin’s pushback resulted in the creation of a Moscow-friendly government in Kiev, the West upped the ante. With the blessing of European Union leaders, neo-Nazi hoodlums were unleashed on the streets of the Ukrainian capital. The pro-Russian Government fell. For the first time since the end of World War II, the West accorded diplomatic recognition to an overtly fascist regime.

We all know the rest. Russia annexes the Crimean Peninsula. Russian-speaking Ukrainians rise up against the fascists in Kiev. Russian volunteers cross the border in support. The West imposes sanctions and moves armoured units eastwards to “head-off Russian aggression”. Russian hackers of undetermined political status attempt to set off a colour revolution of their own. Donald Trump is elected President of the United States.

Do I really need to write any more about the sort of people who denounce the Russian Federation and its leader? Or why I am so happy to be called a Russlandversteher?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 6 April 2018.

By Other Means: Bringing Down A Government, Or Keeping One In Power, No Longer Requires Tanks.

Coup D'état By Crowd: With the appeal to naked force no longer acceptable in a post-Cold War world, the United States and its allies were forced to develop new, less objectionable means of removing their enemies from power. Paradoxically, democracy became the only plausible means of preserving the global dictatorship of the United States' neoliberal ideology. Or, at least, it looked like democracy.

TOPPLING GOVERNMENTS in the twenty-first century, or installing them, is no longer the business of soldiers. It used to be, back in the days of the Cold War. Just think of Chile in 1973, or Argentina in 1976. Back then nobody much cared about the optics. So there were tanks on the streets. So a few thousand people “disappeared”. So what? They were commies. Nobody cared. Good riddance!

 

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, things changed. Lacking the Cold War justification of “resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” the United States and its allies were forced to develop a new way of making sure that their friends continued to acquire and/or retain power, while their enemies – unaccountably – suffered one set-back after another.

 

The Old Way Of Dealing With America's Enemies: Tanks roll through the streets of Santiago, Chile, 11 September 1973.

 

The first step was to make sure that even if their friends failed the political consequences would be minimal. There were to be no more elections like the Chilean election of 1970, in which the victory of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition resulted in the introduction of genuine left-wing policies. The imposition around the world of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” (which began with the arrival of the “Chicago Boys” in post-coup Chile) meant that even nominally “left-wing” parties could be relied upon to refrain from introducing measures calculated to inhibit or restrict the free operation of market forces.

 

The second step was to devise a whole new repertoire of non-military methods for bringing a government down. Essentially this involved using the core freedoms enshrined in all democratic states: freedom of speech; freedom of the press; and the freedom to assemble peacefully for a redress of grievances; not to advance democracy but to create a simulacrum of it. What appeared to the world to be a spontaneous uprising of the people against a corrupt and dictatorial regime, would, in fact, be the culmination of months, even years, of careful planning by teams of operatives (spies?) inserted into the target country by the United States and its allies.

 

The classic examples of this new technique of “coup d’état by crowd” were the so-called “colour revolutions” that brought down the democratically elected governments of Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. (In the case of the latter, twice!) The Americans spent millions of dollars in these countries establishing political organisations, founding newspapers, setting up radio and television stations, and creating websites – all of which were then used to recruit thousands of perfectly genuine followers (usually young, middle-class university students) who would then be led onto the streets to confront the government.

 

These ostensibly peaceful protests were almost always carefully stage-managed to ensure that the authorities, goaded to breaking-point by a tiny, well-trained and well-paid “hard-core” fraction of the crowd, would over-react and start beating the protesters indiscriminately. Graphic examples of this state violence would then be broadcast around the world (often via social media) and, inevitably, the size of the protests would grow and the demands of the protesters would escalate.

 

The critical demand of these “people’s movements” would be the holding of new elections. This was especially so when the “revolution’s” precipitating event was an election whose result was disputed (as in Serbia in 2000). One of the key methods employed to make the claims of a “stolen” election plausible was the publication of bogus opinion polls. The government’s enemies – both foreign and domestic – would fabricate polls showing massive disapproval of the governing party and correspondingly massive support for its challengers. When the ballot boxes disgorged a radically different result the immediate response of the government’s enemies was that the election had been “stolen”. Gravely concerned, the US, UK and European Union would immediately lend their voices to the call for fresh elections.

 

The New Way: Kiev, Ukraine, January 2014.

 

Sometimes, of course, these tactics spooked the government under attack into doing the subversives’ work for them. Informed by his own (and the Russian’s) intelligence agencies that the US was active behind the scenes, building and funding his liberal opposition, the Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, panicked and stole the election for real. Perfect!

 

Interestingly, the process works just as well in reverse.

 

If there’s a government the powers that be, domestically and/or internationally, wish to keep in office, then exactly the same funds will be lavished on exactly the same hidden persuaders. Social media will be skilfully and extensively employed, not to attack the incumbent government, but to undermine and smear its political opponents. Opinion polls will consistently demonstrate the government’s overwhelming popularity. Sympathetic journalists will disparage any suggestion of widespread popular discontent with the status quo. Political activists and parties evincing just a little too much passion and/or promising just a little too much in the way of genuine, as opposed to purely cosmetic, reforms will suddenly find all manner of things going wrong. They’ll hear strange clicking sounds on their landlines. Their computers may be hacked or stolen. The controls of their leader’s car may suddenly malfunction, sending him tumbling down a bank.

 

And nary a tank in sight.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 5 September 2014.

Coup d'état By Crowd

Same Scene, Different Flag: No, it's not Kiev's Independence Square. This "revolutionary" crowd gathered in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in 2003. Another of the so-called "Colour Revolutions", Georgia's "Rose Revolution" unfolded in a manner remarkably similar to the overthrow the Serbian government in 2000. The same elements were also present in the "Orange Revolution" which convulsed Kiev a year later in 2004 - and again, in 2014.

 

WHAT HAVE WE JUST SEEN? A revolution? It certainly looked like one. There were crowds, vast crowds, singing patriotic songs in Kiev’s Independence Square, their collective breath rising up like smoke in the freezing winter air. There were Riot Police, too, naturally. Hundreds of them – looking for all the world like Roman Legionaries lost in time and space. There were even barricades – just like in Les Miserables.

 

And did we hear the Ukrainian people sing? You bet we did!

 

At least, that is what we thought we heard – and saw.

 

We have such short memories now. Last year is already so last year. Expecting us to remember what happened 14 years ago, in Serbia, would be completely unreasonable. You might as well ask us to remember what happened a thousand years ago in Serbia.

 

It’s useful, this collective historical amnesia. Not to us, but to the sort of people who stage-manage revolutions. If you’re that sort of person, a fully-functioning historical memory is an extremely dangerous thing.

 

A fully-functioning historical memory would instantly recall what happened in Serbia in 2000: the vast crowds; the riot police; the barricades; the fall of the dictator; the flowering of democracy. It would also remember what happened in Georgia three years later: the vast crowds; the riot police; the barricades; the fall of the dictator; the flowering of democracy. Heck! It would remember what happened in Ukraine itself, just ten years ago: the vast crowds; the riot police; the barricades; the fall of the dictator; the flowering of democracy.

 

If you’re noticing a pattern here – well done! And, if you were wondering what to call it, try “coup d’état by crowd”.

 

Blows against the state were once delivered with a mailed fist. In the Cold War period the iconography of “regime change” was very different from what we have just witnessed in Ukraine.

 

A fully-functioning historical memory would recall vividly the day General Pinochet unleashed the Chilean military against the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende. On 11 September 1973 the world looked on helplessly as Skyhawk jets bombed the Presidential Palace, tanks rumbled through the streets of Santiago and the national football stadium filled up with bruised and broken political detainees.

 

It wasn’t pretty, but Uncle Sam recalled the Soviet tanks that had rumbled through the streets of Prague just five years earlier and laid claim to a rough-and-ready moral equivalence. “When it’s up against a regime like that,” argued Uncle Sam, “only dictatorship can save democracy.”

 

Regime Change Cold War-style: When only dictatorship could save democracy, the USA was happy to see its enemies deposed by military force. Chile, 1973.

 

But, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the old excuses no longer washed. At what Francis Fukuyama dubbed “the end of history” all the great geo-political conundrums were resolvable only by free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. If Uncle Sam wanted regimes to change in Christian lands he’d have to come up with a solution that left a lot less mess than strike aircraft, tanks and mass executions. (In the Islamic world, effecting regime change is still a blood sport.)

 

Enter the “Colour Revolutions” of 2000-2005: regime changes utilising methods that fell somewhere between a soft and a hard application of American power.

 

But, like the proverbial iceberg, “revolutions” of the sort we have just witnessed in Ukraine hide much, much more than they ever let us see.

 

Long before the first student protester’s boot hits the streets of the targeted capital, Uncle Sam has been busy for months. He’s seeded the media with sympathetic journalists; bought and paid for reliable polling agencies; stuffed sympathetic NGO’s bank accounts with cash; and “advised” the armed forces high command (most of them trained in the US) to keep the Government’s troops in their barracks.

 

Only then do the protest leaders, fresh from their “civil resistance” training programmes, fully equipped with state-of-the-art IT and communications equipment and chaperoned by the best and the brightest the CIA can spare, step out to accomplish the fall of the dictator and the flowering of democracy.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 February 2014.

Idiot Savant? Well, he's half right.

Just pawns in their game: Ukrainie's "Orange" revolutionaries march through Kiev to the beat of drums and drummers manufactured in and trained by the USA. So-called "people's power" is seldom what it seems. Calls by the Niuean premier and blogger Idiot Savant for the Fijian people to "rise up", if not part of a similar deception instigated by Canberra and Wellington, are likely to end in tragedy.

RESPONDING to the call by the Niuean premier, Toke Talagi, that the people of Fiji should "rise up" against the government of Commodore Frank Bainimarama, Idiot Savant of the "No Right Turn" blogsite writes:

"[I]t’s a good idea. From the Philippines to Serbia to the Ukraine, mass non-violent public protest has been a very successful tactic in evicting undemocratic, dictatorial regimes. If Fijians want their democracy back, taking to the streets and refusing to move is probably the best way to do it."

Really?

If Idiot Savant had taken the time to properly investigate the examples of "people power" cited in his posting, he would have discovered that what the world thought was happening – ordinary people heroically "rising up" against a hated regime – was very different from what was actually taking place.

In every case, the events on the street masked a much more subtle political game being played out by individuals and groups either directly, or indirectly, beholden to the United States.

While the Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos, remained a valued "asset" of the US military, the CIA and the State Department, no amount of "people power" would have been permitted to dislodge him. Following the very public assassination of Ninoy Aquino, however, the US (Aquino’s protector) decided that Marcos's usefulness had come to an end, and that US interests would be best served by replacing him with someone possessing a more credible claim to democratic legitimacy. Accordingly, the word was spread – through the Filipino security forces, the Catholic Church, the US-aligned trade unions and the news media – that Marcos would have to go.

In an attempt to hold on to power, Marcos called a snap presidential election, which he then, very clumsily, attempted to steal. Cory Aquino, Ninoy’s widow, backed by the Americans, was told that she had lost the election. Her response was to call upon the people to demonstrate their support. When Marcos attempted to suppress the demonstrations, key military commanders based in or near the capital mutinied. As it became clear that the police, the army, and the notorious death squads responsible for the murder of hundreds of Marcos’s opponents, were not going to stop them, millions of people poured onto the streets of Manila in a mass outpouring of opposition to the detested regime. Inevitably, Marcos was forced to "concede" the election to Aquino.

The more-or-less bloodless "regime-change" effected in the Philippines became the template for other US interventions – most notably in Serbia, the Ukraine and Georgia. In the case of the "colour revolutions" (so called because the demonstrators took to wearing a single, identifying colour: "Rose" in Georgia, "Orange" in the Ukraine) what appeared to be spontaneous popular uprisings were in fact carefully planned and flawlessly executed political mobilisations engineered by individuals and groups expertly trained and lavishly funded by the United States.

The artificiality and hollowness of these colour revolts is exposed by the fact that none of them produced the sort of significant and broadly uplifting social and economic changes that would have indicated a genuine revolution, but merely a reshuffling of the political elites at the summit of the state – elites who turned out to be, in every case, strong supporters of US policy, and Western interests generally.

Which is not to say that the individuals brought down by these US-inspired uprisings didn’t deserve to be toppled from power. Nor that by acting corruptly, attempting to steal elections and even asassinating (or, in the case of the Ukraine, trying to assassinate) their political rivals, they didn’t themselves contribute the final straws that broke the camel’s back. All I’m suggesting is that the people who poured onto the streets turned out to be pawns in a game they did not control, and whose ultimate instigators were never revealed.

Now it is just possible that something akin to the US colour revolutions is either being planned by the Australian and New Zealand governments, or has already been set in motion. Like the Filipino military commanders, senior Fijian military and police officers may already be preparing to lead a mutiny against Commodore Bainimarama. The harassed and harried Fijian news media may already be primed to provide their readers, listeners and viewers with helpful insurrectionary instructions. The Great Council of Chiefs may already have been bought and sold and bought and sold. And the sexist, racist and homophobic Fijian Methodist Church may already be poised to give yet another coup-d’étât its blessing. If so, "taking to the streets" will prove to be a surprisingly effective tactic – but not a revolution.

Nor, almost certainly, will it be good news for the Indo-Fijians still living in Fiji. On the basis of historical precedent, they can expect to be beaten up, raped – even murdered – and to see their homes and businesses broken into, looted and torched by out-of-control gangs of "revolutionary" indigenous Fijians.

On the other hand, Kevin Rudd and John Key may be genuine in their expressions of alarm at the Niuean premier’s suggestion. And they are absolutely right to be worried. Because, if there is no fake revolution planned, and the police and soldiers haven’t been suborned, and the long-suffering Fijians do follow Talagi’s and Idiot Savant’s advice and "take to the streets", the Commodore’s men will crush them like bugs.

But then, those who cry "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!", are almost never the ones who have to live among the ruins.

Idiot Savant? Well, he’s half right.