Seeing For Ourselves: If remaining in the Anglo-Saxon alliance means embracing a far-right version of populism already indistinguishable from incipient fascism; if it requires New Zealand to join its “allies” in repeating all the horrors of Anglo-Capitalism’s imperial past; then we must have nothing to do with it.
WHY IS AUSTRALIA so keen to bring the finance ministers of
the “Five Eyes” together? Since when did the intelligence gathering and sharing
arrangement launched nearly 70 years ago as the UK-USA Agreement start morphing
into an economic and military alliance? More importantly, how long has Canberra
been anticipating New Zealand’s participation in this transformation? Clearly,
the promoters of what is looking more and more like ANZUS 2.0 are not
particularly worried that such a policy would jeopardise our relationship with
China. Indeed, alienating China from New Zealand may be one of the key
objectives of the whole exercise.
Canberra clearly believes that if Beijing is ready to impose
a heavy economic cost on Australia for
its unwavering allegiance to the United States, then Wellington, too, should be
prepared to endure the lash of Chinese displeasure. And make no mistake,
Canberra is paying a price. Its food exports to China are being impeded and the
Chinese Government is warning its citizens to avoid visiting Australia on
account of its deep-seated racial antagonism towards Asian peoples. This
warning will damage not only the Australian tourist industry (already stricken
thanks to Covid-19) but it will also choke off the multi-billion-dollar flow of
Chinese fee-paying students to Australia’s schools and universities.
These are merely the preliminaries, however, should
Australia persist in its determination to be the best deputy-sheriff Uncle Sam
has ever had. New Zealanders often express concern at their own country’s
growing economic dependence on the Chinese market. Our economic vulnerability
pales, however, when set alongside the Australian mining industry’s reliance on
China’s apparently insatiable appetite for the Lucky Country’s mineral exports.
A full-scale boycott of Australian coal, copper, bauxite and iron-ore would
plunge the Australian economy into an even deeper recession.
What reward is Canberra hoping to receive in return for
jeopardising its economic future? Why is it so keen to take up such an exposed
position in the “New Cold War” which is fast intensifying between the Peoples
Republic and the so-called “Quad States” – the USA, Japan, Australia and India?
Has the rise and rise of China awakened all the old atavistic Australian fears
of the “Yellow Peril”? The existential fears which fuelled the frankly racist
“White Australia Policy” which lasted from federation in 1901 until well into
the 1970s. And if that is the driving force behind Canberra’s reckless willingness
to put at risk Australia’s own vital economic interests, then how does it
expect the USA to make good the loss of its Chinese buyers?
The crucial feature of a declining power is its diminishing
capacity to offer a credible quid pro quo for its friends’ and allies’ loyalty.
Why was New Zealand (a nation of barely one million in 1914)
prepared to sacrifice upwards of 12,000 of its young sons for the greater glory
of the British Empire in World War I? The cynical answer: because the primary
produce importers on London’s Tooley Street were willing to take everything
Britain’s South Seas “farm” could send them. Not to put too fine a point upon
it, we traded blood for butter. A Devil’s bargain, no doubt, but a profitable
one!
Is Canberra labouring under the illusion that the USA will
absorb all its vital mineral exports should China decline to receive them? Does
the Australian Government really believe that America’s own mining industry is
just going to sit back and let Australian imports flood their markets and drive
down their prices? The United States is a mature, almost post-industrial,
capitalist economy. It passed through the phase through which China is
currently passing more than a century ago. Australia’s much-vaunted “luck”
stems from it being handsomely endowed and strategically located to supply the
needs of a rapidly industrialising Asia. Overwhelmingly, for the last 40 years,
that has meant China. What has Washington told Canberra about the region’s
geopolitical future that has made Australian politicians so willing to court
the ire of Beijing. What does Scotty Morrison know that we don’t?
The name of the “Quad’s” new geopolitical initiative, the
“Indo-Pacific Strategy”, offers a pretty big clue. Simply recall that, until
very recently, all the talk among the Five Eyes and their allies was about
their “Asia-Pacific Strategy”. The shift in focus, from East to South Asia,
from China to India, points to the overall direction of travel of
Anglo-Capitalism in the twenty-first century. With China stubbornly refusing to
follow the same path as the Soviet Union; with Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and
Taiwan significantly failing to replicate the fates of Ukraine, Georgia, the
“stans” and the Baltic states; with Beijing forging ahead to reclaim its historical
primacy in the region; the time has apparently arrived for the Five Eyes powers
to sink their talons into yet another vast population of peasants. For India,
what came around in the seventeenth century is about to come around again.
The politics required for the Five Eyes powers to pull this
off isn’t pretty.
Remember the BRIC countries? (Brazil, Russia, India and
China) Remember the Anglo-capitalists’ alarm at the emergence of a bloc
determined to step out of the shadow of its individual members’ tragic
histories? Where are they now? Brazil and India – like the USA and the UK – are
(mis)ruled by far-right populists hellbent on leading their people back into
the steely embrace of the imperialists. The survivors, China and Russia, are
now – according to the Five Eyes powers – Public Enemies 1 and 2.
And so, at last, we can answer the question of why the
Australians are so determined to ensure that every last one of the Five Eyes
are on the same economic (i.e. ideological) page. Why it is so important that
no one (and, yes, they’re looking at you Jacinda and Grant) breaks ranks by
declining to see China as an enemy. How vital it is that no member state draw
attention to the fact that the planet cannot possibly sustain the massive
carbon investment required to turn India into another China.
It was the “Asia-Pacific Strategy” that fouled the lungs of
Planet Earth. The “Indo-Pacific Strategy” threatens to bring on a fever that
will stop her heart.
We should inform Canberra, Washington, Ottawa and London
that we are taking back our eyes – the better to find and follow an independent
foreign policy path. If remaining in the Anglo-Saxon alliance means embracing a
far-right version of populism already indistinguishable from incipient fascism;
if it requires New Zealand to join its “allies” in repeating all the horrors of
Anglo-Capitalism’s imperial past; then we must have nothing to do with it.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Thursday, 11 June 2020.
You are onto something here Chris! Why everything! I feel Australia's hot breath, fiery on our cheeks. Or is that a Chinese Dragon?
ReplyDeleteOver in the Marshall Islands or Guam they have the USA military or defence forces bringing them Covid-19 or medicating nuclear fallout. Who needs enemies, when there are such friends abounding. Or bounding like kangaroos.
They have a kangaroo cull in Oz from time to time. Is that what Oz is doing to ex-Kiwis in a small way; uplifting our estranged citizens and sending them back to where they are now strangers? The Germans tried to get rid of Jews before WW2 starting six years earlier in 1933, in their drive for a pure nation in fascism. Thoughts.
If India becomes more militarised then Pakistan is going to be alarmed. Then nuclear use raises its ugly head. This coldness of resolve from good ol' boys in Australia is bad for all of us. And India has Modi who has some unpleasant ideas about anyone who isn't Hindu, and I don't see women continuing to be respected anywhere in this new fractionated world.
ReplyDeleteNaturally I woulds expect you to argue against the Five Eyes. As you know the links lie at a much deeper level than economic. They sit on a foundation of common origins, common values, common language that has been tested in great and small conflicts for over 130 years. New Zealand does not consider it should swap that implicit security guarantee for the unknown. We are certainly not going to sever our connection with Australia.
ReplyDeleteHowever we are not simply Australia's clone. We will view this issue differently. I suspect we will not significantly upgrade our role in Five Eyes. Yes, that will mean two types of Five Eyes nations, an inner circle and an outer circle. That has been the case for 35 years.
But New Zealand will retain the Five Eyes obligation, we may have to do a bit more. The alternative of severing both Five Eyes and the ANZAC connection would impose an extraordinarily high cost. CER would be drastically wound back. We would lose preferential entry to Australia (yes, that is still real, we are the only people who can freely move to Australia and live permanently).
I would also add you also fell into the same trap as Eldred-Grigg about joining WW1. It wasn't just trade. As you know, since you have commented on it many times, that time NZ felt it was an integral part of the British Empire. Where the Empire went, so did New Zealand. And I hardly need add Savage's words at the declaration of WW2 to give life to the prevailing sentiment in the first half of the twentieth century.
As Mr Mapp reiterates I think of WH Auden 1 September 1939.
ReplyDeleteI sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night....
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again...
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good....
But yet! -
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
**~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~**
https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939
The left is in the final stages of executing a top-down cultural revolution in America, argues Mike Gonzalez in this important book. The Plot to Change America lifts the lid on a half-century old New Left march through the country’s elite institutions. Their goal: to deconstruct the national story, replacing it with a neo-Marxist account of hierarchy and group conflict.
ReplyDeleteThe new national epic is about confessing the sins of the past to enter a millennium of equity and diversity. The fallen white oppressor redeems himself by agreeing to live in a state of permanent repentance. In place of allegiance to the Constitution, the Founding, liberal principles of equal treatment and an optimistic view of American history comes the usual hierarchy of racial and sexual victim groups at the top and white male oppressor at the bottom. Equal treatment even if resulting in somewhat unequal outcomes is to be replaced with unequal treatment to engineer equal outcomes. Minorities are dissuaded from assimilating—encouraged to nurture separateness, marinate in historic grievances, and develop what Jonathan Haidt terms a “common enemy” form of identity, coalescing around manufactured categories such as “Asian-American” or “People of Color.”
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/an-american-cultural-revolution/
"The Plot to Change America lifts the lid on a half-century old New Left march through the country’s elite institutions."
ReplyDeleteLeaving aside the copy and paste, given that the countries "elite institutions" are generally run by neoliberals they are doing up this poor job – depending on how you define a lease institutions of course. I tend to include governments and bureaucracies in this. To which the universities, which I suspect Gonzalez refers to, are a much-needed counterweight.
"Manufactured categories such as Asian-American or people of colour."
As opposed to those manufactured categories of "chink" or "nigger"? The categories have always been defined by white people – usually the "non-liberal" elite.