“Environmental problems arising in the planetary sphere become global ones …  (We confront) “the need to reform old ways thinking, as well as the urgent task of framing new institutions, and a more covenantal approach to public policies and international relations.  In spite of the clearer evidence that we share as humans a common and perilous destiny, also true is the fact that we do not currently possess institutions, which allow us to monitor technological change (and the serious environmental risks involved), nationally, or globally” (“Globalisation, Risk, And International Environmental Policy”, Viriato Soromenho-Marques).

“Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is unfolding, that the life-support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our survival.  Yet in the face of these facts, we carry on as usual.  Most citizens ignore or downplay the warnings; many of our intellectuals indulge in wishful thinking …” Yet the evidence, given the increasing impact of anthropogenic climate change, shows that humans have disrupted the functioning of the Earth, and that we have now entered a new geological epoch (“Defiant Earth: The Fate Of Humans In The Anthropocene”, Clive Hamilton, Allen & Unwin, 2017, pvii).

By the turn of this century, paleoconservatives in the US were advocating “a return to a 'new economic nationalism', with controls on immigration, high barriers on trade, and an emasculation of international organisations – an America-first platform, that apart from its basic selfishness, utterly ignores the US leadership role in the world and the responsibility that goes with being a global hegemon” (“Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis For First-World Nations”, Richard C Longworth, Contemporary Books, 1998/9, p284). Enter Trumpism!

“Control the oil and you control entire nations” (Henry Kissinger).

“Before 9/11, when jihadists spoke about oil, it was to complain about how the Saudi royal family and other leaders of oil-rich Arab nations were squandering the patrimony of the Islamic people, selling it cheaply to the West and pocketing the profits” (“The Next Attack: The Globalization Of Terror”, Daniel Benjamin & Steven Simon, Hodder & Stoughton, 2005, p49).  Today, Trump controls the imperial oil reserves, and continues the West's double-game on Muslim extremism.

“Under the guise of communications for civilian purposes (in 'the EU's space-related activities' programme), military and security applications instead are being developed in order to serve Europe's military and defence agenda” (“The Marketing Of War In The Age Of Neo-Militarism”, ed. Kostas Gouliamos & Christos Kassimeris, Routledge, Advances in Sociology series, 2012, p4; for background, see “War In Heaven: The Arms Race In Outer Space”, Craig R Eisendrath & Helen Caldicott, The New Press, 2007). In NZ, Rocket Lab fits with Trump's “Space Force”.

In the 21st Century, “it's easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.  We need an intellectual state shift to accompany our new epoch” (“History Of The World In Seven Cheap Things: A Guide To Capitalism, Nature, And The Future Of The Planet”, Raj Patel & Jason W. Moore, Black Inc., 2018, p2).

The helicopter swooped menacingly low, directly over our home, so low that the drumming sound of its rotor-blades seemed to be descending right down on top of us.  It seemed, indeed, to hover right above us for a few seconds. Even the china in our cabinet rattled.  My partner, Rosalie, and I were both shaken and stirred!  Certainly, there had been various noises sounding throughout the weeks of the Reefton phase of the Southern Katipo 2017 “war games” scenario with its focus on counter-insurgency (COIN), including flurries of gunfire at night and in the early morning.  But we had neither seen, or heard, of anything as near as home invasive as what we were now experiencing in this particular incident, happening one sunny morning.

Psycho-Warfare Public Conditioning For American COIN

Apparently, our helicopter warriors thought that they were flushing out the last of the “dissidents” still hiding in Reefton town. For us, this particular episode was certainly their final parting shot – in fact, our one and only very close to home experience of Southern Katipo 2017. I heard or saw nothing more of the exercise in Reefton after this date. It appeared to mark the end of the COIN games altogether.

Annoyed at the time, I obliged our airborne warriors, and shot out to our front gate where I could see the helicopter, after having just dive-bombed our home, turning to go back to the sports ground/horse race track from where it had just taken off, roughly only a couple of hundred metres away.  It was still at a very low height, hovering just above roof-top level, close to neighbouring houses. 

For some moments, I could really identify with all the endless victims of Anglo-American aggression suffering “Apocalypse Now”-type helicopter raids (for especial relevance to NZ see: “Hit & Run: The New Zealand SAS In Afghanistan And The Meaning Of Honour”, Nicky Hager & Jon Stephenson, Potton & Burton, 2017. Reviewed by Jeremy Agar in Watchdog 145, August 2017, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/45/08.html).  The damning charges of civilian casualties made in that book are now the subject of an official NZ government inquiry.

NZ's renowned investigative reporter Nicky Hager has also revealed “a culture of impunity within the NZ Defence Force (NZDF)” a la the made-in-America mould (“No Defence”, cover story on our “Secret Services” about “Allegations of sexual assaults, war crimes, and cover-ups inside our armed forces”, North & South, November 2018, pp32-43; see also “Hit & Run”, ibid.).

Being buzzed by a helicopter, come to pick you up at the end of a long, hard tramp, can certainly be a most welcome sound.  But the same sort of sound has so often meant death, injury, and horror for the millions of people, blitzed by American helicopters, whether US-manned, or simply US-made, in what has been called the “Third World”, or the “South”, i.e. Asia (including the Middle East), Africa, and Latin America. 

Some Reflections On The Bringing Of War Home To Reefton

Around Reefton, to be sure, the sound of helicopters, particularly in summer, is a nice, friendly sound.  As a long-time tramper, I have been on a number of trips myself involving helicopters (as intimated above). Yet, again, to elaborate further on the starkly grim contrast also indicated, the same sound can mean horror and numbing fear. 

The Southern Katipo 2017 exercise, all the propaganda and public relations (PR) aside, was clearly rooted in the tradition of Western, especially Anglo-American, ready reactionary intervention in poor countries to secure resources, investment, and markets (see (a): “NZ Ready Reactionary Counter-insurgency”, in Peace Researcher (PR) 54, November, 2017, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr54.pdf.

And for earlier exercises (b): “NZ Ready Reactionaries Practise Repression”, PR 29, Special Issue, August 1991, https://www.scribd.com/document/33725438/Peace-Researcher-Vol1-Issue29-Aug-1991). My article (a), incidentally, on the Reefton scenario for Southern Katipo 2017 was already online by the time of the visiting RNZAF helicopter (ibid.).

Both visually and sound-wise, US helicopter-borne COIN has perhaps been most strikingly and dramatically demonstrated in the iconic 1979 anti-war film “Apocalypse Now”. Helicopter noise – musically enhanced and embellished in monstrous style by Wagner's “Ride Of The Valkyries” – strikingly conveyed all the sinister menace of a mass raid on a very vulnerable Vietnamese village. 

Death From Above

Whether purveyed by the Bell UH-1 Iroquois Huey (authentically deployed for the movie!), Apache, Blackhawk, Chinook, or whatever specific model – the American military helicopter has meant death and destruction delivered from above. This has happened again and again for so many of the world's poor over decades of US-orchestrated and conducted COIN programmes. 

There is no more poignant and revealing symbol of the American imperial tradition than the fact that the helicopters employed by the US military have usually been named after indigenous Indian tribes. After all, these are the tribes that the early European settlers pillaged, dispossessed, and massacred – during both the days of early settlement, and later during the so-called “taming of the West”. 

The exploitation of resources on capitalist frontiers usually involves plenty of violence (“History Of The World In Seven Cheap Things”, op. cit.). Today, American helicopters still very much serve as the purveyors of mayhem and murder, and possibly in more areas of internecine conflict around the Earth than ever before. These airborne machines complement the spearhead of murderous drone warfare.

Southern Katipo 2017 – Gearing Up For COIN

Like a number of communities on the West Coast of the South Island, Reefton became a conflict zone scenario in Southern Katipo 2017 (“Troops Invade Coast For NZ's Largest Military Exercise”, Otago Daily Times, 8/11/17, https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/west-coast/troops-invade-coast-nzs-largest-military-exercise). On 8th November 2017 there were 300 Australian and NZ troops in Reefton (ibid.).  Lt Colonel Martin Dransfield said: “We appreciate the support from the Reefton community” (ibid.).

 As the conduct of the exercise demonstrated, PR and psychological warfare are fundamental for conditioning Western publics for increasing Social Darwinist competition on a shrinking planet - to put the Earth's “Big Picture” into a metaphorical nutshell!  This psych-war conditioning programme has naturally been driven by the US. It kicked in with a vengeance after America's defeat in the Vietnam. 

Post-Vietnam, the American militarist power elite blamed the media in particular for sapping the national will to fight in foreign lands. They set out to eliminate what came to called the “Vietnam Syndrome” (“'Beyond The 'Vietnam Syndrome': US Interventionism In The 1980s”, Michael Klare, Institute for Policy Studies, 1981).  During Southern Katipo 2017, NZ's foreign owned/controlled media were only too happy to give the six-week exercise their full support, and help in the militarist conditioning of both local communities, and the nation generally. 

Southern Katipo 2017, as ultimately orchestrated by the US, is tailored for the resource wars of the current era and near future. As humans consume and trash a viable planetary habitat, the Western elite is pitting its peoples against a multitude of emerging enemies around the world (see NZ's “Strategic Defence Policy Statement:2018” [“SDPS:2018”], Ministry of Defence).  An unspoken objective of such exercises is the cultivation of public acceptance for more authoritarian control. 

Most pre-eminently, in the US itself, the National Nuclear Security State (NNSS) embraces pervasive electronic surveillance, the militarisation of the police, and a whole range of measures increasingly typical of authoritarian and even totalitarian regimes. From lambasting desperate refugees pressing on the southern border to hyping up terrorist threats (whether domestic or mounted externally), Trumpism is adept at using Nazi-style scare tactics in order to shore up reactionary populist support. The US has long been a militarist society anyway.  Its President is often called Commander-in-Chief: a title sometimes duly echoed by our colonially-minded TV channels here in Aotearoa/NZ. 

Complicity, COIN, And “Collateral Damage”

As a member of the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence/covert action agreement (along with the US, UK, Canada, & Australia), NZ has a long record of complicity and even collaboration in the ongoing war crimes and human rights' abuse of this Western alliance (“Growing Challenges For Peace: Compounding Geopolitical Confrontation, Insurgency & Counter-Insurgency” in PR 54, November 2017, op. cit.).

For a detailed history and analysis of NZ's Middle Eastern/Central Asia commitments covering the first decade of this century, see “Other People's Wars: New Zealand In Afghanistan, Iraq And The War On Terror”, Nicky Hager, Craig Potton, 2011 (reviewed by Jeremy Agar in Watchdog 128, December 2011, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/28/13.htm).  But that does not bother our political Establishment, except in the odd case where it holds back from full participation or endorsement, perhaps signalling some concerns or reservations, as with the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Meanwhile, too, for most of our history the vast majority of mainstream media presenters and reporters, and those who call the shots on the various boards and executives are happy to camouflage or cover up any crime. TV1 has been particularly to the fore here with its constant flow of malign propaganda. It even celebrated – in the most Orwellian fashion! –  the US-led illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, and consequent capture of Baghdad, as a victory in President George W Bush's “fight for freedom”. 

Likewise, TV1 presenter Daniel Faitaua told us in August 2017 that it had been 15 years since the US set out “to liberate” Afghanistan from the Taliban (1 News At Midday, 22/8/17). Prime News that same day was rather more blunt. This channel reported the Trump Administration as proclaiming that: “We are not nation-building, we are killing terrorists” (Prime, 22/8/17).  US strategy would use “overwhelming force” (ibid.; for some relevant comment, see my: “Mobilise For Action On The Threats To Peace! From Geopolitics And Counter-Insurgency To Anti-Submarine Warfare And Space War”, in PR 56, November 2018, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr56.pdf).  

Towards the end of October 2018, British royal Prince Harry and spouse paid an official visit to Aotearoa/NZ. Harry, as an Apache helicopter pilot/gunner, is on record as boasting in “killer ape” style about killing Taliban fighters in Afghanistan (“Things That Are Weird About Prince Harry Killing People”, Vice, 23/1/13, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/3begw3/its-fine-for-prince-harry-to-kill-people-and-brag-about-it;”Backlash Over Prince Harry Kill Boasts”, Daily Star, 23/1/13, https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/294586/Backlash-over-Prince-Harry-kill-boasts). 

But Harry was welcomed by the NZ Establishment and media in the most fawning fashion. There was a prominent tribalist and militarist dimension to the ceremonial round. After all, NZ governments have been deeply committed – where and when it really seems to matter! – to the imperial tradition of crushing the world's poorest peoples in the cause of barbaric self-interest. 9/11 triggered the US assault on Afghanistan, and 9/11 itself was a payback for Western imperialism in the Middle East (“Blowback: The Costs And Consequences Of American Empire”, Chalmers Johnson, Time Warner Paperbacks, 2000/02).

Broadcasting Barbarism

As an integral part of the Anglo-American system, our media are programmed for the dissemination of barbarism, whether disguised, or even on occasion openly articulated – all set within an appropriate framework or context of course. Invasion and intervention, murder, and even genocide are surely ok when protecting our own skins and material interests, eh?!   

For instance, again, remember our part in helping facilitate the Indonesian genocide (1965-70)?! Prime Minister (PM) Sir Keith Holyoake presided over a National Party government from 1960 to 1972, which incorporated the period of the Indonesian genocide as instigated, manipulated and whipped along by the “Five Eyes” alliance (see my “Ghosts Of A Genocide: The CIA, Suharto And Terrorist Culture”, Special Issue, PR 25, March 2002, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr25.pdf, & “Case Study: The 1965-70 Indonesia Genocide” in PR 44, November 2012,  http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr44.pdf). 

The Chinese ethnic minority suffered horribly, among the rest of the victims. But NZ's participation as a “Five Eyes” member in this genocide still remains a major unmentionable of our foreign policy record in mainstream public discourse.  In 2018, the National Party once more signalled its morally bankrupt approach to foreign policy in a campaign headed by MP Michael Woodhouse to try and stop Iraqi war whistleblower Chelsea Manning from visiting NZ. Thankfully, National's campaign proved unsuccessful.  Yet the episode further demonstrated the Party's brazen lack of principle and disregard for the touted “international rules-based order”.

Sharing The Spoils

Note that during the Indonesian genocide, former US President Barack Obama's Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, spent some time carrying out geographical surveys in West Papua. Soetoro was an employee of the Indonesian Army/government, mapping the country for exploitation by the newly established Suharto dictatorship. This dictatorship, of course, was working in close cahoots with the “Five Eyes” club, and its partners, to share the spoils – above all, key mineral resources. 

In particular: “The Freeport Company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. An American and European consortium got West Papua's nickel.  The giant (American) Alcoa (aluminium) company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. A group of American, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra, West Papua, and Kalimantan”.

“A Foreign Investment Law, hurried on to the statutes by Suharto, made this plunder tax-free. Real, and secret, control of the Indonesian economy passed to the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI), whose principal members were the US, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australia, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank” (“Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism And Its Triumphs”, ed. John Pilger, Jonathan Cape, 2004, from the chapter titled. “Complicity In A Million Deaths” by Mark Curtis, p502). 

The IGGI was established in early1967, following several international meetings between Indonesia and its creditor/investor countries. NZ's status was that of an observer country. “'The profit potential', celebrated a Wall Street investors' report, 'fairly staggers the imagination'” (ibid.). Note how “little ole NZ” tags along for the ride, happy so often just to pick up some crumbs from the “Big Boys'” table!

In the wake of the planned demise of the Leftwing opposition to foreign control in Indonesia, the free market could now forge ahead, exploiting both cheap resources and labour, and cavalierly degrading the environment. It all amounted to a dramatic demonstration of how the violence of capitalism on a pristine new frontier could enforce the extraction of exorbitant profits via the contrivance of “cheap things” (“History Of The World In Seven Cheap Things”, op. cit.). Cheap things characteristic of capitalism are: “money, work, care, energy, food, lives, and, above all nature” (ibid., p22).

“A combination of Western advice, aid and investment helped transform the Indonesian economy into one that, although retaining some nationalist orientation, provided substantial opportunities and profits for Western investors” (“Tell Me No Lies” op. cit., p514). The stage was set for the further exuberant entrenchment of global capital.

Fostering The “New Order” Of Free Trade Foreign Control

“President Suharto's increasingly corrupt authoritarian regime kept economic order. Japan and the US, working through consortia and the multilateral banks, used aid as a lever to rewrite Indonesia's basic economic legislation to favour foreign investors. Western investors moved in” (ibid.). By the mid-1970s, Indonesia was being touted internationally as presenting “enormous potential for the foreign investor” (ibid.). Attractive features were a “favourable political climate”, and the “'encouragement of foreign investment by the country's authorities'”. 

“RTZ (Rio Tinto Zinc), BP (British Petroleum), British Gas, and Britoil were some of the (British) companies that took advantage”, along with a wide range of American, Japanese, and other Western transnational corporations (TNCs) (ibid.). The militarist market had triumphed with a vengeance (ibid.).  Indonesia indeed became “the model pupil” for the application of State terrorism and capitalist pillage (“The New Rulers Of The World”, Verso, John Pilger, 2002/3).

To date, the blatantly illegal invasion and subjugation of Iraq has made this so unfortunate country the star victim of US-led predatory State terrorism in the 21st Century (see Murray Horton's “Stop Thief”, Watchdog 102, May 2003, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/02/06.htm; & British Journal of Criminology, 1/3/07, “The Crimes Of Neo-Liberal Rule in Occupied Iraq”, https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/47/2/177/519163/The-Crimes-of-Neo-Liberal-Rule-in-Occupied-Iraq). Lamentably, a lot of loot has been ripped off by US TNCs and other foreign firms. But the wheels of the pillaging investment wagon keep losing stability in this specific case, with the latest phase shaping up to be a confrontation between competing American/Israeli and Iranian interests.

Ironies Of “Dirty Politics” Running Amok!

Pertinently enough, the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia was even openly admired and assisted during its rule by the likes of Sir Don McKinnon, a former National Party Deputy PM and Minister of Foreign Affairs, as well as Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations (2000-08), and now an NZ elder statesman (e.g., “New Zealand Ought To Say Sorry To East Timorese”, Scoop 18/9/02, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0209/S00107/new-zealand-ought-to-say-sorry-to-east-timorese.htm).Crony collaboration continues with the current Government.

“Dirty (Deadly) Politics”, as perpetrated overseas – courtesy of collusive National Party government and covert NZ aid, and hidden by a smokescreen of disinformation – eventually had some harmful ramifications on the NZ domestic scene. Malign political manipulation became deeply entrenched in National's political culture, both externally and also internally oriented.

Certain former National Party figures like Don McKinnon, who have been happy to cover up foreign policy dirty work and past crimes, have a new lease of life nowadays. They freely expound and disseminate their “wisdom” on overseas issues in public forums. Ironically, McKinnon is even a prominent player in pushing China's “One Belt and Road” path to purportedly limitless riches. Then, again of late, “Dirty Politics” has caught out the National Party in a long overdue dose of karma (e.g., “Dirty Politics Is Back”, Newsroom, 17/10/18, https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2018/10/17/281329/dirty-politics-is-back). 

By October 2018 National's dirty dealing with rich Chinese businessmen had finally brought it a multiple barrage of most justified and warranted angst and pain, following the damning revelations of its rogue former Botany MP, Jami Lee-Ross, about how money buys influence in the Party (for an excellent overview of the issues by mid-October see: “No Smoking Gun But Plenty Of Sunlight From Bridges Tape”, Simon Louisson, 18/10/18, The Standard, https://thestandard.org.nz/no-smoking-gun-but-plenty-of-sunlight-from-bridges-tape/).

Most revealingly, National Party Leader, Simon Bridges, has produced some immortal lines of riotous, racist self-satire during a conversation secretly recorded by Jami-Lee Ross. This is exemplified most obviously by an exchange weighing up the pros and cons of various ethnic candidates to be MPs, viz., whether they should be Chinese, Indian, or Filipino, etc., and the merits of say “two Chinese” compared with “two Indians”! Such tough decisions to make apparently! And, of course, a critical consideration related to pledged or potential financial contributions to the National Party, whether directly and/or indirectly mediated.

Follow The Money!

Time and again now, the National Party has been shown to be very open to the penetration of China's “soft power”. National has long had “cash for candidates” policy in its recruitment of a number of MPs. Wealthy Chinese capitalist entrepreneurs can work hand in hand with front groups, part of the “United Front” network as established by China's ruling Communist Party, in order to help shape the public discourse of target countries like NZ/Aotearoa (Anne-Marie Brady, “New Zealand v China: 'We Could Be The Next Albania’”, NZ Herald, 21/2/18, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11998271).NZ's touted free trade agreement with China obligingly paved the way for the strategic application of this approach.

A basic principle of Marxist analysis would well recommend: follow the money trail!  In the case of the National Party, since individual self-interest is so egregiously evident, greedy footprints radiate everywhere.  Even the crony Rightwing media have had to give the latest allegations against National some close scrutiny, however much certain elements and reporters of this same media may try and play down significant aspects. To be fair, at the editorial level some media have weighed in quite hard, at least for the moment, against National (e.g., editorials in the Press, 18 & 26/10/18; the latter editorial even warmly praised the Labour-led Coalition Government!).  

By the end of October, it was not yet clear whether the most serious allegations of electoral fraud and corruption, as levelled by rogue, whistleblower MP Ross against National would prove correct (“No Smoking Gun But Plenty Of Sunlight From Bridges Tape”, op. cit.; & “Ross Saga Quiescent But Donations Scandal Needs Addressing”, The Standard, Simon Louisson, 25/10/18, https://thestandard.org.nz/ross-saga-quiescent-but-donations-scandal-needs-addressing/). These charges were currently the subject of a Police investigation.

But plenty has already been revealed about the National Party's venality and lack of integrity for those who want to look (ibid.).  At this point it should yet be stressed that a blinkered focus on China and the reach of its political influence has its own very obvious limitations for the formation of a genuinely independent NZ foreign policy. It simply echoes US militarism and geopolitical strategy. I shall return to this very important consideration later below.

The National Party's Revealing Ructions

From a deeper perspective, former National PM John Key's poisonous legacy of “Dirty Politics” has rebounded on the Party in kamikaze mode (for the essential background, see “Dirty Politics: How Attack Politics Is Poisoning New Zealand's Political Environment”, Nicky Hager, Craig Potton Publishing, 2014. Reviewed by Jeremy Agar in Watchdog 137, December 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/13.html). National was left reeling, shell-shocked and punch-drunk, following the hits delivered by its maverick MP. 

Jami-Lee Ross himself was a Party member with a murky background in the machinations of “Dirty Politics” (ibid.). He still maintains connections with key players (e.g., see “Dirty Politics Is Back”, op. cit.). But, sadly enough, Mr. Ross, who had been suffering from severe stress, again underwent some mental treatment during October 2018. National's lack of compassion and sensitivity on mental health issues – now a prominent domestic issue – has been widely panned, including by experts in the field. 

Aiding The Agents Of Darkness

It seems very likely that the outbreak of the whole recent controversy stems from a failed, or lapsed, coup attempt to replace National Leader, Simon Bridges, with a hard Rightwing candidate, either Mark Mitchell or Judith Collins. Both these candidates are loaded with “Dirty Politics” baggage (“Dirty Politics”, op. cit.; “Dirty Politics Is back”, op. cit.).

Mark Mitchell is the malevolent mercenary, who made a fortune out of the misery of the illegal Iraq War and its horrible, ongoing fall-out (see e.g., “Why Mark Mitchell's Run At Leadership Is A Scam & Is This Tracy Watkin's Worst Political Column Of All Time?”, Daily Blog, 19/2/18, https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/19/why-mark-mitchells-run-at-leadership-is-a-scam-is-this-tracy-watkins-worst-political-column-of-all-time/; “Hager Posts Dirty Politics Chapter On Mark Mitchell On Web”, The Standard, 21/2/18, https://thestandard.org.nz/hagar-posts-dirty-politics-chapter-on-mark-mitchell-on-web/).  Yet Mitchell was even construed as some sort of hero by agents of the neo-liberal media, e.g. by Stuff's Political Editor Tracy Watkins (“Why Mark Mitchell's Run”, ibid.). 

Judith Collins, in turn, has been deeply involved in “Dirty Politics”, and corruption allegations concerning the National Party, Chinese money, and related economic gains (e.g. “National Gets $50k Donation From Oravida Founder”, NZ Herald, 17/3/17, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11820377).  Ironically, at the centre of Jami Lee-Ross's charge of electoral fraud against Simon Bridges is a sum of $100,000, allegedly given by a Chinese businessman (“Secret Tape Does Not Frame Bridges”, Press, Tracy Watkins,18/10/18). 

Creeping Neo-Fascism

Note the article just referenced is another PR piece by Tracy Watkins, trying to do her best for the National Party (ibid.; compare “Dirty Politics Is Back”, op. cit.; “The Jami-Lee Ross Audio Tapes Are Damning”, Daily Blog, 17/10/18, https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/10/17/the-jami-lee-ross-audio-tapes-are-damning/). As Nicky Hager's book “Dirty Politics” so damningly revealed, the National Party has for some considerable time now been subject to the plotting by a cabal of far Rightists, centred around a dark figure, Simon Lusk, who likes to lurk in the shadows and play a long game (“Dirty Politics”, op. cit.). 

When Hager's story first broke in 2014, it certainly sounded bizarre that such a strange character would have the influence he has had in National (ibid.).  But, then, there has been, and still is, a very receptive group within National and its associated network – and even apparently growing – on the hard Right, that reflects broader globalist trends in Western capitalism, as exhibited by Trumpism and Brexit.

Nicky Hager himself well warns us that the latest revelations exposed in the current controversy show the persistence and danger of “Dirty Politics” and its poisonous influences (“Dirty Politics: 2018: Nicky Hager Assesses The Jami-Lee Ross Saga”, Spinoff, 25/10/18, https://thespinoff.co.nz/unsponsored/25-10-2018/dirty-politics-2018-nicky-hager-assesses-the-jami-lee-ross-saga/). Hager sees the controversy sparked by a bid to install Judith Collins as the National Party leader (ibid.). 

Even some mainstream media commentators now acknowledge that “Dirty Politics” lies at the root of National's turmoil, and is symptomatic of something deeply rotten and dysfunctional in the Party (“Simon Bridges Needs To Call The Hazmat Team And Order A Full Scale Clean-Out”, Stuff, 25/10/18, https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/108058857/Simon-Bridges-needs-to-call-the-hazmat-team-and-order-a-full-scale-clean-out; “hazmat” refers to cleaning up hazardous material!). There is surely a putrid smell at the heart of National.  Those decent Party members, who adhere to principled norms, need to urgently reassert themselves. They should try and help lift the tone of democratic political debate, as indicated by our PM Jacinda Ardern.

National's Negativity

Simon Bridges' days look numbered. In these times, the Right is becoming more fractured for a host of reasons. One obvious line of division lies between the openly racist Right and those who take a more moderate approach to issues of ethnicity. Witness the earlier blowback within National from then Party Leader Don Brash's unashamed racism, reaching back to colonial times, and the toxic culture of his attitudes and behaviour. This followed an excoriating scrutiny of the party in Nicky Hager's first pathbreaking book on National (see “The Hollow Men: A Study In The Politics Of Deception”, Craig Potton Publishing, 2006.  Reviewed by Jeremy Agar in Watchdog 114, May 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/14/03.htm). 

National, to its credit, then purged its anti-Maori set to a considerable extent, and moved on. But, unfortunately, the Party still retained the rest of a quite poisonous political culture. In the conclusion to “The Hollow Men”, Hager observed that “the National Party, in the period covered by this book, was exceptionally unprincipled in the context both of NZ politics and its own history” (ibid., p280). Well, it got much worse in critical ways during the era of “Dirty Politics”! 

Having closely watched the various debates and discussions in Parliament now for a number of years, I can personally testify to National's cynical, opportunistic power-plays, and protection of greedy business interests.  The Party has become very much a creature of capitalist globalisation. Its defining characteristic is perceived monetary self-interest.

Beware The Raving Reactionary Right!

Meantime, Dr Don Brash is still promoting his ethnocentric views on race relations in the wider community to the tune of ongoing controversy. Yet, much of the media see fit to give him credibility, despite his egregiously flawed record and socially menacing opinions.  Certainly, despite divisions on the Right, overseas examples demonstrate the danger of mass movements mobilised by extremists from this side of the political spectrum.

Given a set of conducive conditions, there is plenty of potential for a shift to the hard Right in Aotearoa/NZ (see my “Reactionary Pakeha Politics”, in Watchdog 135, April 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/35/11.html). Yet if this were to happen, there would be mounting concern and NZ would confront the related prospect of growing socio-economic division, as expressed in Trump's America and a number of European countries. 

Whatever the exact angle of Rightwing attack in Aotearoa/NZ – whether the open racism of Brash, or the vicious personal attack politics of “Scumbag” Cameron Slater, NZ today is sadly reaping the noxious seeds so copiously sown by the National Party, and associated agents, viz. the likes of Lusk, Slater (Whale Oil blog), David Farrar (Kiwiblog), Jordan Williams, Matthew Hooton, etc. (all so revealingly exposed, stumbling and blinking into the sunlight, by “Dirty Politics”, op. cit.; &, “Sunlight Did What Sunlight Does: Nicky Hager On Dirty Politics, Three Years On”, Spinoff, 16/8/17, https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/16-08-2017/sunlight-did-what-sunlight-does-nicky-hager-on-dirty-politics-three-years-on/).

Poisonous Politics

This noxious, yet powerfully funded network, has spread its influence wide.  A case in point is the NZ Taxpayers' Union (NZTU), a very active neo-liberal pressure group. Spawned in 2013 by the toxic duo of David Farrar and Jordan Williams, this outfit acts for both corporates and rich individuals, and even employs “Dirty Politics”-type devious ploys to peddle its views (New Zealand Taxpayers' Union, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Taxpayers%27_Union).

NZTU has very illuminating links with the Rightwing media and politicians (ibid.). The group's chairperson, John Bishop, is a former TVNZ Political Editor. This speaks volumes in terms of TV1's neo-liberal/neo-con culture, which has been so evident now for decades. Globalist Big Business, under the auspices of the NZ Business Roundtable (now the NZ Initiative) and related agencies, succeeded in capturing State-owned TVNZ, such a crucial public asset. This was a prime neo-liberal objective. In a plethora of ways, market forces have impacted on TVNZ, besides its commercial dependence on advertising and similar services.

More generally, much of the Rightwing trend to “Dirty Politics”, and ensuing damage to our political culture has been set by Republican Party doctrine and strategy in the US (“Dirty Politics”, op. cit.; also “The Hollow Men”, op. cit.). A key player was Republican President Ronald Reagan's first National Security Advisor, Richard (“Dick”) Allen (“The Hollow Men”, pp99102; and see my “Covert Warrior Comes Out Of The Cold”, PR 24, December 2001, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr24.pdf). President Trump and his ruling clique have taken this sort of stuff to new depths, fostering hate, division, insecurity, and lots of “fear and loathing” within America itself.

Nevertheless, by late October 2018, Trump was getting his best poll ratings yet in the US. Make no mistake. Neo-fascism is very much on the rise in the West. It takes varying forms but at its black heart is the same sort of sentiments that motivated these movements in the past. It peddles the messages of antagonism to the Other, and the consequent for aggressive national security. By doing so, too, it plays right into the hands of the NNSS as well. In Aotearoa/NZ, signs of neo-fascism might yet be only incipient indicators but a global downturn, or some kind of crisis could really spark another phase in the decline of our country's democracy and public culture.

The Gathering Implosion Of Capitalist “Democracy”

To be sure, the travails of the National Party are symptomatic of the compounding crisis of global capitalism. Constricting coils of capitalist contradictions are tightening on sphere after sphere of human activity – from militarisation to looming environmental limits, and from increasing socio-economic inequalities to geopolitical confrontations

Capitalist democracy has been portrayed by its pundits as the great achievement of the West's liberal culture. But not only was it always a travesty of pretence to so many people in the South, resting on the backs of billions, it is also increasingly precarious and paper-thin in the West itself – witness, of late, the inroads of Trumpism and Brexit, the rise of racist movements, etc.! The rule of the plutocratic 1% to 5% of the population, who really run the show is at stake as never before.

People of goodwill across the Earth have to reach out to one another, and join hands in an unprecedented global campaign of alternative action, of cooperative programmes for social justice and genuine sustainability.  We must take renewed positive action, building on all the movements and initiatives already in motion. As PR Co-Editor Murray Horton aptly enjoins: “Gaining true independence from the American empire is an idea whose time has well and truly come. Indeed, it's a matter of both necessity and national dignity” (“Jacinda Says NZ Has 'Independent Foreign Policy': If Only That Was True”, PR 55, June 2018, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr55.pdf). 

Free Market Militarism

To return to the issues raised in my discussion of Indonesia, including West Papua, the reigning pattern of the militarist market prevails unabated. These days, NZ turns a conveniently blind eye to the awful human rights' abuses in West Papua (“Indonesia & New Zealand: 'Friends For Good' – But Whose Good?”, Maire Leadbeater, in PR  54, ibid.; see her book “See No Evil: New Zealand's Betrayal Of The People Of West Papua”, Otago University Press, 2018. Reviewed by Jeremy Agar in PR 56, November 2018, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr56.pdf). 

Both this recent history and present policy and behaviour are surely, if sadly, faithful to their roots in the long, slow rise of the current Atlantic alliance. The economic interests of both Britain and the US, and later the Anglo-American axis, have so often been facilitated by the iron fist behind the so-called “invisible hand”.  For instance: “In 1840, Britain duly declared war on China in the name of 'free trade'.  It was a walkover…”.

“Under the subsequent peace treaty, China agreed not to constrain the activities of British drug merchants and to compensate them for damages inflicted by the Chinese police” (“Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind”, Yuval Noah Harari, Vintage, 2011, p364). Britain also gained Hong Kong, as well as playing a big part in growing the number of opium addicts to “about 40 million Chinese” (ibid.).

 Like what Professor Harari calls the “cult of free trade”, such self-serving myths of the promulgation of a “superior culture”, spreading welfare further afield, are critical in empire-building (ibid., p221). “Many Americans nowadays maintain that their Government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s” (ibid., pp221/2). At the official level, President Trump has now largely ditched this pretence.

Subverting Democracy

Time and again, America's hypocritical and highly cynical proclaimed commitment to freedom has been exposed for the charade it is. Dramatically enough, this has even hit close to home not only with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the Gough Whitlam government in Australia in 1975, but also on our very own soil in Aotearoa/NZ.

During the formation of Aotearoa/NZ's nuclear free stand in the 1980s, US State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) efforts were made to try and destabilise the Lange Labour government (for some academic coverage of these charges, see: “The ANZUS Crisis, Nuclear Visiting, And Deterrence”). Such attempts were documented at the time in the likes of Nuclear Free and the NZ Monthly Review.

See also the historical first series of PR, http://historicalpeaceresearcher.blogspot.com/2010/; e.g., “Destabilisation: USIS, SIS, CIA And ASIO” by Nuclear Free Kiwis (NFK) in PR Vol 1, Issue 11, 1986, https://www.scribd.com/document/33723185/Peace-Researcher-Vol1-Issue11-1986. SIS = NZ Security Intelligence Service. ASIO = Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. Ed.

This US programme of subversion included the cultivation of friendly journalists and other well-placed opinion-makers courtesy of the US Information Service (USIS), or Agency, trips; the initiation, facilitation, and support for pro-Pentagon and pro-nuclear pressure groups; and scaremongering propaganda about alleged Soviet threats. These threats even included a wild, malign story (printed in Truth!) about Maori radicals allegedly getting weapons from Soviet trawlers off our coast – a ploy so very precisely predicted to us by visiting ex-CIA agent Ralph McGehee in 1986.

See historical first series of PR, ibid.: “US Dirty Tricks In The Philippines – Parallels With New Zealand”, by NFK, PR  Vol. 1, Issue 16, December 1987, https://www.scribd.com/document/33725264/Peace-Researcher-Vol1-Issue16-Dec-1987  & also “Correction” note (really an addition) in PR Vol. 1, Issue 17, February 1988, https://www.scribd.com/document/33725390/Peace-Researcher-Vol1-Issue17-Feb-1988.  

To be sure, the US has even subverted the Government of its traditionally most loyal ally, Australia, and attempted to do the same with NZ – in both cases against supposed “Five Eyes” mates! Even back in 1975 in NZ, too, McCarthyite anti-Communist hysteria – courtesy of the CIA-backed Hanna Barbera “Dancing Cossack” cartoon campaign, etc. – helped usher in the Rightwing Muldoon National government. 

From a more general perspective, the mainstream media can indeed be so true to form. Today, most of this foreign owned/controlled media show not an inkling of real NZ independence, or any integrity about human rights in relation to Western – especially American – foreign policy. They might as well be programmed by the CIA. Let's grow the resistance and the alternatives!

Pretentious Preening And Posturing About International Rules

Such history makes an absolute mockery of the latest posturing pretence, as adopted by some Western nations, NZ included, that they believe firmly in the present “international rules-based order”. The West pushes this position, in claimed opposition to the policies of China and Russia, and various other countries (see “Mobilise For Action On The Threats To Peace! From Geopolitics And Counter-Insurgency To Anti-Submarine Warfare And Space War”, in PR 56 November 2018, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr56.pdf). 

The official appeal about international rules these days, as pitched to publics like that of Aotearoa/NZ, is especially oriented to the canons of human decency and proper protocols of behaviour, i.e. in so far as these are embodied in the existing principles and practices of international law.  The NZ “SDPS:2018” is purportedly wedded to this global order (NZ Ministry of Defence). Yet, as noted, these canons of behaviour are regularly violated in practice (“Lawless World: America And The Making And Breaking Of Global Rules”, Philippe Sands, Allen Lane/Penguin, 2005).

Consequently, much of this posturing, given the egregiously awful record so repeatedly exemplified, is clearly just a load of old codswallop when geopolitical interests intrude. Ever since the end of WWII, the West has contrived the rules of the world order pre-eminently in its own perceived interests. It has done this as much it could, utilising a whole array of methods – from domination of the United Nations (UN), through a variety of “soft power” techniques – and all out to the application of open force, however illegal. 

But, then, the policy and practice of institutionalised hypocrisy and cant are fundamental to Western civilisation, and above all its Anglo-American spearhead. What is good in our civilisation gets regularly contradicted by our behaviour. We have to start really living up to the best of the principles of ideal international policy and practice, as already articulated; and, also, those yet to be devised and agreed on, e.g., much greater initiatives for pre-emptive peace-making.  

Promoting Pernicious Propaganda

A common theme in the Western worldview is that US domination reflects a kind of benign global system. In fact, this doctrine reflects to a very large extent the ever so typically Western, especially Anglo-American, self-serving definition of international conditions. American hegemony has meant its pursuit of narrow self-interest under the hypocritical guise of globalism and free trade working ultimately for the benefit of all (see, e.g., “Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man: The Shocking Inside Story Of How America Really Took Over The World”, John Perkins, Ebury Press, 2004/6. Reviewed by Jeremy Agar in Watchdog 112, August 2006, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/12/08.htm).

Trump's fiery, bullying rhetoric has been peeling away such pretence, as well as fuelling division in the US itself. Moreover, the antics of Trumpism are now starting to cause a degree of division within the West itself, including the “Five Eyes” club. President Trump's “America First” approach has effectively blown the cover of the Western consensus, although the US and its allies still egregiously try and use the propaganda camouflage wherever and whenever it suits, as in the Syrian conflict.

Yet, bizarrely enough, at the same time, American imperial doctrine has often been routinely broadcast in the most brazen way. This happens, whether on Fox News, or even expounded in chilling detail to Establishment acclaim by unashamed neo-fascists, e.g., Thomas PM Barnett in “The Pentagon's New Map: War And Peace In The Twenty-First Century”, Berkley Books, 2004).  

Rise Of Reactionary Movements

Whatever might be the relatively accepted academic definitions of the terms “fascist” or “neo-fascist”, Trump had already exhibited in his bid for Presidency a number of key elements of fascism, and is now leading a populist movement towards this sort of future e.g. “How The US Went Fascist: Mass Media Makes Excuses For Trump Voters”, Informed Comment, https://www.juancole.com/2016/02/how-the-us-went-fascist-mass-media-makes-excuses-for-trump-voters.html. 

And see “Donald Trump May Not Be A Fascist, But He Is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path”, Huffington Post, 14/1/16, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-neiwert/trump-may-not-be-a-fascist-but_b_8973768.html; “Father of Fascism Studies: Donald Trump Shows Alarming Willingness To Use Fascist Terms & Styles”, Democracy Now, 15/3/16, https://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/15/father_of_fascism_studies_donald_trump).

Given worsening global problems, conflicts continue to grow both within and between countries. At the same time, the reactionary trends around the world to greater governmental control and dictatorial behaviour are increasing, e.g., Putin's Russia, Xi Jinping's China, Erdogan's Turkey, Netanyahu's Israel, and the repressive, consolidating grip of Rodrigo “Death Squad” Duterte in the Philippines. Extremist Rightwing movements are providing platforms for a host of European racist/fascist, nationalist, and anti-immigrant leaders and agitators, who no doubt would prove dictatorially inclined once ensconced in power. 

Trumpist-Type Political Thuggery

On a personal note, I remember way back on a visit to India in 1989 being disturbed by signs of a developing Rightwing Hindu nationalist movement, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its parent paramilitary organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). An India Today front cover warned with a banner headline about “Dangerous Dimensions” of “communalism” and its ethnic antagonisms (31/10/89; see also “Riot After Riot: Reports On Caste And Communal Violence In India”, MJ Akbar, Penguin, 1988). The RSS was inflaming the conditions for riots in a country with the second largest Muslim population in the world. 

Today, the Indian PM Narendra Modi represents both the BJP and RSS. On his path to power, “Modi campaigned on a promise to unleash India's economic potential, bring new opportunity to its poor and aspiring middle class, and transform the country into a 21st Century global power” (“India In The 21st Century: What Everyone Needs To Know”, Mira Kamdar, Oxford University Press, 2018, p182). An informed observer remarked that: “…. there is no doubt that under (Modi's) leadership, India is becoming an increasingly illiberal democracy”, marked by vigilante communal violence and intimidation of free speech (ibid., p195).  At the same time, on the global scene India and China are squaring up as rival nations.

Over on another continent, in Brazil, the neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro, who proudly models himself on Trump, has become the new President. His election threatens to prove an absolute disaster – for Brazil, for Latin America, and for the world! He wants to raze the Amazon, the lungs of the planet: to colonise land for settlements and farming, and in the search for minerals, especially oil and gas. He is quite prepared to exterminate the indigenous Indian peoples in the process. 

Both Duterte and Bolsonaro are products of the militarist market as fostered by the US in their respective countries. A former Army captain, Jair Bolsonaro exults in violence. He openly and enthusiastically endorses the torture and death squad terror perpetrated by the CIA-engineered military dictatorship of 1964, that ensued in two decades of US-backed military rule. 

President Trump has congratulated Bolsonaro and already there are clear indications of looming oppression. It is highly significant that the new Brazilian President has a strong support base among the nation's evangelical Christians. This religious grouping has been spawned over the years by – broadly speaking – the same fundamentalist churches, which provide such a following for Trump in the US.

A Tragic Treadmill

Civilisation, in the sense of humane values and behaviour and in relation to policy and practice, is surely in crisis. As President Trump takes America for the most part further into conflict mode, both internally and externally, with so much of the world, global problems continue to compound and deepen for everybody. We have to contest all this in committed, non-violent ways more than ever.

Trump himself is becoming even more deeply embroiled in a tumultuous minefield of legal cases. He seems to be entrapped in a tightening coil of worsening corruption and constitutional scandals. Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward's new book “Fear: Trump In The White House” (Simon and Schuster, 2018), reveals a scarily dysfunctional and disorganised Administration. Even some leading officials are very worried about the President's proclivities, and sometimes intervene in ways to offset and control his worst tendencies. Lately, Trump has vowed to weed out more “enemies” from his Administration.

But while there is now even open talk of possible impeachment, Trump stays for the moment a teflon-style President like the far-Right flaky Ronald Reagan was for so many of his diehard supporters. In the meantime, America gets more divided. Let's hope Trump does not indulge in another foreign bombing raid, or some other episode of dangerous foreign adventurism, for a politically contrived distraction from his domestic problems!

Keeping Up That Oily, Smiley Face

The deleterious consequences of US-led foreign control and intervention continue to take their toll in a whole range of ways. Most tragically, of course, the peoples of the Middle East and surrounding regions (North Africa, Central Asia, etc.) are by far the victims of the worst results of Western resource predation and geopolitical aggression. As already indicated, America's addiction to oil is deeply rooted (“Stop Thief!: Sadly, It's A Common Story – A Desperate Addict Turns To A Life of Crime”, Murray Horton, Watchdog 102, May 2003, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/02/06.htm, & also “Blood And Oil: The Dangers And Consequences Of America's Growing Dependency On Imported Petroleum”, Michael T Klare, 2009).

America's oil addiction and its interactive relationship with the militarist market reaches far back from into its history (“A Quarter Century Of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990-2016”, David North, Mehring Books, 2016; “A Century Of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics And The New World Order”, F William Engdahl, revised edition, Pluto Press, 1992/2004/2012). Oil greases the war machines, and the war machines guard the oil reserves. These machines – from land vehicles, marine vessels, and aircraft – all consume in turn a lot of the oil they guard.  And, so it goes . . . 

It has, in recent times, been argued that the US is no longer so preoccupied with safeguarding its oil supply pipeline from the Middle East since it has become a lot more self-sufficient at home (e.g. “Trump's Middle East Policy”, International Policy Digest, 14/3/17, https://intpolicydigest.org/2017/03/14/trump-s-middle-east-policy/). Instead, America is seen as giving more priority to what now it calls the “Indo-Pacific” region and the threat of a rising China.

Much of America's apparent confidence for this shift in geopolitical emphasis comes in the wake of the so-called “fracking revolution” for oil and gas within the US itself. There are, to be sure, even some hugely optimistic projections of the US as a major fossil fuel exporter (“US Will Become A Net Oil Exporter Within 10 Years, Says IEA”, Guardian, 13/11/17, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/14/us-net-oil-exporter-iea-international-energy-agency).

But, putting aside any environmental concerns, there is good reason to consider such optimistic hydro-carbon projections as grossly misplaced, and overblown, with fracking technology only providing a temporary respite from looming supply issues (“‘A Shale Reality Check’: How Secure Is A National US ‘Long Position’ On Natural Gas For US Energy Policy And For Promoting The Reforming Of NG To Produce Hydrogen?” 6/3/18, https://www.h2developmentcorp.com/blank-2/2018/03/07/A-Shale-Reality-Check---How-Secure-Is-A-National-US-Long-Position-On-Natural-Gas-For-US-Energy-Policy-For-Promoting-The-Reforming-Of-NG-To-Produce-Hydrogen). For certain, the US is hedging its bets on oil, and even looking to secure a future source in Syria (see “Mobilise For Action On The Threats To Peace!”, op. cit.).

Growing Competition For Resources

It is significant, too, that President Trump has posted especial concerns about “strategic metals”, particularly steel and aluminium. Whether at this stage, this sort of stuff is deliberately overblown or not for trade reasons, the US war for the world's resources is becoming ever more evident. American national security strategy actually accuses China of something that the US has long and systematically practised - “predatory economics”! It certainly recognises a rival when it sees one!!

All this market bullying is going hand in hand with a continuing American military build-up in the Indo-Pacific region, a process into which NZ is being roped (“SDPS:2018”, op. cit.). Meanwhile, Israel and Saudi Arabia will certainly serve in the Middle East as the core joint platform there for Anglo-American military strategy and the protection of oil/gas reserves. 

This particular geopolitical strategy includes an appropriately aligned Egypt, firmly back in de facto military control, and other suitably aligned Gulf states like Kuwait and Bahrain. The Sunni Saudi/US COIN campaign against Yemen is currently a key element in the maintenance of imperial control in the region, ostensibly against the influence of Shiite Iran. 

The UN calls it the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet but the Anglo-American axis is unfazed by the suffering inflicted by its geopolitical brutality (“Yemen Crisis: Five Million Children At Risk Of Starvation, Save The Children Warns”, Independent, 20/9/18, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/yemen-crisis-conflict-children-famine-starvation-death-a8545666.html). By October 2018 the UN was warning that about 14 million people, half the population of war-torn Yemen, faced “pre-famine” conditions.      

Malicious, Murderous COIN In Tandem With Capitalist Obscenity

Most malevolently, the West has shown its true colours when it comes to the crunch. Millions of children in Yemen are being bombed, starved, and plagued by disease due to the perfidy of the Anglo-American axis and its allies. The latter supply and coordinate weapons, logistic support, surveillance and intelligence, naval blockades, etc. – all in aid of the Saudi/Gulf States' air and ground attacks.

The mainstream media stand starkly exposed for their calculated, hypocritical demolition of human rights, with Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, in such acute crisis (e.g. “The Siege Of Hodeidah, Washington's War Crime In Yemen”, 15/6/18, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/15/pers-j15.html; “Yemen – US Grants Approval For Genocide”,11/6/18, https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/06/us-grants-approval-for-genocide-in-yemen.html).

(See also “The War Nerd: Anglo-American Media's Complicity In Yemen's Genocide”, 11/6/18, https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/06/war-nerd-anglo-american-medias-complicity-yemens-genocide.html; “What US And UK Media Won't Tell You About The War In Yemen”,  The Listening Post, 25/6/18, https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2018/06/uk-media-won-war-yemen-180624152733811.html).

As yet another US-instigated war on the world's poor takes its bloody toll in Yemen, the Saudi-organised lavishly feted investment conference “Davos In The Desert” took place in October 2018. This conference proceeded in the midst of the unfolding revelations concerning the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. 

While a number of American and other Western TNCs were prompted to boycott the event, others attended and made a killing on many billions of dollars of investment (“Despite Khashoggi Case, US Firms And Saudi Prince Show Up At 'Davos In The Desert'”, Washington Post, 23/10/18).

The Vicious Cycle Of Pummelling Oppression And Payback

Saudi Arabia remains the crucial linchpin of the Anglo-American axis in the Middle East. Several decades ago, the 1979 Iranian revolution blew apart this particular country's proxy “policeman” role in the Persian Gulf. The region's oil supply suddenly seemed to be at risk from both nationalist revolutionaries and rival foreign forces. 

In the words of a leading American strategist: “The Iranian disaster shattered the strategic pivot of a protected tier shielding the crucial, oil-rich region of the Persian Gulf from possible Soviet intrusion” (“Power And Principle: Memoirs Of The National Security Adviser 1977-1981”, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1983/5, p356).

The author of these words has boasted about setting a “bear-trap” for the Soviets in Afghanistan, along with unleashing fanatical Islamist fighters against the 1979 Soviet invasion. The spectacular reversal in Iran came about despite America's aid for regional subjugation, including “the Shah's repression of dissidents in Iran…”  (“Blowback”, op. cit., p70). American “down-the-line support of the Shah's repressive rule had only accelerated the coming to power of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an implacably anti-American regime” (ibid., p100). You reap what you sow!

Now we are all teetering on the brink of a slide into an accumulating roller-coaster of compounding violent strife, given Trump's reactionary rejection of the Iranian nuclear agreement, and the application of severe economic sanctions obviously directed at yet another blatant regime change. Tellingly enough, the UN has deemed that the US has again violated the “international rules-based order”.  It has found American sanctions imposed on Iran to be “illegal” (“UN: Sanctions On Iran Illegal”, Press, 5/10/18). 

Most ominously, however, even the threat of a nuclear strike hovers over Iran, with constant threats from the US/Israel brigade. Not so long ago, it was remarked that: “A (Dr) Strangelovian move of this sort (an American, or joint US-Israeli, nuclear attack on Iran!) would be fully supported by the Israel lobby, by the bulk of US corporate and Wall Street interests, the leadership of both Parties, a majority of religious and academic elites, the military and intelligence Establishment, and, of course, a jingoistic, cheerleading mass media” (“Ecology And Revolution: Global Crisis And Political Challenge”, Carl E Boggs, Environmental Politics and Theory series: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, p54). 

Peddling Propaganda

Given that the Iranian agreement on nuclear weapons was negotiated under the Democrat Obama Administration, such a comprehensive consensus for a purportedly pre-emptive attack on Iran would not prevail in these times. But the possibility is still high enough for real concern. Artificially manufactured fears about a still vulnerable potential enemy are grist to the mill for the American Establishment. 

Witness the egregiously lying and malicious propaganda to pave the way for the flagrantly illegal Anglo-American invasion of neighbouring Iraq in 2003 (“Target Iraq: What The News Media Didn't Tell You”, Norman Solomon & Resse Erlich, Context Books, 2003; “Weapons Of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda In Bush's War on Iraq”, Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber, Tarcher/Penguin, 2003). Such malign misinformation is standard across the US foreign policy spectrum.

The Trump Administration has now merged a new wave of economic sanctions and military threats against Iran. We most urgently need a much greater “people power” movement working worldwide for peace-making and positive change. The Iranian nuclear weapon agreement was a positive achievement by the Obama Administration that the international community could use for further advancement towards wider arms control measures. President Trump and his militarist cronies are running rampant with rough-shod and highly volatile “big stick” diplomacy around the globe.

Evil Warmongering

The most vicious of these cronies now in power is the neo-fascist John Bolton, US National Security Adviser. A one-man walking time-bomb, indeed a fanatical suicide bomber, Bolton is credited with having the most responsibility “for the Bush Administration's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and its embrace of the 'Star Wars' missile 'shield', whose purpose is to give the US 'full spectrum dominance'” (from 'Liberating Afghanistan', chapter 5, in “Freedom Next Time”, John Pilger, Black Swan, 2006, p399). 

This American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty immediately destabilised the role of nuclear weapons in ensuring mutual deterrence, leading to a dangerous new phase of the arms race in which we are all currently entrapped. As famed investigative reporter John Pilger notes, Bolton had the US State Department title under President George W Bush of 'Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and Disarmament, an “Orwellian creation” indeed, given “its function was clearly the antithesis of this”. Probably the most driven and dangerous 'neo-con', Bolton almost single-handedly led the US on a path to nuclear war with North Korea” (ibid., p398).  Watch this space!

President Bush later even – in yet another one of his Orwellian moves – promoted Bolton as US Ambassador to the UN, which the tribalist Bolton loathes (pp413/4). Tellingly though, around this time, Douglas Feith, a “political soul-mate” of Bolton was found guilty by an official inquiry. “The Pentagon's Inspector General adjudged Feith of 'inappropriate' behaviour in setting up a rogue propaganda unit designed to find a link between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, where none existed, and to promote an invasion of Iraq” (ibid., p413). 

In fact, as Pilger stresses, John Bolton “opposed the very principle of international agreements” (ibid., p398). As President GW Bush's representative, Bolton actually “dismissed any suggestion that international law could constrain the actions of the US, or that domestic constitutional requirements alone were not sufficient to confer legitimacy on the use of the force” (“Lawless World”, op. cit., p174). President Bush himself was even blunter and more forceful in expressing this viewpoint (ibid.).

Bolton also said, “There is no such thing as the UN” (“Freedom Next Time”, op. cit., p398). He went on to contend the US is “the only real power in the world”, and should lead other nations according to “when it suits our interests, and when we can get others to go along” (ibid., pp398/9).  While the poisonous Bolton considers that the UN is irrelevant, as a then member of the GW Bush Administration, he called for “an invasion of Iraq because of its alleged failure to respect UN resolutions” (ibid., p399). And, hence the illegal 2003 invasion, conducted with flagrant American hypocrisy and militarist fanfare, and all in absolute violation of the UN Charter!

Killing Arms Control Treaties!

Trump's National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is also most fittingly known as the “treaty killer” (ibid.). He has been instrumental in adding the Iranian nuclear/peace agreement to his rotten record. In true Nazi-style, he wears nick-names like “treaty killer” with pride. He is particularly enamoured of the label “Armageddon Man” (ibid.). Bolton is thus the very epitome of zombie evil, an embodiment of Freud's “death instinct”, a raving madman instrumental in taking the world on the road to the Trumpist Hell (“The Death Cult Of Trumpism”, Nation, 11/1/18, https://www.thenation.com/article/the-death-cult-of-trumpism/).  

His latest effort as the “treaty killer” is the destruction of the vital Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (IRNFT, or INF), a pact made in 1987 in helping wind down the Cold War (“US To Pull Out Of 1987 Nuke Treaty”, Press, 22/10/18; “Ditching Nuclear Treaties: Trump Withdraws From The INF”, 25/10/18, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1810/S00123/ditching-nuclear-treaties-trump-withdraws-from-the-inf.htm).

Bolton's demolition of this particular treaty stems directly from the consequences of the earlier US withdrawal from the ABM treaty. It fits with the American plan to fight the next war as much as possible on the soils and waters of other countries, and also try to lessen nuclear retaliation by “Star Wars”-type anti-missile defence systems.

Ultimately, of course, such moves are driven by US geopolitics and the military-industrial complex. Since the INF prevented America from developing new weapons, the treaty had to go. The Trump Administration blatantly rejects any arms control (“Bolton Holds To US Pledge To Quit Pact”, Press, 25/10/18).  So much again for NZ's cringeworthy appeal to the “international rules-based order”, supposedly championed by the Western powers!

Fuelling An Oil-Boozed Arms Bazaar

All the self-interested interventions of the self-defined “free world” in poorer countries have certainly have had their unravelling consequences. One of the great ironies – given the official narrative and its eminently hypocritical storyline – is that this history goes far in helping explain the emergence of Trumpism. In particular, as already sketched to some degree, the history of Western involvement in the Middle East is a long and tumultuous one, and increasingly portentous in its outcomes and ramifications. 

Against the background of imperial history, a crucial geopolitical change came about with the first so-called “oil shock” in 1973. The members of the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting countries (OAPEC), a spin-off of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) established earlier in 1960, imposed an oil embargo against the US. They took this joint action on account of American support for Israel during another round of Arab-Israeli conflict. America supplied the Israelis with lots of weaponry during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

The first “oil shock” – as administered by OAPEC/OPEC coordinated action in 1973/4 – hit the rich countries with a series of price hikes and supply interruptions. In its wake, the US reacted by engaging in a strategy that fused together militarisation and the predation of Middle East oil. Moreover, it was a strategy that has shaped Western capitalist imperialism right up to the present, and consolidated the rule of the warfare/national security state. President Donald Trump would have certainly been in his element even then!   

Worried about a huge blow to America's balance of payments due to soaring oil prices, Washington decided that the “quickest way to recycle oil money, or to 'sop up the surplus' … was to sell arms in exchange – much safer and more stable than having the surplus oil money 'sloshing around the short-term capital markets of the world'. In this topsy-turvy world, arms were now being touted as the means to make the world safer” (“The Arms Bazaar: The Companies, The Dealers, The Bribes: From Vickers to Lockheed”, Anthony Sampson, Hodder & Stoughton, 1977, p244).

Booming Arms Sales

The US thus responded to higher priced oil imports in the early 1970s by boosting arms export sales to the Middle East (ibid.). Weapons sales, along with those of related military equipment, mushroomed. Another boost and dimension to the militarist market got under way! In a single year, the Pentagon succeeded in boosting its total foreign military sales (FMS) by more than double on the previous year. It lifted these “sales from $US3.9 billion in 1973 to $US8.3 billion in 1974. The world arms trade had been transformed beyond recognition” (ibid.). 

Along with all its other dimensions of militarisation, the US military-industrial complex had now embraced arms sales on a scale that meant the development of a Keynesian warfare state, rather than the Keynesian welfare state. So, the pattern was set for welfare and general social well-being to be screwed in aid of warfare. The increasingly militarist American market, despite momentary hiccups – as for a short period after the end of the Cold War – has since marched on into the future.

Even earlier than the oil-price triggered splurge of arms spending in the Middle East, various nations (including Israel), along with neighbouring countries like Turkey, had become the target for massive and lucrative arms sales from the Anglo-American axis. Iran under the Shah had been a major focus for security and arms aid, and related sales.

Dealing Out Death!

In recent times, the predominance of arms sales to the Middle East has still been very much the case for the Western warmongers and their assorted, appointed guardians of fossil energy. That bastion and linchpin of Anglo-American oil imperialism, the feudal, totalitarian kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has often been the foremost weapons purchaser. 

Of the FMS offers in 2010 under the Obama Administration, some 60% comprised sales to Saudi Arabia alone (“Trends In Major US Arms Sales In 2017”. Center for International Policy, 2/3/18). At the time, this was the biggest such US export deal to any country under any Administration.

To be sure, President Obama, that notorious winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, scored an overall record in military exports (“Obama's Administration Sold More Weapons Than Any Other Since World War II”, Motherboard, 3/1/17, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjmvb/obamas-administration-sold-more-weapons-than-any-other-since-world-war-ii).  

Most ironically, the latest American arms sales to Saudi Arabia have got caught up with some more blowback from its own pernicious model of foreign policy! The shocking death of “dissident” Washington Post (WP) columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, brutally murdered at the hands of a special 15-men Saudi death squad flown into Turkey, has once again illuminated US President Trump's own depravity. Almost incredibly, Khashoggi was murdered at the kingdom's own Consulate in Istanbul. 

Yet while the Saudis struggled to come up with an outrageously malign and hypocritical face-saving front, Trump blatantly “stressed Saudi Arabia's massive investment in US weaponry” (“Trump Pro-Saudi As Outrage Grows”, WP article reproduced in Press, 19/10/18).  A huge $US110 billion arms sale to the Saudis is in the pipeline. Trump openly voiced concerns that the Saudis “could instead purchase arms from China or Russia” (ibid.). He also warned “about the oil-rich desert kingdom cutting off its supply of petroleum to the US” (ibid.). Similarly, he “warned against losing a key partner countering Iran's influence in the Middle East” (ibid.). Oh, the angst, blood, sweat, and oil of geopolitics and resource wars!  

It is certainly most revealing that the death of a journalist working for a Western newspaper is a step too far for so many of our ruling elite. Meanwhile, helping kill kids in Yemen, whether directly or indirectly, is still good policy and practice. Children can be “collateral damage”, unless say some enemy is bombing them, as has been the case in Syria!

While the Middle East (& related regions) remains the dominant focus for arms sales, the Trump Administration brazenly intends to spread weapons further and more widely around the planet as it looks to boost sales to an even greater extent (ibid. “US Arms Sales Jump 25 Percent in FY 2017”,  Reuters, 29/11/17, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-arms/u-s-arms-sales-jump-25-percent-in-fy-2017-idUSKBN1DT35V). All this history and geopolitics has critically shaped the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Trashing International Law

As we have repeatedly illustrated in the course of this article, American abuse of international law in pursuit of its foreign policy has a long, ugly, and sordid history. The irony of this is all the more profound when we consider that conservative Western interests like to portray the US as the world's policeman. Such abuse was particularly flagrant during the Reagan era in the 1980s.

Since 9/11 the US has again greatly expanded and accelerated foreign policy derelictions, imparting an even uglier and perilous model for others to follow and imitate (“Lawless World” op. cit; “Rogue Nation: A Guide To The World's Only Superpower”, 3rd ed., William Blum, Common Courage Press, 2005; “On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare”, Noam Chomsky & Andre Vltchek, Pluto Press, 2013). 

China's rejection of the finding by the International Court of the Hague in favour of the Philippines on an issue of conflict in the South China Sea can aptly illustrate this point (“Beijing Rejects Tribunal's Ruling In South China Sea Case”, Guardian, 12/7/16, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wins-south-china-sea-case-against-china). Big powers can pick and choose what laws they like, and scoff at international disapproval. The global climate of diplomatic cooperation is thus further undermined, and appeals to a “rules-based order” left in tatters.

The Mechanics Of Militarism 

On the international scene, Vladimir Putin is regularly painted as the kind of pantomime villain that the Western military machine so regularly needs to fuel its profit-propelled war industries. Propaganda is pervasively endemic to the military industrial complex. Ongoing accusations and charges of Russian cyberwarfare interference in the 2016 American Presidential elections, and beyond, are currently rife with this sort of antagonism.  But whatever Putin's realpolitik, as famed peace activist/anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott remarks, President Putin's measured stability contrasts starkly with Trump's “very frightening” volatility (noted in “The End Of Life On Earth”, New Philosophy, February 2018, pp71-77).

The capitalist West certainly covets the natural resources of the old Soviet empire, including those of Russia itself. Social Darwinist games of geopolitical competition go on around the globe, e.g. reaching from the Arctic and even, ominously enough for Aotearoa/NZ, to Antarctica. Meanwhile, President Putin and his ruling oligarchy, however Mafia-like at times, have succeeded in mobilising extensive nationalist popular support. 

There is some genuine opposition, but at work also are the machinations of the CIA, the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and other American and Western agencies. All these agencies operate within an overall American programme to pressure Putin and his government. At the same time, in the greatest of ironies, Trumpism has its own poisonous and implosive project for American society.

Cultivating Geopolitical Competition

In an article in the aftermath of 9/11 and all its fallout, influential Establishment strategic analyst Fiona Hill and her co-writers even actually referred to the US's “ravenous appetite for petroleum” (“Does Saudi Arabia Still Matter? Differing Perspectives On The Kingdom And Its Oil”, Foreign Affairs, Shibley Telhami, Fiona Hill, et al., November/December 2002, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/does-saudi-arabia-still-matter-differing-perspectives-on-the-kingdom-and-its-oil/). They contended that in any crisis of the theocratic, totalitarian kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a joint approach would form the “centrepiece of the US-Saudi relationship” (ibid.). 

These writers include in passing the usual, ritual comment about how this highly important strategic relationship should also incorporate a programme of reform within the repressive feudal regime; and even that the US must close the gap between its values and its actual policies and deeds (ibid.). The brazenly shocking murder of WP columnist Jamal Kashoggi has since further demolished all such pretence and posturing, which has always been so much humbug anyway. 

For certain, given the historical record and current behaviour, such statements as those by Telhami, Hill, et al have long amounted to simply so much empty, face-saving rhetoric (ibid.). In context, initiatives like permission for women to drive cars, as granted in September 2017, only amount to window-dressing.  While there may be some token signs of reform, democracy and the toleration of dissent look likely to wait until the kingdom freezes over! Kashoggi's murder surely testifies to this!  But the Anglo-American Establishment and its media need to constantly play pretend games about human rights issues on the international scene.

Imperialism At Issue

Fiona Hill's own Social Darwinist focus is certainly clear enough in her geopolitical preoccupation with fossil fuels and the US competition for these, both in conjunction with its allies and against rivals – including China, which was already importing 60% of its oil from the Persian Gulf (ibid.). Most ironically, at the time of their article, Fiona Hill & co. thought that the American empire had Russia under their control and securely within their orbit (ibid.). They looked keenly to what they saw as an emerging “free market” in Russia and, so, easy access for American companies to Russian resources, especially energy sources. 

But the American-style cowboy economics unleashed in Russia instead ushered in reactionism and blowback under Putin, about which analysts like Fiona Hill also portentously pontificate today.  Fiona Hill is very much a typical American Establishment analyst (see Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Volume 72, 2016, “US-Russia Relations – Putin: The One-Man Show The West Doesn't Understand”, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2016.1170361). Fiona Hill might be pretty conventional compared with fellow Brookings Institution members like the hawkish neo-con Robert Kagan, yet the general imperialist line of their geopolitical strategising is, in essence, very much the same.

Social Darwinist Competition

With the rise of China, the US has lost much of its mojo – its grip on the globalisation process.  Its TNCs exploited the Chinese market for decades, given China's rapid growth and lack of labour, safety, and environmental regulations.  But the Trump Administration has decided that in various spheres the costs are outweighing the benefits – hence its initiation of massive trade wars, which also encompass other countries to varying extent.  In the past, even some adherents of the capitalist credo and its provision of prosperity could see problems ahead for America. For instance, Richard C Longworth, a senior economics writer for the Chicago Tribune, posted a warning of blowback in his book “Global Squeeze”, op. cit.). 

He remarked that: “Global markets, freed from the kind of regulations that restrict national markets, pursue a pure, laissez-faire capitalism. This theory holds that markets are perfect and that the common good is best served if they are left free to work their magic…  If capitalism is not to breed its own destruction, it has to be fair, which is to say that the steeds of inequality must be guided by the reins of democracy” (ibid., p190). Inequality, he argued, should not be given free rein. But, as he pointed out, socio-economic inequities were worsening in the US (ibid.).

 Free Trade Travesties

As Longworth also observed, free trade is a myth anyway because such a high proportion of trade is intra-TNC, i.e., within transnational corporations (citing 40-50%; ibid., pp30-32). TNCs, which set up branches in other countries could directly export to the host nation, rather than exporting to this particular nation from America itself (ibid., p42).

Furthermore, “throughout history, free trade has always looked best to the strongest nation with the most competitive export industries” (ibid., p47). Imperial Britain enforced free trade through the imposition of the militarist market and the Maxim gun. Post-World War II (WWII), the US enforced its own version of free trade and corporate global reach with a host of both covert and overt activities, charged and underwritten with military power. 

Yet, as Richard Longworth well warned, the day of reckoning was coming. The “old steelmaking neighbourhoods of Chicago and other Rust Belt cities” stood as testament to the fact that the competitive pressures induce “companies (to) adopt labour-saving technology”, killing jobs (ibid., p98). These days, in an unprecedented era of rapidly changing high-tech the global “race to the bottom” is predicted to reduce employment on an enormous scale.   

Compounding Capitalist Contradictions

Earlier in this article, I drew attention to some academic research on China's political influence in Aotearoa/NZ (Anne-Marie Brady, “New Zealand v China”, op. cit.). Political Science Associate Professor Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University put the cat among the pigeons within the NZ political Establishment – at least to some extent – following the publication of a research report in September 2017 (“Magic Weapons: China's Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping”, Wilson Center, 18/9/17, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/magic-weapons-chinas-political-influence-activities-under-xi-jinping). Her report documented the reach of China's “soft power” inside our political system, especially the then ruling National government.

Her research findings are certainly significant in so far as they go.  China's expanding global reach is of concern in many dimensions, and the NZ experience is only a subset of all this. But Anne-Marie Brady makes certain highly charged political recommendations of her own as to the appropriate course of action for Aotearoa/NZ, on the basis of her research. 

She remarks that: “NZ and Albania are two of the many small states that have sought shelter in military alliances with the US while turning to China for economic opportunities” (Anne-Marie Brady, “New Zealand v China”, op. cit.). However, she finds it significant that “unlike the previous National government, Ardern's government has not endorsed Xi Jinping's flagship policy, the Belt Road Initiative, bringing NZ back into line with its allies and nearest neighbours” (ibid.).   

Associate Professor Brady then goes on, most ironically, to call on the current NZ government to make another principled stand as happened under the 1984-90 Labour government with the declaration of NZ’s nuclear-free status (ibid.).  According to Brady, we need to defend our sovereignty and values against China in a diplomatic way, “and make legislative changes such as to the Electoral Finance Act” (ibid.).  

Seeking Real Sovereignty

We could certainly go along with this kind of policy. After all, we strongly opposed the Free Trade Agreement which NZ forged with China, and which serves as a springboard for the takeover of NZ assets and inroads into our democracy. But Brady also calls for embracing closer economic bonds with “friends and allies”, i.e. our “Five Eyes” partners, in order to counter China (ibid.).

Associate Professor Brady herself even uses weasel word-play here in this connection. She says: “NZ can also work more to partner with like-minded democracies and give up the notion that it needs to seek shelter with one or other of the great powers” (ibid.). In reality, what Brady is proposing is an even more subservient relationship with the Trumpist NNSS on the road to Hell! 

Sorry, Anne-Marie, your own role with the Kissinger Institute on China and the US Polar Initiative, at America's Wilson Center, clearly signals your own Social Darwinist tribalist allegiance (Anne-Marie Brady, Wilson Center, https://www.wilsoncenter.org). Brady's own work too, whatever its veracity, is itself an example of US “soft power” in action. This soft power has long been rife in Aotearoa/NZ, locking us all into the US war machine and militarist market. The fact that Professor Brady has done her report as a Global Fellow (July 2014-June 2018) of an outfit named after Kissinger, an egregious world war criminal, says it all. What Aotearoa/NZ needs to chart for itself is genuine independence and neutral peace-making/mediation. 

Blather, Baloney, And Barmy Warmongering Bullshit!

Meanwhile, though there are even occasional hints in the mainstream media about the crisis of globalist capitalism banging up against the limits of economic growth, the sanitised official spiel for Western publics still paints the prospect of endless prosperity. Despite some acknowledgement of emerging environmental constraints in the form of the increasing competition for resources, “SDPS:2018” is openly committed to the Social Darwinist rush to destruction, lining up China as the main potential enemy (op. cit. “Mobilise For Action On The Threats To Peace!”, op. cit.).

For instance, “SDPS:2018” specifically refers to the increasing competition for resources several times in the course of the document but does not delve into any detail. It persists in conveying the impression that growing prosperity for the future is still somehow open-ended.  To be sure, “SDPS:2018” reeks of American propaganda regarding the nature of geopolitical competition. Some egregious examples are readily evident. For example, in the most malign fashion, “SDPS” portrays Russia's clearly defensive moves in Eastern Europe as the result of supposed Russian aggression. 

The defence document even twists geography: “Europe has also been the target of influence and coercion campaigns by outside powers, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) focusing anew on countering a formidable Russian threat” (ibid., p22). Reality is actually turned on its head and the craziness of NATO aggression and its militarist market invasion of former Soviet states completely whitewashed (ibid.).

US-led NATO's campaign of aggression continues in the most confrontational, provocative fashion (“NATO Holds Huge Military Drills In Signal To Russia”, Press, 27/10/18). We are undoubtedly in dire trouble these days with our Government and its “walking dead” Defence Department pushing further down the road to Armageddon. Are we going to be so tribally and tamely conditioned for WWIII?!

Growing Geopolitical Confrontation

The US is trying to face down China in the South China Sea and the surrounding region. Australia, as America's most loyal deputy, is not only militarising its Northern Territory, and deploying surveillance drones, etc., but has moved to further militarise the Pacific. As normal practice, it is using island bases, per the usual political manipulation of the locals. In particular, it is reopening “a vast Pacific military base used by the US in WWII, as it seeks to counter Chinese expansionism in the region” (“Naval Base Move To Block China”, Press, 22/9/18).

The Australian government is going to redevelop the Lombrun naval facility on Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Following the deplorable use of Manus Island to brutally confine intercepted “boat people”, it is highly symbolic of the siege mentality of the privileged Anglo-American axis – and what is generally happening on our planet – that this island is now to be remilitarised. It will “service large warships, both Australian and American” (ibid.). Australia has obviously acted on the US instruction to establish a regional naval base in a way that meets the desired objectives of both “Five Eyes” members (ibid.). 

Moreover, Australia quite unashamedly trots out its standard PR line that it works with Pacific Island nations like PNG in an egalitarian cooperative way. It touts “the benchmark that Australia places on this is one of engagement and partnership” (ibid.) i.e. using Pacific islands as the frontline in preparation for WWIII! Australia contrasts its own position with the comparatively “vast amounts of money” in aid and investment that China is now pouring into PNG (ibid.).

The Heat Goes On!

Rivalry for geopolitical influence is certainly hotting up in the Pacific. “Australia has done what it can to block China's growing influence elsewhere in the Pacific. This year it stopped China rebuilding the Black Rock military camp on Fiji by itself becoming the sole foreign donor” (ibid.). It also “prevented Huawei, the vast Chinese telecommunications firm” from allegedly compromising the security of Australia's communications network (ibid.). NZ has been compliantly tagging along with a boosted aid/investment programme in the Pacific, fitting in appropriately with the “Five Eyes” agenda wherever and whenever appropriate.

Australia, to be sure, would be very much on the frontline of the Holocaust for which it is preparing. Dr Helen Caldicott aptly calls the Pine Gap intelligence/communications base in mid-Australia “the central nerve system of the world American nuclear policy, which would orchestrate a nuclear war, and is orchestrating the drone killing” (in “The End Of Life On Earth?”, op. cit.). Caldicott rightly denounces Pine Gap as “a killing centre, and (that) by hosting it we are war criminals. There would be at least 20 hydrogen bombs targeted on Pine Gap. Then there's Northwest Cape (base) and there's Darwin full of US marines and ships. We (Australia) are totally targeted” (ibid.).

Capitalist Contradictions Continue At A Gathering Rate!

Ironies run riot as ever. “China Harbour Engineering Company, a State-owned company, has a $NZ45.6m deal to upgrade Momote Airport on Manus Island” (“Naval Base Move To Block China”, op. cit.), no doubt helpfully upgrading it to take any Western military aircraft! “More than 1500 US Marines are stationed at a base in Darwin, northern Australia”, with the number due to “rise to 2500 by 2020”, along with plans to “bring another 4000 US sailors and Marines to the western Pacific” (ibid.).

At the same time, the increasing geopolitical competition between the West and China rides on often mutually beneficial economic exchanges and investment. More deeply and broadly, the underlying impetus stems from profitable, consumerist economic growth fuelled by mindless technological innovation and governmental corporate welfare, e.g.,  the space race, and absurd contrivances like the flying car being developed jointly in the US and NZ, versus a different version in China (see my “From 'Big Bang' Space Race To Trashing the Planet: The Struggle Against The Global Corporates”, Watchdog 148, August 2018, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/48/08.html). 

In turn, this all ultimately depends on the ongoing onslaught on the planet's resources and environment (e.g., “Capitalism Is Destroying The Planet”,  ECOmaps, http://ecomaps.eu/en/learn/capitalism-is-destroying-the-planet/; “Nature's Steep Decline”, Stockholm Resilience Centre, https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2018-10-30-natures-steep-decline.html, on the dire implications of the 2018 Living Planet Report and the desperately urgent need for positive action).

As well, many millions of people suffer severely from such exploitation, with electronic waste (e-waste) a rapidly escalating global problem (e.g. “What Is The Human And Environmental Cost Of New Technology?”, Guardian, 27/2/13, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/human-environmental-cost-new-technology).  This is the result of the so-called “digital”, or “fourth industrial revolution”. Yet the message of corporate globalisation is effectively tantamount to saying: bugger the resource wars, climate change, and deteriorating ecosystems! After all, isn't there always Mars as Elon Musk says!?! 

In August 2018 President Trump made a public appeal for a logo for his new proposed “Space Force”. He even promoted a new line of consumer products to help fund it in a calculated promotion of the militarist market. In the atmosphere of Trump's crazy death cult, some relevant logos readily come to mind, e.g., “World War III (WWIII) here we come!”; “Aim high! – life's a blast!!; and, “From Ashes to Stardust!”.

Turning Crisis Into Constructive Opportunity?

It is surely sobering to think how the crest of evolutionary overshoot is providing the momentary affluence for armies of strategic analysts around the world to constantly monitor, analyse, and chart all the unfolding, competitive geopolitical twists and turns, along with various projections into the future. Of course, so often these analysts are just cheering on their respective tribalist affiliations. For example, Michael Shoebridge, Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former Defence Department official, heartily endorses the current militarisation of Manus Island (ibid.). He thus promotes a greater military boost in the region for both the US and Australia (ibid.).

All this sort of stuff would all be the epitome of black humour if the looming obvious outcome were not so absolutely and obscenely horrific. The geopolitical, militarist intellectual output mapping the road to Hell is like some bizarre pantomime – war gaming indeed! – the equivalent (to use an old image) of shifting chairs round on the deck of the Titanic as it steamed straight at the iceberg. 

Collision with the giant iceberg was destined to seal the ship's fate – a picture especially relevant in an age of global warming, as well as the related count-down to nuclear war. Do we have the humanity and common-sense to turn this ship around in time – to prevent the destruction of Spaceship Earth and its inhabitants?!

Being Positively Pre-emptive

In my overview of the big challenges posed by the militarist market, the over-riding emphasis is on the need for urgent, pre-emptive action.  We have been stressing this for many years, both in Watchdog and Peace Researcher, as well as in other publications.  At the global level, UN leaders are trying to marshal the world's peoples to act now for peace-making and on climate change. In regard to the former, they are striving for far better programmes of arms control. These include the reduction and control of nuclear weapons, along with the prevention and regulation of new technologies like robotic weaponry.  

We must, moreover, implement a transition to a fossil fuel free future in order to cope effectively with climate change and mitigate problems as much as possible. The challenges are greater than ever before but surely this should get more and more people on board if we campaign hard to get change agents active across the spectrum. 

This approach incorporates tackling the whole range of urgent environmental issues. Sustainable development and social justice goals should cover and inform the various projects required. Despite the obvious barriers and foot-dragging among vested interests, we have plenty of scope for further progress. Furthermore, we are working with the most prestigious international bodies on common causes for the Earth and humankind. Let's seize the time!