Five Eyes become four as New Zealand distances itself from anti-China action
Workers have no interest in going along with the wave of anti-China propaganda that is preparing the ground for a devastating war.
Anti-China propaganda, it seems, is the order of the day, whether the topic is Covid-19, Huawei (5G), Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, the Falun Gong (a CIA-sponsored religious cult) or just good old-fashioned ‘human rights’, and the persistent but groundless accusations that these mean less to the Chinese working class and their 80 million-strong party of government, the Communist Party of China (CPC), than they do to the numerically insignificant but financially all-powerful clique of global finance capitalists.
These accusations are made brazenly and incessantly, despite the Anglo-American and European Union imperialists’ relentless campaign of superexploitation and global impoverishment of the working masses and exploited nations, triggering recurrent financial crises, and the constant drive to take over yet more colonies in the desperate bid to ‘save themselves’, and hence the latter’s relentless drive to destabilisation, plunder and war.
But amidst the daily propaganda blaring from our media of late, there can be discerned an occasional uplifting note of discord from the camp of the Anglo-American imperialist aggressors, which also provides a window onto the deeper truth.
Particularly significant is the news that New Zealand’s government – whose prime minister Jacinda Ardern was until so recently being lauded for her model handling of the Covid pandemic, while China’s exemplary response and record has been studiously neglected and ignored – is feeling ‘uncomfortable’ with being dragooned, by means of its security state apparatus, into adopting an increasingly overt anti-China foreign policy stance.
It’s worth quoting the Times of 20 April at length:
“New Zealand has broken with Anglophone allies over using the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing network to confront China [our emphasis], reversing an agreement to expand the network’s remit.
“Nanaia Mahuta, the foreign minister, declared that New Zealand was ‘uncomfortable’ with pressuring China and wanted to pursue its own bilateral relationship.
“The network, a cold war-era partnership to share intelligence, took a new turn last year when it began issuing statements as a single entity, including condemning China’s human rights record.
“Last May, defence ministers from Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand endorsed an expanded role with a public commitment not only to meet shared security challenges but ‘to advance their shared values of democracy, freedom and respect for human rights’. [!]
“Mahuta, 50, said she had informed the other Five Eyes members of New Zealand’s changed position.
“‘It’s a matter that we have raised with Five Eyes partners, that we are uncomfortable with expanding the remit of the Five Eyes relationship, that we would much rather prefer looking for multilateral opportunities to express our interests on a number of issues,’ she said.” (Five Eyes on China cut to four as New Zealand puts trade first by Bernard Lagan and Catherine Philp)
‘Five Eyes’ is the security agreement, essentially emerging from WW2 and the Anglo-American agreements of 1943 and 1946, between the USA and Britain, subsequently expanded to include Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
“The Five Eyes has its origins in the second world war and Winston Churchill’s belief that the English-speaking democracies need to work together to contain the Soviet threat during the cold war.” (Japan prepares to join UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network by Bernard Lagan and Gavin Blair, The Times, 21 April 2021)
This was British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, a ‘democrat’ of the racist and arch-colonialist variety, who had just engineered the Bengal famine in order to stockpile grain for European troops and European populations, while taxing India £100m and levying 1.3 million Indian troops to fight in the war, all the while denying India any political rights, including the right to express its own opinion on participation in that war.
When Leo Amery, Britain’s secretary of state for India petitioned Churchill for famine relief, and as three million Bengalis lay starving to death, Churchill told him that relief would do no good, since “Indians breed like rabbits”.
Five Eyes was extended in this spirit, as an Anglophone imperialist, anti-working-class and anti-Soviet spy network, following Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, which had been delivered in Fulton, Missouri in 1946.
Churchill’s warning of an “iron curtain falling over Europe”, of course, was in fact a reference to the liberation of Europe from Hitlerite fascism by the Red Army, and the birth of socialist democracies across central and eastern Europe. The term and concept had been shamelessly pilfered from the lexicon of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
This is no accident. British imperialism and US imperialism share the key tenets of German imperialism – monopoly capitalism, foreign plunder, racial superiority (whether overtly or covertly expressed) and, above all, the desire to keep the working class politically and economically subservient, to ensure maximum profit to their joint stock-holding corporations.
It should never be forgotten that, contrary to the prevailing academic and cultural dogmas of imperialism, the US and Britain, along with France and others, conspired to strangle the USSR at birth, throughout the interwar period and particularly in the lead-up to the second world war. It was only the working-class heroism of the USSR’s people, their cultural, scientific and economic development, their great moral stature, proletarian internationalism and diplomatic and their military resolve that prevented such an eventuality.
The USA remains the leading power and dominant force within the Five Eyes alliance, with Britain playing second fiddle and the other powers very much doing as they are told (receiving the information). Interestingly, even the participant states themselves acknowledge the inherent danger of accepting US intelligence at face value – as being coercive and manipulative of policy and curtailing their independence.
“It has been estimated that the two-way intelligence flow between Australia and the US is roughly 90 percent in Australia’s favour, with Canberra providing niche contributions overwhelmingly in relation to southeast Asia and the Pacific region.
“Echoing the alliance studies literature, however, an obvious danger for junior partners is that the asymmetry inherent in the Five Eyes arrangement exposes them to potential manipulation and control by the dominant major partner. The landmark Hope Royal Commission noted that there is a danger that some of the information Australia is given access to will be deceptive or misleading and operational cooperation may entail some loss of operational independence.” (Five Eyes and the Perils of an Asymmetric Alliance by Professor Andrew O’Neil, Australian Institute of International Affairs, 27 July 2017)
The Five Eyes ‘intelligence-sharing arrangement’ became formalised under the Echelon surveillance system in the 1960s. The latter’s stated intention was to monitor the communications of the former Soviet Union and the eastern bloc of European socialist countries. Far from being wound up following the collapse of the USSR, however, it has run amok in the decades since 1990, and is now used to monitor civilian populations worldwide, daily spying on all forms of electronic communications (email, SMS, Whatsapp and other messaging devices, Facebook, social media, and the worldwide web, as well as telephone and other voice communications) of billions of users.
Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, exiled from the US but still wanted by its government for exposing the deep state’s illegal spying activities, described Five Eyes as a “supranational intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries”, using as it does, the cover of ‘foreign’ intelligence services to spy on its own citizens. (Edward Snowden: Leaks that exposed US spy programme, BBC News, 17 January 2014)
Five Eyes is therefore a part of the Anglo-American imperialist states’ machinery – an outfit operating above the formal law of its participant nations, but expressing the real and determined interests and will of the ruling clique of finance capitalists of those nations in their bid to dominate their own working classes, to combat the interests of any rival nations, and to conquer markets, sources of raw materials and labour reserves across the globe; to exploit ruthlessly and for the extraction of maximum profit.
Given that post-Brexit Britain is distancing itself from the EU, that the US and Britain are increasingly identifying China as the major competitor and challenger to their global hegemony (to the great benefit of mankind, including the British working class, we note), and that Australia and New Zealand cannot be enlisted into Nato for obvious geographical reasons, the Five Eyes colonial and cold war intelligence network is being utilised as a platform from which to openly espouse a joint foreign policy amongst its members, and to pressurise and harangue China in particular.
Australia has been wholeheartedly drawn into the US’s security sphere. In addition to its participation in the illegal and unjust war in Afghanistan, with its accompanying special forces atrocities, the country has agreed to host a string of aggressive US army, air and naval bases.
“The US Department of Defence is … spending $305.9m on naval infrastructure in Darwin as it expands its presence in Australia, but it doesn’t want to say what it’s going to build.
“According to a drafted US congressional bill, the ABC discovered, $US211.5 is being put aside for ‘navy military construction’ in the Northern Territory capital, pending approval by US lawmakers.
“The same bill also mentions proposed ‘military constructions’ to be built predominately at points around the Pacific, including in Guam and Japan. The Darwin project is the second most expensive project in the bill, with the Guam proposal – strategically-positioned with Korea and Japan to its north and Taiwan to its west – coming in slightly higher at $327m.
“The Darwin proposal forms part of the US force posture initiatives, a concerted effort to build $2bn worth of defence-related infrastructure to strengthen its presence in northern Australia and ‘position both nations to better respond to crises in the region’, according to the Australian Department of Defence.” (The US military is planning a secretive new $305m naval expansion in Australia but no one wants to talk about it by Jack Derwin, Business Insider Australia, 30 July 2019)
Recently, it was announced that the Five Eyes group – to enhance its anti-China initiative – is hoping to enlist Japan into its ranks. This is an incredibly crass and offensive manoeuvre given Japan’s recent colonial history in China, replete with such atrocities as the Nanking massacre, an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Imperial Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing (Nanking), which was at that time, in 1937, the capital of China. Soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army murdered as many as 300,000 disarmed combatants and Chinese civilians, and perpetrated widespread rape and looting. (‘The forgotten holocaust’: 27 tragic photos from the Rape of Nanking by Mark Oliver, All That’s Interesting, 28 February 2019)
The deep state apparatuses of the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand apparently believe that Japan’s historic contempt for and imperial rapine of China, and its record of racist genocide committed against the Chinese people, places Japan in an excellent position to join a group that has the stated policy of staging coordinated attacks on China’s alleged ‘human rights abuses’.
China’s economic, cultural, scientific and political rise is unquestionably a product of its revolution, led by the Communist Party of China under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, which ended the 150-year period of its national humiliation, characterised by the dual burdens of semifeudal backwardness and semicolonial subjugation. This epic struggle, encompassing one quarter of the world’s population, culminated in the total victory of the Chinese communist forces and the People’s Liberation and Eighth Route armies.
Mao Zedong’s historic speech, proclaiming victory in September 1949, should be recalled and pondered by those seeking to understand China today:
“Fellow delegates, we are all convinced that our work will go down in the history of mankind, demonstrating that the Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments.
“For over a century, our forefathers never stopped waging unyielding struggles against domestic and foreign oppressors, including the revolution of 1911 led by Dr Sun Yat-sen, our great forerunner in the Chinese revolution. Our forefathers enjoined us to carry out their unfulfilled will, and we have acted accordingly.
“We have closed our ranks and defeated both domestic and foreign oppressors through the people’s war of liberation and the great people’s revolution, and now we are proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
“From now on, our nation will belong to the community of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world, and work courageously and industriously to foster its own civilisation and wellbeing, and at the same time to promote world peace and freedom.
“Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up. Our revolution has won the sympathy and acclaim of the people of all countries. We have friends all over the world.”
China’s proletarian dictatorship, or proletarian democracy if you prefer, allowed the country to transform its social, industrial, economic, cultural, scientific, health, demographic, diplomatic and military horizons as few nations in history have.
China’s life expectancy has doubled; it is the largest global economic power and the world’s industrial ‘workshop’; and moreover is becoming one of the world’s foremost scientific and cultural hubs.
The manner in which China has dealt with the coronavirus, minimising the deaths and economic impact of the pandemic, brushing aside hostile Anglo-American propaganda, and meeting it with technological solutions; solving its own crisis and simultaneously offering political and medical aid to the world; addressing all nations with a calm voice of diplomatic reason while mobilising all its resources to eradicate the virus domestically, to the great benefit of its people and economy, bears eloquent tribute to its moral and political ascendancy. (Coronavirus and the world economic depression of 2020, Lalkar, July 2020)
One need only compare the rise of China with the shocking situation of poverty, inequality and cultural, social, political, medical and scientific backwardness that endures in much of India to realise what a revolution is good for.
As China has become the world’s workshop and economic powerhouse, it is hardly surprising that she has become a significant trading partner with Australia and New Zealand, both relatively small economies and China’s near neighbours in the Pacific.
China has become New Zealand’s largest export market and trading partner. Likewise, it has become Australia’s largest export market – particularly for its key mining industry. In fact, a policy of political and military hostility to China is an act of great self-harm to the antipodean states, which are being asked to self-flagellate entirely in the interest of the ongoing global dominance of Anglo-American imperialism.
If there is any logic to this alliance whatsoever, it is historical and deeply racist – the relic of a bygone colonial era.
Despite this, with characteristic racist bluster, Australia has allowed itself to be flattered and cajoled into imagining itself as a regional ‘European’ power – in reality a tool of Anglo-American imperialism. Hence, notwithstanding the real economic damage it will do to itself, it has been outspoken in taking up the anti-China narrative.
Australian Department of Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo used the occasion of Anzac Day, 25 April 2021, ostensibly a memorial to the troops of New Zealand and Australia who died in WW1 and WW2, to deliver a profoundly bellicose message to China:
“In a world of perpetual tension and dread, the drums of war beat – sometimes faintly and distantly, and at other times more loudly and ever closer.
“Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war.”
These comments were amplified by Australian defence minister Peter Dutton, who chose the same occasion to raise the prospect of conflict between China and Taiwan: “Nobody wants to see conflict between China and Taiwan or anywhere else in the world, but I don’t think it should be discounted.” (Australian official warns staff of ‘drums of war’ as tensions rise in Asia Pacific, CNBC, 26 April 2021)
This has been followed in short order by a speech from Australian prime minister Scott Morrison reinforcing previous decisions made with the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump to increase its joint military aggression with the USA – framed as if this sabre-rattling was a defensive response:
“Australia is to upgrade military bases in its far north and expand joint drills with US forces after warnings about the ‘drums of war’ beating in the Pacific region.
“Prime minister Scott Morrison announced a plan on Wednesday [28 April] worth more than half a billion US dollars to revamp four military training facilities in the remote north over the next five years.
“It comes as one top government official this week warned that free nations ‘again hear’ the ‘drums of war’ in the region, while newly-installed defence minister Peter Dutton openly mused about the prospect of a war between China and Taiwan.
“The package of upgrades is more extensive and more costly than first conceived two years ago and would allow more joint drills with American forces, including US marines rotating through the northern port of Darwin.
“‘We will always do what is necessary to ensure Australia has the capability it needs to protect and defend its interests,’ Morrison said.” (Australian minister warns ‘the drums of war are beating’ as it pledges to upgrade military bases and expand drills with US forces to combat China by Adam Barnett, Daily Mail, 28 April 2021)
The Australian state government of Victoria agreed cooperative investment deals with China under the Belt and Road initiative in 2018, but came under sustained pressure to abandon them from both the USAand the Australian national government.
In 2020, “The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo said that communication channels could be severed if Victoria allowed China to fund telecommunications infrastructure in Australia.
“He said the US would ‘not take any risk to our telecommunications infrastructure, any risk to the national security elements of what we need to do with our Five Eyes partners’.
“‘We’re going to protect and preserve the security of those institutions, so I don’t know the nature of those projects precisely, but to the extent they have an adverse impact on our ability to protect telecommunications from our private citizens, or security networks for our defence and intelligence communities, we will simply disconnect, we will simply separate.’” (China’s Belt and Road initiative: what is it and why is Victoria under fire for its involvement? by Josh Taylor, The Guardian, 25 May 2021)
Australia’s cave-in to the USA was highlighted in April 2021, when “foreign affairs minister Marise Payne tore up the agreement in a move that had angered China and further soured already strained relations between the two nations.
“‘I consider these four arrangements to be inconsistent with Australia’s foreign policy or adverse to our foreign relations in line with the relevant test in Australia’s Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Act 2020,’ she said.”
The Chinese ambassador to Australia pointed out presciently: “We express our strong displeasure and resolute opposition to the Australian foreign minister’s announcement on 21 April to cancel the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation within the framework of the Belt and Road initiative and the related framework agreement between the Chinese side and government of Victoria.
“This is another unreasonable and provocative move taken by the Australian side against China. It further shows that the Australian government has no sincerity in improving China-Australia relations.
“It is bound to bring further damage to bilateral relations, and will only end up hurting itself.” (Chinese Embassy Spokesperson’s Remarks, Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Commonwealth of Australia)
New Zealand has taken a rather more sober approach. Recognising that it is a small country, with more sheep than people, and more overseas citizens than those living at home, and that China is not only a key economic partner but its major source of export revenue, it has taken the rather sensible step of distancing itself from the rabid declarations driven by Joe Biden’s administration in the USA and the hawkish but delusional China Research Group of Tory MPs in Britain.
Foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta said that New Zealand would “not invoke the Five Eyes as the first point of contact on messaging out on a range of issues that really exist outside the remit of Five Eyes”, signalling the country’s desire to chart its own relationship with its largest trading partner.
“She symbolised the China-New Zealand relationship as one between a ‘dragon and taniwha’, a serpent-like creature from Maori myth.
“‘I see the taniwha and the dragon as symbols of the strength of our particular customs, traditions and values, that aren’t always the same, but need to be maintained and respected,’ she said. ‘And on that virtue we have together developed the mature relationship we have today.’” (Five Eyes on China cut to four, The Times, op cit)
In a dramatic reversal of fortune, New Zealand prime minister Jacinta Arden is now being widely condemned by the Anglo-American imperialists and their media spokesmen, with Murdoch’s global Newscorp group prominent among her critics – all of whom are clearly enraged at the hole her administration has blown in the economic sanctions and propaganda ‘diplomacy’ emanating from the cosy imperialist club.
The following Telegraph excerpt is typical: “From the moment she entered office in 2017, the international coverage of Jacinda Ardern has been nothing short of slavering. Ardern is a female political leader at a time when sections of the press still talk about this like women politicians are unicorns. A year later she added to that advantage by giving birth while in office, which was reported on as though giving birth while holding down a job is unheard of.
“Coverage has continued in the same vein ever since, helped by the fact that her more important public statements are delivered with lashings of forced empathy. But those of us who are allergic to such bogus forms of communication and who judge people by their actions [!] rather than their capabilities at emoting are noticing that, increasingly, Ardern’s behaviour stinks.
“Last month her oh-so-progressive government made an unprecedented step. It refused to join a Five Eyes statement which was critical of the Chinese communist party. The Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network (the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is the world’s most successful and important intelligence-sharing partnership. In being a member of it, New Zealand is at an extraordinary advantage – an advantage that far outweighs the miniscule resources it actually puts into intelligence or other defence capabilities. [In other words: NZ was controlled by the information it was presented with and the line it must tow!]
“But the refusal was not an oversight by the Ardern government. Rather, it was a part of a disgraceful and pro-totalitarian political turn. Ardern’s foreign affairs minister Nanaia Mahuta said that New Zealand now has a preference for moving on from the Five Eyes alliance and looking for new ‘multilateral opportunities’.
“Except no such better opportunities exist for such a small and isolated power. What is going on is that sweet, lovely Jacinda Ardern and her government are in the process of seeking as much Chinese investment as possible to boost their economy, and doing everything that the CCP wants to ensure that the investment roars in.” (Ardern isn’t as lovely as she’d have you believe by Douglas Murray, 8 May 2021)
The very idea! That economics could lie at the bottom of a political decision! What a cry of impotent and hypocritical rage! But the sad author, one Douglas Murray, has not yet done venting his spleen – or earning his keep:
“Earlier this week, she gave a speech in which she tried to claw back some of her moral capital by insisting that she had raised questions about the CCP’s human rights record in private. And she said that she really was worried about how to ‘reconcile’ New Zealand and Chinese communist party attitudes towards human rights.
“Well here’s a tip. It can’t be done. You’re either in favour of forced labour camps, neocolonialism and forced abortions on women who are nine months pregnant, or you’re not. Ardern perhaps hopes that we’ll glide over these awkward facts. And the international press might well.
“On Wednesday [5 May], the New Zealand prime minister announced with wonderful timing that she and her partner have set a ‘summer wedding’ date. So yay. Sweet Ardern is back. Pity she sold her country.”
All of the crimes this rabid lapdog hurls against China are false – but they are in fact true of his masters, whether as the colonial settlers in Australia against the native inhabitants of that land, or by the European colonists in the Americas. Or, indeed, by the British imperialists throughout their colonies – in India, in Africa, and during the slave trade.
It is journalists of the Douglas Murray variety who have sold themselves as mercenaries to imperialism. And people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones!
Our own BBC, ever the faithful agent of British imperialism, has not been reticent in joining the propaganda offensive on the spurious question of alleged human rights abuse of the Chinese.
In this regard, and by way of an answer, we would invite our readers to watch the 15 April 2021 episode of Newsnight, in which the programme’s highly partisan presenter was taken down by her own invited guest from Columbia university, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. The latter was invited to discuss climate change, but then treated to an anti-China rant, which he courageously confronted.
“Professor Jeffrey D Sachs, a current serving environmental advisor to the United Nations, slammed the BBC for ignoring America’s human rights abuses during an interview about climate change on BBC’s Newsnight programme.
“As the BBC started with talking about China’s human rights abuses, Sachs said that the broadcaster’s framing of the interview was ‘not what he had expected’, and asked: ‘What about America’s human rights abuses?’
“He then cited examples, saying ‘The Iraq war, together with the UK, was completely illegal and under false pretences. The war in Syria, the war in Libya, the continued sanctions against civilian populations in Venezuela and Iran. Walking away from the Paris climate agreement for the last four years; unilateral trade actions that have been deemed illegal by the WTO.
“‘We have really serious human rights violations by the United States abroad … not to mention the continued, massive racism, white supremacism, and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of black African American and people of colour in the US,’ he added.
“‘I found the framing of [this debate] not what I expected – I thought we were going to talk about climate change, which we should,’ Sachs said.” (Jeffrey Sachs: What about America’s human rights abuses?, People’s Daily, 17 April 2021)
All of this shameless and hypocritical anti-China propaganda is not accidental. Rather, in the face of a global economic depression in the capitalist world, with rising unemployment and discontent, and plunging profitability for many capitalist enterprises, the chief imperialist powers are seeking to save their teetering system at the expense of the working class.
Further markets are needed to exploit for superprofits and to service the national debt, and these can only be had at the expense of cuts in services for the working class and intensified exploitation of less economically developed nations. The imperialists are stalking the globe in their mad desire to subjugate independent nations that have not yet been fully asset stripped and integrated into the imperialist system of debt slavery.
And, above all, the preparations are being made to challenge China and Russia – two great economic and military powers that stand in the way of the total domination of the Nato and Five Eyes powers. And it is this aim that the escalating psychological warfare evident in our media serves.
As Joti Brar, Communist vice-chair and deputy leader of the Workers party, tweeted back in March 2020:
“The coming crash will be blamed on #COVID19 altho it has been coming for 3yrs. #coronavirus deaths will be blamed on #China altho China did the most to stop it. Angry workers will be encouraged to blame China for the crimes of #capitalism and to support our rulers’ push for war.”
British workers want no part in our ruling class’s drive to war, since we will be the victims of that most unjust and unjustifiable war – a war, moreover, that would have devastating environmental consequences, besides entailing a huge loss of life, and that our ruling class is very likely to lose.
China is no longer the ‘sick man of Asia’ but a global powerhouse, which has both the right and the means to defend herself from our common enemy – the British and American ruling classes and their Five Eyes and Nato partners-in-crime.
In November, China condemned the Five Eyes network for criticising its suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for China’s foreign minister, said: “No matter if they have five eyes or ten eyes, as soon as they dare to harm China’s sovereignty, security or development interests, they should be careful lest their eyes be poked blind.”
China still has friends all over the world – and British workers must ensure that we speak out as friends of China, against the hostile intentions of our own parasitic and decadent ruling class, in our own interests, and those of the workers of all countries.
