- by Hannah Middleton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2153
(Comrade Hannah Middleton inaugurated the Guardian’s Peace Notes column. As we prepare to commemorate her life and achievements, it seems appropriate to reprint these words taken from a 2022 speech to the CPUSA)
Defence Minister, Richard Marles, has gone so far as to say that we are not only working “inter-operatively” with the US military in numerous ways but we are now committed to “integration” of the ADF into US force structures.
Prime Minister Albanese has said “We will deepen our regional defence co-operation with close partners – including Japan, India, Singapore and others – to bolster our joint capabilities, shape our strategic environment and uphold the rules of the road.”
This is imperialist spin for encircle, contain, and defeat socialist China.
Australian governments are ignoring history and refusing to acknowledge that Western imperialist domination is ending. This geopolitical shift is characterised by, among other things, changes in trade. In 2000, over 80 per cent of the world’s countries traded more with the US than China. By 2020, seventy per cent had more trade with China.
The narrative built to hide US fear of China as a rival power challenging US imperialism’s regional hegemony is that China is an authoritarian state that is a military threat.
However, there has been no pattern of China moving outside its boundaries, other than in respect of territory, such as islands, which it has always insisted were its own.
Today US imperialism is fighting to maintain its domination of the Pacific, pouring millions of dollars into “aid,” funding the Peace Corp’s return, establishing new embassies across the Pacific and appointing the first US envoy to the Pacific Islands Forum.
After World War II, the US was so far in the lead that it could establish and run the global order. The US gave the orders. Gradually however, industrial powers recovered and decolonisation and the non-aligned movement grew.
US imperialism responded by beating all this back violently, using wars, assassinations, overturning governments, and more.
With Asia now the centre of global economic power, imperialism is working to retain its economic and political primacy, risking war – and even nuclear Armageddon.
This madness has its origin in the United States, whose ruling class is greatly threatened by the advances of the Chinese people which pose an existential threat to the advantages long enjoyed by Western corporations that have benefited from centuries of colonialism.
The aim of US imperialism’s foreign policy is to prevent any national power becoming a challenge. The US has defined China as its principal threat and is now working to instigate a war between Taiwan and China.
Recognising that war is the product of the anarchic and competitive character of the capitalist world order, we know that in order to end bloody imperialist wars we must overthrow capitalism.
This is an urgent task for as a declining imperial empire struggles viciously to retain its domination, we face a fight that can end “in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
In this situation we must confront this on a global scale. We must build the widest and strongest peace movement possible to win reforms that can save the planet and also contribute to the fight to replace capitalism by socialism.
We have to argue that countries buying more and more deadly weapons systems in an escalating arms race does not create peace or security. It has not worked in the past and it never will.
Human security is not based on escalating military spending and war games but on care for the planet and its inhabitants – a state which is impossible under capitalism.
It is time for us to insist that governments around the world redirect their massive war spending to serve humanity suffering from lack of food, water, and other human needs amid an expanding climate catastrophe.
