Politically, Australia, and all other exploiter nations will do anything necessary to keep the world divided between rich and poor nations. War, invasion, coups, IMF debt traps, trade wars, embargoes, and sanctions: these are all tools used by the imperialist countries.
The following was presented on the panel, The Need for Anti-Imperialism in Australia, which took place on day one of Red Ant’s Peace and Liberation Conference in August 2022.
Australian foreign policy has always been determined by its membership within a small club of imperialist powers that dominate the world economy, as well as by its ‘junior’ status within this club.
While putting the interests of Australian capital at the forefront, it has had to do so from a position of relative weakness vis-a-vis the largest powers, especially the United States.
Although Australia is indeed a ‘junior partner’ of the larger imperialist powers, it remains a powerful and constant source of imperialist oppression over non-imperialist nations in Asia and the Pacific.
The Australian ruling class supported the New Order dictatorship in Indonesia (1965-1998) and the invasion and brutal occupation of Timor Leste; has been involved in many acts of imperialist aggression such as the invasion of Vietnam as well as interventions in the Middle East (including two invasions of Iraq) and Afghanistan; and plays an ongoing policing role and interference in the affairs of Pacific Ocean neighbours including Australia’s former colony Papua New Guinea.
These are all measures aimed at securing the stability of the imperialist system and the ability of the Australian ruling class to systematically extract super-profits from the mass-exploitation and misery of workers inside Global South countries.
China has ZERO foreign bases in the Pacific but that doesn’t stop a multi billion military campaign against ‘Chinese Expansionism.
‘Great Power Conflict’
A complicated world situation has now developed where both socialist and left-wing governments – mostly in Latin America – as well as capitalist governments outside the imperialist core – such as China and Russia – are facing increased hostility from the rich countries.
“After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region.”
Under Trump, Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” gained greater weight as the ‘war on terror’ was replaced with ‘great power conflict’ as official US policy.
The long-term interests of the Australian working class don’t lie in a few crumbs that might fall from the table of the imperialist bourgeois! …They lie in overthrowing this rotten imperialist system that keeps billions of working and oppressed people in chains!
Brian Morris’s work as an academic over many decades has taken in everything from how cultures name things to how they interact with nature, religion and the concept of self. Since the 1960s he has also been active as an anarchist and has taken a particular interest in social ecology.
Brian has written for many publications including Freedom and has published several books on figures such as Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin and Murray Bookchin, as well as taking on the topic of anarchism and ecology in a series of books such as Anthropology, Ecology, and Anarchism (PM Press) in 2014 and Visions of Freedom: Critical Writings on Ecology and Anarchism (Black Rose) in 2018.
Tell us about your early life and influences
I am at heart a working-class lad from the Black Country, with a fascination for the natural world. I have had a somewhat odd academic background. I failed my eleven-plus and left school at the age of 15 to work in an iron foundry in West Bromwich, like all my male forebears.
While working in the foundry I severely damaged my right hand in a machine. For that I was awarded £120 working men’s compensation – a lot of money in those days.
This enabled me to leave home aged 20, after undertaking my two-year National Service as a seaman-navigator in the RASC. In October 1957 I sailed from Amsterdam to Cape Town, and after hitch-hiking around South-Central Africa for about five months I eventually obtained employment as a tea planter in Malawi (then Nyasaland). I worked as a tea planter for more than seven years, eventually sitting and passing five GCE “O” levels at the age of 29
I then returned to the UK. Failing to get into university to study biology (ecology) – my cherished ambition – I trained as a teacher at Brighton College of Education in the late 1960s. It was there that I first engaged in socialist politics.
The main intellectual influences on my life were not philosophers, nor even academics, but popular naturalists such as Charles Darwin, Ernest Thompson Seton Gordon and W. H. Hudson. As a teenager I avidly read their nature writings.
Apart from Darwin, all have been forgotten. My intellectual outlook on life has therefore always been one that is realist, historical and ecological – a form of evolutionary naturalism.
How did you get into anarchist politics?
Although I have always been something of a rebel – even as a boy I flouted the law of trespass – I became an anarchist largely due to two events in my life.
The first was that my wife, Jacqui, sensing, perhaps, my rebellious spirit, gave me as a birthday present in October 1965 George Woodcock’s Anarchism. Although much derided these days – quite unfairly – this book opened my eyes to what to me then was a completely new political vision.
The second event was a meeting on comprehensive education that I attended in February 1966, at Conway Hall in London. It was to hear a lecture on “Education or Indoctrination” by Madeline Simms. After the lecture a lively debate ensued during which a rather large Bakunin-like working class bloke spoke out forcibly about the rights of children. He appeared to be quite a misfit. I overheard one person remark, rather disparagingly: “Oh he’s only an anarchist.”
Madrid (ESC). – The Executive that governs in Spain surprises us more and more. This summer, Spain led the purchase of Russian gas and became the country that entered the most capital in Moscow in the midst of the war in Ukraine.
According to a report compiled by the Economist, since the war broke out in Ukraine, purchases of Russian gas from Spain have doubled, from 2,174 gigawatt hours (GWh) to 5,317 GWh, according to the latest Enagas bulletin for the month of July .
The spike in gas purchases by Spain from Russia occurs in the months of June and July. According to sources from the Sánchez government, this increase responds to the adjustment of the annual volumes of the amounts agreed in the contracts.
The government first blamed the increase in purchases of Russian gas for the diversion to Spain of two LNG ships after the suspension, for maintenance, of four regasification plants in France. But the gas purchases continue for many months, according to official Enagas reports.. only surpassed by huge purchases of US fracking gas. see chart below..
Diarmuid Breatnach (Reading time main text: 6 mins.) Propaganda is employed in wars and finds its most widescale application through the mass media. The belligerents want their own populations to support their war effort and to have other states support them. IRISH REPORTING ON THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR The hierarchy of the Catholic Church infamously […]
A team of nine experts from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and other top universities has published paradigm-shifting research about the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines and why mandating vaccines for college students is unethical.
This 50-page study, which was published on The Social Science Research Network at the end of August, analyzed CDC and industry-sponsored data on vaccine adverse events, and concluded that mandates for COVID-19 boosters for young people may cause 18 to 98 actual serious adverse events for each COVID-19 infection-related hospitalization theoretically prevented.
The paper is co-authored by Dr. Stefan Baral, an epidemiology professor at Johns Hopkins University; surgeon Martin Adel Makary, M.D., a professor at Johns Hopkins known for his books exposing medical malfeasance, including “Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Heath Care”; and Dr. Vinayak Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist, who is a professor in the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, as well as the author of over 350 academic and peer-reviewed articles.
But among this team of high-profile international experts who authored this paper, perhaps the most notable is Salmaan Keshavjee, M.D., Ph.D., current Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Global Health Delivery, and professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Keshavjee has also worked extensively with Partners In Health, a Boston-based non-profit co-founded by the late Dr. Paul Farmer, on treating drug-resistant tuberculosis, according to his online biography.
Risking Disenrollment
As the study pointed out, students at universities in America, Canada, and Mexico are being told they must have a third dose of the vaccines against COVID-19 or be disenrolled. Unvaccinated high school students who are just starting college are also being told the COVID-19 vaccines are “mandatory” for attendance.
These mandates are widespread. There are currently 15 states which continue to honor philosophical (personal belief) exemptions, and 44 states and Washington, D.C. allow religious exemptions to vaccines. But even in these states, private universities are telling parents they will not accept state-recognized vaccine exemptions.
Based on personal interviews with some half a dozen families, The Epoch Times has learned that administrators at some colleges and universities are informing students that they have their own university-employed medical teams to scrutinize the medical exemptions submitted by students and signed by private doctors. These doctors, families are being told, will decide whether the health reasons given are medically valid.
5 Ethical Arguments Against Mandated Boosters
Though rarely reported on in the mainstream media, COVID-19 vaccine boosters have been generating a lot of controversy.
While some countries are quietly compensating people for devastating vaccine injuries, and other countries are limiting COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, the United States is now recommending children 12 and older get Pfizer-BioNTech’s Omicron-specific booster, and young adults over the age of 18 get Moderna’s updated shot.
Sep 12, 2022 9:52 AM
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