Above photo: An Australian soldier shoots dead an unarmed Afghan prisoner in cold-blood. One of the huge number of war crimes committed by the Australian military in Afghanistan.
Stand with Afghan Peoples and the Working Class of Australia – Support China’s Forthright Condemnation of SAS Atrocities!
The Australian Military is the Capitalist Bosses’ Military.
Not a Soldier, Not a Cent to this War Criminal Force!
- Oppose Every Intervention by the Australian Military
- The Australian Defence Force is Not Our Military – It is the Military of The Big End of Town Tycoons
- Working Class Masses and All the Oppressed in Australia Should Say: Thank You Red China for Calling Out the True Horror of the Australian Capitalist Regime’s War Crimes
- Growing Tensions Between Australia’s Capitalist Regime and the PRC
- Standing with Socialistic China is in the Interests of Australia’s Working-Class Masses
- The PRC Must Do Her Socialist Duty and Be More Consistent in Condemning the Australian Regime’s Atrocities
2 December 2020: Australia’s SAS special forces are on the move in Afghanistan. They run into two unarmed 14 year-old boys. The troops are suspicious of these boys’ allegiances. They don’t like the look of these kids. So Australia’s elite soldiers simply slit the throats of these children! In order to “clean up the mess,” the other troops bag the bodies of the murdered children and throw them into a river. This is just one of a huge number of war crimes committed by the Australian military in Afghanistan that whistleblowers have alleged. The whistleblowers have provided extremely compelling evidence of most of these atrocities. They have produced video footage of SAS troops shooting in cold blood civilians and unarmed prisoners. They also described how Australian forces would carry with them “throwdowns” (weapons, grenades, radios) in order to plant on the bodies of civilians that they murdered so that they could pass off their victims as combatants killed in conflict.
As a result of these widespread revelations of SAS atrocities in Afghanistan, the Australian regime was compelled to commission its own reports in order “to be seen to be” taking the issue seriously. The first, by military sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, described how Australian special forces would land by helicopter in an Afghan village, then open fire on men, women and children as they ran away. Then they would fabricate an excuse for their massacre – such as that the people were running away to grab weapons! Next, the troops would cordon off the village and drag the local men and boys to “guest houses” where they would be “tied up and tortured by special forces, sometimes for days.” When the Australian troops departed “the men and boys would be found dead: shot in the head or blindfolded and with throats slit.” As one solider told Crompvoets: “Guys just had this blood lust. Psychos. Absolute psychos. And we bred them.”
Finally, two weeks ago, a detailed report by Major General Justice Paul Brereton was released. It found that at least 39 Afghan civilians or unarmed prisoners had been “unlawfully killed” by Australian soldiers. Twenty-five soldiers were identified as perpetrators – some still serving in the military. However, this is just the tip of a massive iceberg. In addition to those incidents which the report outlines have a highly credible basis, the report details an even larger number of additional crimes that it describes as “unsubstantiated.” However, in most cases this is not actually because these war crimes were not committed but because of the culture of cover up. Moreover, given the cover-up culture and the fact that many Australian soldiers who witnessed crimes share the same despicable racism and cruelty as their fellow troops who perpetrated them, many of the atrocities may never come to light. The real number of Afghan civilians, peasants and unarmed prisoners that the Australian troops murdered is likely to be in the hundreds. And that is not even including the much larger number of civilians that they killed through indiscriminate airstrikes and artillery fire as part of the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan. The number of SAS troops who directly committed or abetted war crimes is also likely to be well over a hundred. Moreover, the number of troops complicit in these atrocities through silence and cover up is many, many times that number. In short, a very large proportion of the SAS was directly or indirectly involved in horrific racist war crimes against the people of Afghanistan.
The Brereton report was never aimed at honestly showing the Australian population the true horror of the military’s actions. Indeed, huge chunks of the report were blacked out when the public version was released. This includes entire reports on several of the war crimes, including one that the report describes as “possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history” …. but which the public is not allowed to know about! This blatant censorship is aimed at moderating anger at the Australian military’s heinous crimes. Indeed, the whole point of the report was to put the disgusting atrocities in a context that dishonestly claims that the military is “overwhelmingly” dominated by troops that “performed skillfully, effectively and courageously” and where higher military officers had little responsibility for the war crimes. Although Brereton may well be correct in asserting that many of the war crimes were directly committed by SAS patrol commanders his claim that there is “no evidence that there was knowledge of, or reckless indifference to the commission of war crimes, on the part of commanders at troop/platoon, squadron/company or Task Force Headquarters level, let alone at higher levels …” is completely unbelievable. Given how many details of the atrocities leaked out into wider society, it is bleedingly obvious that higher military officers knew full well what their sergeants and corporals were perpetrating. Moreover, powerful evidence has emerged that top officers participated directly in some of the heinous crimes. Photos show a very senior officer insultingly sculling beer from a prosthetic leg illegally seized as a war trophy from a slain suspected opposition fighter. The fact is that the Brereton Report is a whitewash of Australia’s senior officers and the defence top brass – and that is what it was always designed to be! It recalls the senior Nazi leaders who after their removal from power claimed that they were not aware of the Holocaust being directly administered by their concentration camp guards!
Yet despite Brereton’s best efforts, the crimes committed by the SAS are so horrendous and so numerous that objective viewers reading his findings would nevertheless conclude that the Australian military is a war criminal-infested force. So no sooner had the report been issued, Australian politicians, the mainstream media and military leaders worked to downplay the significance of its findings. It is certainly fair to say that prime minister Scott Morrison initially described the report as “disturbing” and “distressing.” He had to. In order to be seen to be concerned about war crimes he had to say something but only just enough to acknowledge them. But he and the rest of the capitalist rulers skillfully worked to turn the focus away from the despicable crimes and the awful suffering of the Afghan victims. Morrison dishonestly claimed that the crimes were only committed by a “small number” of troops and emphasised the need to respect veterans and provide them with “absolute support.” Within days, uplifted by a militarist campaign by the Murdoch media, other right-wing forces, hawkish Labor MP Luke Gosling and veterans groups, Morrison pressured Australian Defence Force chief, Angus Campbell, to retreat from his initial firm promise to implement the Brereton report recommendation to strip the special forces of a group merit award. Somehow the SAS troops had become the victims in this saga who needed to be defended! Meanwhile, regime officials showed no genuine anger at the racist murder and torture committed by the Australian military. Instead, Morrison and Co. quickly moved to using “even-handed” terms to describe the revelations, insisting that this “is a very sensitive issue, we’ve got to be careful how we handle it.” The mainstream media have done their best to, in turn, downplay these horrors, one media commentator on ABC TV’s The Drum program even describing the horrific war crimes as mere misbehaviour by some troops.
However, all the Australian regime’s spin was cut to pieces when China’s foreign affairs spokesman, Zhao Lijian, posted a clearly computer-manipulated digital artwork on his personal twitter account that depicted an Australian solider with a knife to the throat of an Afghan child. The Chinese diplomat’s tweet accompanying the image stated: “Shocked by the murder of Afghan civilians and prisoners by Australian soldiers. We strongly condemn such acts, & call for holding them accountable.” Zhao Lijian’s incisive tweet cut straight to the significance of what the Australian military was doing in Afghanistan: this isn’t a “very hard issue” requiring a “balanced” response as the Australian ruling class was trying to sell us, no, their military is murdering children and other civilians in cold blood and needed to be unreservedly condemned for these ghastly crimes! Shocked by this plain-speaking exposure of the true horror of their crimes, the entire Australian ruling class from the right-wing government, to the ALP Opposition to the Greens screamed in unison that the tweet and its accompanying artwork were “offensive.” They were backed by all their media too, from the government-owned ABC to the Murdoch media to the outlets owned by the Nine group – including Channel 9, the Sydney Morning Herald and 2GB.
Morrison not only thundered that the Chinese government should apologise but desperately contacted Twitter in a failed attempt to have Zhao Lijian’s tweet taken down. The Liberal-National parties, which had championed the “right” of white supremacists to “free speech” by seeking to water down the section of the Racial Discrimination Act that outlaws racist insults, is showing what they really think of “free speech”. They want people to have the “right” to insult black, brown and yellow-skinned people but don’t want anyone to have the right to call out the true horror of the Australian regime’s racist atrocities.
Australian regime forces have been torturing and murdering children, farmers and unarmed prisoners in cold blood but as far as the Morrison government, the ALP, the Greens and the mainstream media are concerned … it is China that should apologise! The ruling class’ denunciations of the Chinese official’s tweet has exposed the complete insincerity of their claim to be trying to clean up their defence forces. Australia’s capitalist ruling class are far, far, more angry about – and determined to censor – criticism of their military’s war crimes than they are about the horrendous war crimes themselves. This is captured in a follow-up, still more brilliant, political cartoon by artist, Wuheqilin. In this work, the young Chinese artist depicts Australian troops shooting dead Afghan civilians with the entire Western media ignoring these atrocities and instead pointing their cameras at a young Chinese artist painting the horror of the bloody crimes; while Scott Morrison, holding an Australian flag draped over murdered Afghan people, screams at the artist, “apologize!!”
In responding to the Chinese official’s tweet, the ruling class claimed that the image he tweeted was “fake” because it was not a real photo of an Australian solider with a knife to a child. But for something to be “fake” it has to be an attempt to pass itself off as something else. The popular Chinese artist who produced the image, Wuheqilin, was never trying to impute that he was using a real image. This was simply a political cartoon, a powerful and unnerving artwork. The artist never tried to pretend otherwise. The Australian regime’s fraudulent denunciation of the cartoon/meme as a “fake” was nothing other than a way of diverting from the substance of the work, which was to highlight the horrific nature of the Australian military’s actions and the fraudulent character of its claim to have been seeking “to bring peace” to the people of Afghanistan. If there are indeed real photos of Australian soldiers with knives to the throats of Afghan children – or that depict even worse atrocities – then these have not yet surfaced though the possibility that they may in the future cannot be discounted and if the Australian government is aware of their existence then they ought to admit to it. Certainly, the Australian regime’s nervous and somewhat nonsensical obsession with labelling a work of art as “fake” and “doctored” may suggest that defence minister Reynolds et al have something to hide.
All this did not stop Australia’s allies from springing to their defense. The U.S., Britain, France, Canada and Jacinda Adern’s New Zealand all joined in denouncing the Chinese official’s tweet. Notably, all the regimes seeking to squash unreserved condemnation of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan had themselves participated in the brutal occupation of Afghanistan – an operation that saw racist-imbued callousness cause these regimes to slaughter tens of thousands of Afghan people in “mistaken” airstrikes on wedding parties, hospitals and villages. The outrage of Australia’s capitalist rulers and their allies against the calling out of Australian military atrocities in Afghanistan is a case of: “war criminal regimes of the world unite!”
Oppose Every Intervention by the Australian Military
Australian troops were first sent to Afghanistan by the Howard Coalition government in 2001. Successive Labor and Liberal governments continued Australia’s participation in the Afghan war. The Australian troops were deployed in order to impose U.S. and NATO domination of the very distant land of Afghanistan and of the Western Asian region more broadly. In the process, they were supporting one Western-backed, reactionary male-chauvinist Afghan force against a rival reactionary, misogynist force – that was at the time not conforming to the predatory designs of the U.S. and West European imperialists – both of whom had previously been massively armed and funded by the U.S. and its allies against the leftist, Soviet-backed, pro-women’s rights government that had administered Afghanistan from 1978 to 1992. Just like their NATO and New Zealand allies, the Australian military action in Afghanistan had absolutely nothing to do with protecting the safety of their own country’s people … or any other people for that matter. So how were the troops to be motivated to participate in such a war? And how could the troops themselves justify in their own heads killing people from rival forces? In the end, the motivation given to the troops and given by the troops to themselves was largely racism. This included both the “respectable” white supremacist mantra that white men are “burdened” by the need to bring “civilization” and “Western values” to the dark-skinned peoples of the world and the more extreme racist notion that their Afghan opponents are savage, sub-humans. Moreover, while many soldiers may have initially been relatively innocent types driven into a cruel, racist outlook by the logic of the imperialist interventions that they were participating in and having to justify this to themselves, in other cases, already diseased racist elements volunteered because they knew that joining the Australian military gave them an opportunity to kill dark-skinned people with impunity. Little wonder then that, as a 2007 photo proved, Australian troops flew the fanatically racist Nazi flag during patrol on at least one of their army vehicles deployed in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, other Australian troops were seen in a 2012 photo brandishing the racist Confederate flag – the flag that glorified the enslavement of black people in the U.S. Given such an embrace of extreme racist “culture” it is little wonder that many troops went on to commit such despicable racist crimes likes slitting the throats of unarmed children and using civilians for live-fire target practice.
Yet these war crimes in Afghanistan are hardly an aberration. Throughout its history, Australian military forces have perpetrated the most hideous atrocities imaginable. In December 1918, Australian Light Horse Brigades and New Zealand mounted troops still stationed in the Middle East at the end of World War 1 responded to the death of a NZ soldier in a clash with a Palestinian man by bayoneting, shooting and beating the men in the Palestinian village of Surafend. They then burnt the village to the ground. In all the ANZAC forces massacred some 100 to 150 people. Not a single ANZAC soldier received any punishment for this hideous massacre.
Such war crimes inevitably flow from the very essence of the Australian military. The military serves a capitalist class in Australia who hold all the levers of political power. This class – the owners of the banks, industries, mines, transportation, communications infrastructure and major service outlets – makes their huge profits from the exploitation of workers’ labour. But in the stage of advanced capitalism, this capitalist class in the wealthier countries like Australia are not able to stay afloat by only ripping off their own workers. They must necessarily also seek out abroad new sources of labour to exploit, new treasures of raw materials to loot and new markets to dominate. However, such exploitation can only be guaranteed through the use and threatened use of military force. That is the primary reason for the existence of the Australian defence forces and Australia’s overseas intelligence agencies like ASIS. For example, through two separate interventions in East Timor, the Australian military were deployed to ensure that the political superstructure in that country was molded into one that facilitated the looting of Timor’s energy resources by Australian-owned corporations. During their second 2006 intervention, the Australian forces used their dominance of military power to help orchestrate a coup against then prime minister, Mari Alkatiri. They had Alkatiri removed because he was too insistent that East Timor receive a greater share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea that was being plundered by Australian corporations, Woodside Petroluem and BHP. Two years earlier, ASIS spies planted listening devices in the building containing Alkatiri’s office in order to unfairly give the Australian regime the upper hand in negotiations with East Timor over the Timor Sea resources.
To help guarantee its marauding around the South Pacific and adjacent Asian region, the Australian ruling class needs the backing of an even more powerful imperialist bully. That bigger bully is the United States. That is why the Australian ruling class sends its military to participate in U.S.-led wars. It wants its godfather to remain all powerful so that this almighty power will be able to back its own stampeding within this region.
Many left-wing groups reduce the problem of Australian militarism to the fact that governments here have chosen to join U.S.-led wars. The implication behind this notion is that if only Australia was “freed” from its alliance with the U.S., its military would not wage reactionary wars and would not commit war crimes either. Certainly, the U.S.-Australia alliance should be opposed. But this is only because the alliance makes both the U.S. superpower and its junior Australian imperialist partner stronger. Australian rulers showing too little independence from the United States is however not the fundamental problem. Australia’s ruling class choose to follow behind the U.S. only because that helps guarantee their own imperialist looting closer to home. It is not that the U.S. is corrupting an otherwise noble Australian military. Let’s remember that even the murderous U.S. military found the Australian troops in Afghanistan especially brutal and racist. And that’s really saying something! For example, American marines were shocked when Australia’s SAS troops murdered a bound prisoner in 2012 after he would not fit into an American helicopter that came to pick up prisoners captured by Australian troops. Moreover, the Australian military’s participation in Australian-led wars has been just as reactionary and murderous as its involvement in distant “U.S. wars.” Take, for example, the Australian-ordered war against the Bougainville independence movement. The people of Bougainville had risen up in late 1988 against the arrogant destruction of their land and the despicable refusal to pay any meaningful compensation by Australian-owned mining giant CRA (which was later merged with a British firm to form Rio Tinto). So, the Australian regime – then led by Labor’s Bob Hawke – pressured its PNG neocolony to unleash war against the people of Bougainville. The Australian regime supplied PNG with arms, logistics and intelligence and completely led the war through Australian military planners and advisers and “ex”-SAS “mercenaries” who flew Australian-supplied Iroquois helicopters. Nearly 20,000 people in Bougainville were killed in the war and in the brutal blockade of the island imposed with Australian naval support and Australian-supplied patrol boats and aircraft. Of all the horrific atrocities committed in this war the worst were the ones unleashed by the Australian and New Zealand pilots flying the helicopter gunships. They indiscriminately strafed villagers with machine gunfire massacring countless numbers in the process.
That is why we oppose not only Australian participation in “U.S. wars” but equally oppose Australian-led military interventions too. We say: Australian military, police and spies get out of the South Pacific and East Asia! Australian troops get out of Afghanistan and the Middle East! Defend Afghan Peoples Against U.S. and Australian imperialism! We understand that for the capitalists of developed countries like Australia, engaging in imperialist super-exploitation of the poorer countries is not a choice but a necessity driven by the very nature of the capitalist system. Therefore, every intervention abroad by Australian regime forces will necessarily be driven by an imperialist aim and should be opposed regardless of how the ruling class tries to sell it.
The Australian Defence Force is Not Our Military –
It is the Military of the Big End of Town Tycoons
In response to China calling out the full horror of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, the Australian ruling class have stoked base nationalism. “How dare China attack our military and our troops” is their message. However, the Australian military does not serve the interests of the overwhelming majority of this country’s people – it only serves the wealthy exploiting class who make up just 5 to 10% of this country’s population. This has always been the case. Following the 1788 colonial invasion, armed state forces and other “law enforcement” institutions were brought over from Britain or established here for two purposes. Firstly, they were to murderously dispossess Aboriginal people from their land and to then defend this colonial theft. Secondly, they were to enforce the exploitation of hired labour – originally built upon the brutal system of convict labour – by wealthy big property owners. To this day these fundamental, essentially intertwined purposes of maintaining a massive system of labour exploitation on a basis of a continent-wide, genocidal-minded, institutionalised and ongoing theft of land and resources have remained the basic raison d’être of the armed and police forces of Australia.
Every time that Australia’s armed state forces kill Aboriginal people or attack striking workers on a picket line or repress left wing social protests, the personnel making up these state institutions become more conscious of their purpose and more hardened to carry out their tasks in the service of the rich, labour-exploiting class. Moreover, each deed that the state forces commit against working class and Aboriginal people becomes part of the tradition and culture of their institutions. This pro-capitalist and racist culture is passed on from one generation of police, troops, prison guards, magistrates, judges, spies, diplomats and top bureaucrats to the next regardless of which political party may be in office. The culture and values of Australia’s bureaucratic and military personnel is, of course, supplemented by the contemporary ideological campaigns of the capitalist rulers. For example, it is undoubted that Australian troops murdering Muslim people in Afghanistan were influenced by all the Islamophobia spread by the ruling class and their media over the last two decades from the Tampa crisis, the so-called Children Overboard affair and on and on.
The subordination of state enforcement institutions to the capitalist class is reinforced continuously. The extreme wealth of the capitalists gives them a huge influence over society – including the ability to make all state institutions do their bidding. In the case of the Australian military, the threads tying the defence forces to the capitalists pass through the officers that lead the military. As highly paid and feted-by-society elements, higher up military officers are invited to the same official and semi-official events as corporate bigwigs – not to mention the same high-society functions. At all these events, the military top brass develops organic ties with the capitalist tycoons – ties that are reinforced by friendship between their respective children at the exclusive private schools that they send their children to and possibly later through marriage between their sons and daughters. To all these personal connections between corporate high fliers and higher-ranking military officers are added strong economic links. As highly paid personnel, upper military officers are able to hold stakes in the same companies as rich capitalists do, which binds the two layers together. Moreover, staking out lucrative careers for themselves for when they retire from the military, officers are compelled to grovel to their contacts within the corporate elite – since it is that class which controls the economy and hence determines who gets hired for what roles.
Although the Australian military’s main role is to enforce capitalist interests abroad, it is also unleashed at home whenever the ruling class really needs it. Most recently, the SAS was deployed to hijack refugee boats on the high seas and prevent desperate immigrants from coming to Australia. Indeed, the current head of the military, Angus Campbell, made his name as the first head of this despicable operation. The operation was part of the capitalist rulers’ campaign to create hostility towards refugees and non-white migrants as a way of diverting the masses away from blaming the ruling class for their insecure economic position. Earlier in 1989, during the reign of the Hawke-Keating Labor government, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) flew planes in a massive scabbing operation to smash a hard-fought airline pilots strike. Forty years earlier, the Chifley Labor government deployed the army against a weeks-long strike by tens of thousands of NSW coal mine workers. Thousands of armed troops entered the mine fields and worked as scab labour. The military succeeded in smashing the workers’ strike and allowing the regime to imprison eight workers’ leaders. In the following years, the military was also deployed several times against union struggles by waterside workers and seamen. Clearly, the Australian military is far from being the protector of the working class. Instead, it is one of the key weapons that the capitalist exploiting class uses to suppress the exploited masses.
The Working Class and Oppressed of Australia Should Say: Thank You Red China
for Calling Out the True Horror of the Australian Capitalist Regime’s War Crimes
The anti-working class essence of the Australian military exists despite the ranks of the regular, non-special forces, troops being made up in fair part by people from working class backgrounds looking for a secure source of income. In this the Australian military is little different to the police. The police in Australia enlist working class and lumpen proletariat elements into a force that is used to suppress the working class, Aboriginal people and other oppressed layers of society. It is true that in a revolutionary situation, a conscript army can split when called on to fire upon the rebelling masses, with the rank and file troops coming over to the side of the insurgent toiling classes. However, Australia’s SAS troops are anything but rank and file conscripted troops. They are an elite, very well paid, highly-feted by official society, volunteer force. Moreover, the Australian military as a whole is a relatively small and specialized volunteer force. Thus, if the Australian military retains this character, we cannot expect even regular troops to play the same role as Russian conscripts did in supporting the October 1917 workers revolution. Nevertheless, there is still a class division between well-paid officers and rank-and-file troops within the non-special forces portion of the Australian military. Thus, the possibility of this part of the military splitting when called on by the ruling class to fire upon insurgent workers should certainly not be ruled out. However, regardless of whether rank and file troops may mutiny in the future in the course of a workers revolution, the Australian military remains today an instrument for enforcing the exploitation of workers at home and for enforcing imperialist plunder abroad. It is a force serving the capitalist exploiting class – just as the Russian conscript army was prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Even when the Australian military is not being unleashed at home, militarism, glorification of the ANZACs and nationalist support for the military is used to deceive the masses into supporting the Australian capitalist state that the military forms a key component of – the very state whose cops, courts and bureaucracy are used every day to attack workers struggles, intimidate progressive protest movements, harass the homeless and attack Aboriginal people and other persecuted racial groups. Therefore, politically aware working class people and all conscious layers of the oppressed should welcome any undermining of the credibility of the military and other Australian state enforcement institutions. We should be cheering the fact that the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has cut through the Australian regime’s spin and exposed the true horror of its military’s war crimes. True, initially, it was merely a lower level PRC official who tweeted an incisive political cartoon. However, the fact that the PRC has rebuffed the Morrison government’s demands that he apologise and has instead re-asserted his condemnation of the Australian military’s war crimes is indeed powerful. However, the progressive substance of the PRC’s stance will only make a difference if we stop Australia’s ruling elite from drowning the issue in nationalist bluster. That means that those who do understand the correctness of China’s stance – and who can see through the complete dishonesty of the Australian capitalist rulers’ response to that stance – should be very publicly supporting China’s condemnation of SAS war crimes. Let’s have the courage to defy the ruling class consensus! Let’s fight to oppose every person and every cent going into Australia’s anti-working class military!
Growing Tensions Between Australia’s Capitalist Regime and the PRC
Part of the reason why the Australian ruling elite reacted so furiously to Zhao Lijian’s tweet was because he happens to be a PRC official. Relations between Australia’s capitalist regime and the socialistic PRC have been on a downward spiral over the last few years and have absolutely plummeted in the course of 2020. Over the last 16 months, Australia’s ASIO secret police have undertaken threatening interrogations of Chinese international students residing here simply because they have had the temerity to express their political sympathy for Red China. ASIO and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) have also carried out heavy-handed raids on Chinese journalists working here. Then, after the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Australian regime was at the very forefront of a despicable imperialist campaign to blame China for the pandemic. The Morrison government, backed by the ALP, proposed not a genuine, independent inquiry focused on how countries responded to the pandemic once the virus made its initial spread (new viruses have always been impossible to stop at their immediate source) but, instead, a witch-hunt obsessed with the academic issue of the origin of the virus for which they had already pronounced China “guilty.” The extremely hawkish foreign minister, Marise Payne, even called for weapons inspector-style moves to accompany the “investigation.” Given that the use of weapons inspectors was the prelude to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, this raised the spectre of Western military action against China! Meanwhile, Australian war ships have been sent thousands of kilometres from these shores to join U.S.-led actions in the South China Sea aimed at intimidating the PRC in her own neighbourhood. Then, five months ago, in a move squarely aimed at China, Morrison announced a massive $270 billion defence expansion plan that will see the military acquire long-range hypersonic missiles. Understandably unhappy at all these provocations, China has responded by starting to place restrictions on lucrative Australian exports to China.
A major method that the Australian regime uses to “justify” their hostility to China is to attack the PRC over supposed “human rights abuses.” Therefore, they went totally apoplectic when a Chinese official made that tweet that points people to the truth that their own human rights record is actually far worse that any problems in China. Mouthpieces for the Australian ruling class have responded by claiming that in contrast to the PRC at least Australia is being “transparent” about its problems and “taking steps” to address them. What a load of rubbish! Many of the war crimes identified were known within the military establishment for a very long time. Indeed, some allegations that the Brereton Report admits are credible go back as far as 14 years! Yet, to date, not a single soldier has been charged. Indeed, many of those who have murdered Afghan civilians and prisoners are still serving in the military – including some high-ranking officers. Moreover, the only reason that these crimes have been even partially made public is because of the efforts of whistleblowers. And the Australian regime did everything possible to thwart these courageous truth tellers. The regime arrested the key whistleblower, David McBride, and hit this former military lawyer with charges that could see him imprisoned for 50 years simply because he dared to give the media evidence of some of the war crimes. Meanwhile, even the tame government-funded media outlet, the ABC, was raided by the AFP for daring to broadcast McBride’s evidence. And let’s not forget that successive governments have been complicit in Britain’s persecution of Julian Assange – and in U.S. plans to extradite him to face life imprisonment – precisely because Assange published details of the horrific war crimes committed by U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There is another more fundamental problem with the line spun by Australian regime apologists that “at least we are addressing our problems whereas China is refusing to deal with its human rights abuses.” And that is that while the atrocities committed by the Australian regime are all too real, almost all its accusations against China over supposed “human rights abuses” are false. This is especially the case with their claim that China is “persecuting its Muslim Uyghur population” in north-western China’s Xinjiang province. Now, there has been an anti-communist movement based on the Uyghur population waging terror attacks on civilians. Heavily funded by the U.S. regime, the movement is led by Uyghur billionaire capitalist, Rebiya Kadeer. Kadeer had once been China’s richest woman but is now in exile in the U.S. after the socialistic PRC tried to pressure her – as they do to other capitalists – to give more back to society. The capitalist and pro-capitalist Uyghurs have appealed to religious extremism to build support for their campaign against the PRC and the Uyghur-led, socialistic provincial government that administers the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In July 2009 riots, right-wing mobs from their movement stabbed and hacked to death some 150 non-Uyghur civilians – not only Han Chinese but also members of another Muslim minority, the Hui.
The PRC responded to all these attacks by cracking down on the hardened terrorists, while adopting a humane strategy towards those on the fringes of the anti-PRC, religious fundamentalist movement. Thus, people who had made minor donations to the terrorist groups or assisted them with online propaganda – equivalent people who in Australia would find themselves being thrown into Goulburn Supermax prison for lengthy periods – were instead given a chance to rehabilitate by being sent to vocational boarding schools. There they would be taught the values and principles of the PRC’s socialistic system and would be given technical training. Western media assertions that there are over a million Uyghurs “detained” in these schools are completely ridiculous. In reality, just a tiny proportion of the Uyghur population went to these boarding schools. The program has proved successful with most attendees having now graduated and been assisted in finding meaningful jobs. However, the anti-communist movement was defeated largely through other means. And this actually has to do with correcting a problem that the PRC leadership brought upon itself. For rightist, pro-market reforms in China in the 1980s and 1990s caused an increase in the income disparities between people living in the hospitable coastal environments in the East and South of China and those in geographically harsher, more remote regions like Xinjiang. Moreover, even within Xinjiang, big differences in income arose between the capital Urumqi, which has a Han Chinese majority, and the southwestern part of Xinjiang which has a harsh, cold desert climate and is where the Uyghur people have traditionally lived. These disparities naturally fuelled the growth of ethnic tensions. However, later the PRC addressed the issue by increasing the level of socialist planning. State-owned enterprises from wealthier regions were paired with poorer cities and towns in southwestern Xinjiang and made responsible for providing jobs, developing industries and uplifting people from poverty. As a result, unemployment and poverty in Xinjiang has fallen dramatically and income disparities have been reduced. Consequently, support for the anti-communist, religious fundamentalist groups has plummeted.
Some problems remain. There is a degree of Han Chinese chauvinism within China that leads to paternalist attitudes towards minority communities among some people. But to put that in perspective, any Han Chinese chauvinism in China is hundreds of times less intense than the white supremacist racism that currently infects Australia. Certainly, members of China’s minority groups are not being murdered in state custody by police and prison guards left, right and centre as is happening to Aboriginal people in Australia. Moreover, a Muslim woman from the Uyghur or other minority community can safely walk the streets of China and know that she is not going to be violently attacked because of her religion if she happens to wear the traditional Islamic headscarf. This is unlike Muslim women in Australia, hundreds of whom have been assaulted by racist rednecks. It would be unthinkable too in China for a horde of 10,000 screaming racists from the majority ethnic group to violently set upon ethnic minorities the way that white supremacists did at Cronulla Beach in December 2005. Furthermore, it is unheard of for senior Communist Party of China politicians to insult or whip up hatred against minority communities, the way that former prime minister Tony Abbott insulted Aboriginal people by saying that there was nothing here before the British arrived or the way that Peter Dutton has demonised Lebanese Muslims and African people or the way that former NSW ALP leader Michael Daley has incited hostility to Asian migrants. Therefore, it is absolutely disgusting for the Australian ruling class to attack the PRC over her treatment of her Uyghur population. Let’s not forget that it was only last year that an Australian white supremacist terrorist murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch after he was nurtured for years in the racist environment that capitalist rule has created in Australia – where the likes of government MPs Andrew Hastie and George Christensen enthusiastically participate in white supremacist, Nazi-infested rallies, where media “report” crime events in a manner that associates people of colour with crime and where both major parties use anti-refugee and protectionist appeals to fuel divisive nationalism.
Standing with Socialistic China is in the Interests of Australia’s Working Class
So why are members of Australia’s capitalist ruling class so hostile to the PRC even though their own exports to China generate them such incredible wealth? Some have incorrectly put it down to Australia’s rulers being pressured to take such a stance by their U.S. senior partners. However, in reality, Australia’s ruling elite is merely hostile to the PRC for the very same reason that the U.S. rulers are. And that reason is that these capitalists cannot tolerate the fact that the world’s most populous country is a socialistic state in which public ownership plays the dominant role and where the working class – in an imperfect and tenuous way to be sure – holds state power. The hostility between the capitalist rulers of the U.S, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, New Zealand etc on the one hand and the PRC workers state on the other is merely the manifestation on the global scale of the irreconcilable conflict at the enterprise level between the capitalist exploiters of hired labour and their workers. It’s actually that simple!
Indeed, if one looks back over the history of the Australian military since World War II, we see that most of their biggest military campaigns – from their role in supporting the U.S. and capitalist South Korea against socialistic North Korea and China during the 1950-53 Korean War to their intervention in Malaya (now Malaysia) against the brave communist guerilla movement there to their war-crime-ridden participation in the Vietnam War against the heroic, communist-led Vietnamese workers and peasants – have been against socialistic states or revolutionary movements seeking to achieve socialistic states. Today, the Australian regime’s rapid military buildup is aimed squarely at the socialistic PRC and her North Korean ally. Indeed, the regime’s attempt “to be seen to be” addressing its military’s brutal crimes is aimed at restoring the military’s credibility in order to make it a more effective force in its fight against these workers states.
The continued existence of socialistic rule in China presents several problems for the imperialist powers. For one, the PRC, as she grows in strength, is increasingly developing mutually beneficial relations with countries in the developing world – relations that are quite unlike the exploitative manner in which the Western capitalist regimes “relate” to these countries. This is enabling countries like PNG, East Timor, Fiji and Vanuatu to gain greater independence from the Australian company bosses who have for decades raped and pillaged them. Not surprisingly, Australia’s capitalist rulers are furious about this trend.
Moreover, Australia’s capitalists calculate that as much as they are earning from lucrative exports to China right now, they could gain even greater profits if socialistic rule in China were to be destroyed and they were therefore able to acquire the “freedom” to exploit Chinese workers the way that they and their fellow Western imperialists exploit workers in the likes of Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Thailand and Bangladesh. Moreover, with China continuing to grow in strength under socialistic rule, the imperial ruling classes are worried that this rise of a socialistic power will “corrupt” their own masses and make their own working classes start to look more positively at socialism as an alternative. The capitalist rulers in Australia know full well that their own working class masses are frustrated about the lack of secure, permanent jobs (something which has become even more acute during the pandemic), at the unaffordability of housing, at incessant racist state terror and at ever growing inequality. Thus, the ruling class is worried that their own masses will start to look favourably upon the hugely successful poverty reduction and public housing programs that China’s socialistic economy has made possible. Therefore, they and the other imperialist ruling classes are determined to contain – and preferably crush – the PRC.
Yet while launching a new Cold War against the PRC makes sense for the capitalist rulers of the U.S, Australia, Britain etc, this anti-PRC drive is completely against the interests of the working class – and, indeed, most middle-class people – of each of these countries. For one, Australia exports $170 billion each year to China. That means that, on average, each of Australia’s ten million households receives $17,000 every year from exports to China! Why put that at risk for the sake of the big end of town’s need for an anti-China Cold War? Secondly, the Cold War drive is draining massive resources into the military that should be used for badly needed public housing, public transport expansion, TAFE, childcare, public schools and public health care.
Thirdly, the new Cold War has created a repressive climate at home. Not only have Chinese international students, journalists, academics and migrants been targeted but in April a NSW Labor MP, Shaoquett Moselmane, was witch-hunted out of his position as deputy president of the NSW upper house for merely praising China’s successful response to the pandemic. Two months later, he was subjected to a threatening raid by the AFP that culminated in him being dislodged from his elected parliamentary seat for four months until the AFP finally admitted that he had no case to answer. Meanwhile, an Australian citizen who migrated from South Korea, Chan Han Choi, who was arrested on charges of trying to help North Korea broker deals in defiance of crippling UN economic sanctions, was denied bail for nearly three years largely because of his political sympathy for the PRC’s North Korean ally. All this Cold War witch-hunting has created such a “justification” for authoritarian repression that it has enabled the regime to target dissidents and whistleblowers with no direct connection to Cold War issues too. Not only is the Australian regime prosecuting David McBride but they are also persecuting whistleblower Witness K and his lawyer Bernard Collaery – the people who revealed to the world the regime’s spying on East Timor. Moreover, on November 18, the AFP raided several Sydney offices of the CFMMEU construction workers unions in a highly secretive operation that the police have refused to reveal the purpose of. The Australian capitalist rulers’ anti-China Cold War is facilitating their long-held plans to attack the militant sections of the workers movement.
Most importantly, if the capitalist powers were to succeed in destroying the PRC workers state it would allow them to drive down workers conditions in not only China but in the rest of the world as well. On the other hand, if their attempts to overturn the socialistic PRC are rebuffed and China’s public sector-dominated economy continues to grow in strength, this will encourage the struggles of working class people in this country against privatisation, for a massive increase in public housing, for nationalisation of the banks and for public ownership of the key sectors of the economy. Eventually, the fact that Australia’s biggest trading partner is under a form of workers rule could inspire the struggle here for a workers government. That is why not only must the workers movement and Left in Australia oppose the Cold War drive against the PRC, we must positively stand for the defence of the PRC workers’ state. Let us demand: U.S. and Australian militaries get out of the South China Sea! Stop the Australian regime’s military build-up! Down with the U.S., Australian and British ruling classes’ support and funding for pro-colonial, anti-PRC groups in Hong Kong! Down with their campaign of lies against China over Xinjiang! Down with their anti-communist interference!
The PRC Must Do Her Socialist Duty and Be More
Consistent in
Condemning the Capitalist Australian Regime’s Atrocities
While the entire Australian establishment has hysterically denounced China’s condemnation of SAS war crimes, China’s stance has captured the mood of Afghanistan’s people. A December 1 editorial in the English language Afghan newspaper, The Afghanistan Times, praised China’s response in its commentary on the spat between Canberra and Beijing. The Afghan newspaper stated that:
“The Afghans are warmly welcome anyone who condemn inhuman actions [that] badly affect the innocent Afghan masses. But the condemnation of war crimes committed by the foreign soldiers in Afghanistan since the US entered the country alongside its western allies nearly 20 years ago – is an unprecedented and timely budge by the government of China. Other countries must follow [suit] the suite…. Anyway, the agonized Afghans welcome China’s move not to only condemn but also react strongly over unlawful killings in Afghanistan and we also welcome other countries’ standpoint to bringing the killers of innocent Afghans to justice.”
This Afghan newspaper’s description of China’s stance as an “unprecedented and timely budge by the government of China” is an apt description. For the PRC leadership all too rarely takes a stand on issues that do not very directly concern China’s immediate interests or those of ethnic Chinese people. The PRC leaders espouse a policy of mutual non-interference in the affairs of other countries. In general, they actually do follow this policy. This does not of course stop the Australian ruling class from regularly attacking supposed “Chinese interference.” Yet, if one examines closely the Australian regime’s claims of “Chinese interference”, none of the them are about the PRC actually trying to change Australia’s domestic policy or Australia’s political system. Rather, the specific claims about “Chinese interference” are all concerned with alleged attempts by China to make the Australian political establishment less hostile to China or to prevent Australia being used as a staging area for anti-communist Chinese exile groups. In other words, the supposed cases of “Chinese interference” even if they were real, which is doubtful, are entirely about the PRC defending itself, rather than about shaping Australia’s political direction. However, this is not actually a good thing! It is the duty of a workers’ state to support the struggles for liberation of the working classes and downtrodden peoples of so much of the world that is still subjugated under capitalist rule. However, the PRC makes little to no effort to support the class struggle of the exploited masses in the capitalist world.
The rationale for the PRC government’s national-centred approach is a hope that if they do not seek to undermine capitalist rule in the capitalist countries, the imperialist rulers will in turn not obstruct the PRC from building socialism within China. Yet the latter is not what is happening! The capitalist powers are doing everything possible to undermine socialistic rule in China – from applying military pressure on the PRC, to discriminating against China’s socialistic state-owned enterprises and to providing massive financial, technical and propaganda support to anti-communist, anti-PRC forces within China (including in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet). Therefore, if the most powerful countries remain under capitalist rule there is a real danger that they will eventually be able to squeeze to death socialistic rule in China.
Many supporters of Chinese socialism may see that as impossible given China’s huge size and the fact that she continues to make one achievement after another. Yet, let us not forget that many subjective communists once thought that it was impossible for counterrevolution to destroy the Soviet workers state too. In the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet Union, just like the PRC today, was achieving an economic growth rate several times that of the capitalist countries and was accomplishing one great feat after another – including putting the first human in space. However, the Soviet Union was eventually crushed under the combined force of capitalist military, economic and political pressure. We should realise too that in many ways the PRC today faces a more uphill battle than the Soviet Union did. For one, when China had her anti-capitalist revolution, China was further behind the most powerful capitalist countries than when Russia had her October 1917 Revolution. Russia prior to the 1917 Revolution had been an imperialist power – a relatively backward one to be sure – but an imperial power all the same. By contrast, China before the 1949 Revolution was a brutally subjugated neo-colony that had become one of the poorest countries in the world. Therefore, while the Soviet Union before its collapse had reached rough military and nuclear parity with the U.S.-led imperialist powers, today the PRC remains much weaker militarily than the U.S. For example, the U.S. has 5,800 nuclear warheads to just 320 for China. Moreover, although catching up fast, the PRC’s per capita GDP remains further behind in comparison with the richest capitalist countries than the Soviet Union was. Additionally, the PRC is much more resource poor per person than the Soviet Union was and has fewer fellow socialistic countries to stand with it. There is another factor that is just as significant. Red China today has a much bigger and better organized capitalist class than the Soviet Union did at the time she was destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution. Many of these capitalists within China are becoming ever more conscious of their particular class interests and are seeking to white ant the socialistic state from within while biding their time to make a full grab for power.
Given all these dangers that socialistic rule in China faces, it is a matter of defending their “own” workers state for the PRC to support the anti-capitalist struggles of the working class and oppressed masses in the U.S., Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Japan etc. We say to the Chinese masses:
“Chinese toiling people, you have achieved so much since you grabbed state power 71 years ago. The fact that you have lifted every single one of your rural population out of extreme poverty is a simply stunning achievement. But we in the capitalist world are still suffering. We need your help! Please “interfere” in our affairs – not covertly but openly and proudly by supporting our struggles against Australia’s capitalist rulers. We want you to “interfere” in the way that workers on strike in one workplace would want workers in another workplace to “interfere” in support of their struggle by taking solidarity action. And when we and the other working classes still suffering under capitalism today eventually topple our own oppressors like you did in 1949, then your own socialist construction will no longer face deadly threats. Then, all the working classes around the world that have newly achieved their liberation will join you in building a bright socialist world.”
Red China’s forthright calling out of Australian regime war crimes in Afghanistan points to the potential for the PRC workers state to start to politically oppose the capitalist ruling classes in Australia and the other imperialist countries. To be sure, the PRC only took this stand because she was copping a series of hostile provocations by the Australian ruling class. Nevertheless, the fact that this “unprecedented and timely budge by the government of China” has had such an impact and been so well received by the people of both Afghanistan and China should encourage Beijing to make more principled stands on questions that do not very directly concern China’s immediate interests. We, therefore, appeal to the PRC to make the following demands:
- All U.S. and Australian troops get out of Afghanistan, Iraq and the Persian Gulf!
- Jail all police officers and prison guards who have murdered Aboriginal people in Australian state custody!
- Free all the refugees from the Australian regime’s brutal imprisonment! Bring all Manus and Nauru refugees to Australia with the full rights of citizens!
- Abolish the ABCC and all anti-union and anti-strike laws in Australia!
- End the persecution of trade union militants from the CFMEU and other unions!
- End the privatisation of public housing in Australia! For a massive increase in public housing instead!
- Grant real freedom to, and drop all charges against, Chan Han Choi! End all sanctions on North Korea!
- Drop all charges against David McBride, Bernard Collaery and Witness K!
- Free Julian Assange!
- All Israeli troops and settlements get out of the West Bank and Gaza!
However, as crucial as it is that the world’s most populous country takes an active stand, the main focus of Australia’s pro-working class activists should be on what we should do ourselves. And what we need to do right now is to take advantage of the revelations of some of the Australian military’s war crimes and the forthright condemnation of these atrocities by the country that is Australia’s largest export market, to explain to the toiling masses that the Australian military is not our military and that the Australian state as a whole is not our state either. We need to explain that the state in Australia is the big end of town’s state, a bludgeon and a machine that they use to oppress us. Therefore, not only should Australia’s working class welcome China’s condemnation of the hideous war crimes committed by the Australian military but we should oppose every operation by this military and should fight to oppose every person and every cent going into this murderous and imperialist military. When wide layers of the working class understand that the Australian state is not their state and that Australia’s capitalist-dominated “democracy” is a fraud, then they will ensure that the struggles of the workers movement are kept independent of all institutions of this state. Then, the workers and progressive movements will finally become unshackled. And they will become an unstoppable force for liberation.