Babel Inc
Page 5
Indeed, most of the Chinese immigrants were indentured laborers who had been inveigled or impressed into decade or longer contracts by unscrupulous Chinese entrepreneurs, the notorious ‘companies.’ Indentured or contracted, free or unfree, the Chinese immigrants were formidable economic rivals: they worked hard, they worked cheap, and they gave no labor problems—the Chinese ‘companies’ which ruled the immigrants with an iron hand saw to that.[7]
From 1850 to 1877 there were many protests against Chinese immigration, but to no avail:
All of them failed in the face of opposition from entrenched business interests—especially the railroads, banks, and steamship lines—and reinforced by a vociferous strain of ‘liberalism’ led by ex-abolitionists and egalitarians, churchmen, and ‘reformers’ of various stripes. Then as now, the pro-immigration forces were well situated to influence public opinion from prestigious pulpits, editorships and professorial chairs.[8]
Hence the alignment of forces 150 years ago was similar to today’s alignment: big business together with what today would be called the ‘Left,’ and the same types of liberal.
New Zealand workers likewise objected to coolie labour. Their primary champion was the iconic New Zealand statesman Premier Richard John Seddon, a former gold-digger himself, who was persistent in introducing restrictive measures that were aimed at circumventing the demands of the British Colonial Office that one could not discriminate against Chinese, Japanese, or Britain’s colonial subjects. Seddon’s Asiatic Restriction Bill of 1896 was blocked by Britain.[9]
The descendants of those first Chinese migrants—then often critiqued not only for their coolie labour, but also for their opium and gambling—acculturated successfully over the course of several generations. On that account, unfortunately, the apologists of multiculturalism and an ‘Asian New Zealand’ use their example to ‘prove’ that present-day objections by New Zealanders to Asian immigration are based on ignorance and xenophobia. Today, however the situation is quite different, especially insofar as Asian immigration is one, most visible, symptom of merging New Zealand (and Australia) into an Asian economic bloc as part of the globalisation process. A second factor is that China, unlike Seddon’s time, has emerged as a superpower and has geopolitical designs on this region. Again, Chinese immigration is a symptom of our relationship with China. Thirdly, it was thanks to Seddon and other statesmen, and the efforts of workers and small-scale merchants and tradesmen, that there were brakes put over a century ago on Asian immigration, without which New Zealand’s demography and submergence into Asia might have proceeded well before the present.
Even in those times there were those within the labour movement who said that the answer was to unionise Asians workers and organise across racial lines, on the basis of class; that ‘racism’ and immigration restrictions serve capitalism in dividing the international working class. It is an example, yet again, of the Marxian and anarchist Left only being able to comprehend matters in terms of economics, without taking into account that ethnicities, cultures, and peoples are deeply rooted, innate, and not merely economic constructs that can be eliminated by changing economic and property relations, whether under socialism or capitalism.
The stalwarts of the old Labour movement, especially in the Anglophone world, including the United States, fought the consequences of alien immigration. Within the British Empire such immigration had the backing of the Colonial Office. The Empire had ceased to be living as an expression of the British spirit of Robert Clive, James Cook, and Francis Drake, and the heroism of Rorke’s Drift. What the Empire had become, with the rise of the cosmopolitan oligarchs such as the Rothschilds and David Sassoon (whose opium trade was backed by the military might of the Empire), was an expression rather of moneyed interests, largely of non-British origin, as exemplified by the name Rothschild. Already the strained relations between Rothschild and Cecil Rhodes were symptomatic of the division that existed between the traditional, quintessential British merchant-explorer-statesman who had created the Empire, and the often alien oligarch who reaped the financial rewards. As we shall see in the next chapter, it was now an Empire that fought the Boers in the interests of new ‘Britons’ such as Alfred Beit whose loyalty to the Imperial idea, like the loyalty of today’s oligarchs to any specific nation, lasts only as long as the interests of money are served.
As Karl Marx predicted—with satisfaction—capital would become increasingly internationalised, or what today is called globalised—and the old European colonial empires by World War I were restricting global profit maximisation. The empires required dismantling, and being replaced by international free trade. This latter became the official war aim of the new centre of international finance, the United States, and remains so in America’s wars against ‘terrorism’ for ‘democracy.’ We shall now consider how the European empires were dismantled, with the purpose of allowing what the Left calls ‘neo-colonialism’ (generally without understanding its full implications) to fill the void.
[1] Henry Parkes (1815–96) is considered the father of Australian Federation.
[2] J. T. Lang, ‘White Australia Saved Australia,’ I Remember (Sydney: Invincible Press, 1956), cited by Kevin McCauley, The Labor Party and White Australia, Sydney, 2002, http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/thelaborpartyandwhiteaustralia/labortwo.html.
[3] Robert McIntosh, Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal Mines (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 57–59.
[4] ‘The 1907 Arrival of Many Low-Wage Labourers Precipitated the September, 1907 Vancouver Asiatic Riot, Immigration Watch Canada,’ 14 August 2011, http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/2007/09/08/the-1907-arrival-of-many-low-wage-labourers-precipitated-the-september-1907-vancouver-asiatic-riot/.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Kevin Jenks, ‘Denis Kearney and the Chinese Exclusion Acts,’ The Social Contract Journal 6, no. 3 (Spring 1996).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] John E. Martin, ‘Refusal of Assent—a Hidden Element of Constitutional History in New Zealand,’ Victoria University Law Review 41, no. 1 (June 2010).
Decolonisation as the Prelude to Globalisation
The story of the eclipse of White rule in Africa, as with the European colonies of Indochina and elsewhere, is one of calculated world power-politics. Those who brought ruin to White Africa were not, as is commonly supposed among the Right, Moscow-trained communists and terrorists, but the ‘Money Power’ centred in Washington and New York. The reason for this is that the old empires had become too restrictive for capitalism that, as Karl Marx predicted gleefully, would become increasingly international. Additionally, the money market was becoming increasingly centred on Wall Street, New York, rather than in the old capitals of Europe. The empires had outlived their usefulness and had to be removed as impediments. The aim was to replace these old empires with a global empire, which is not loyal to any national tradition, people, culture, monarch, or state. The consequences of this have been for corporate interests to fill the void with the departure of the colonial powers, the competitors being the USSR and later Red China. China, while maintaining its own national interests, has nonetheless been willing to work in economic symbiosis with Western big business, which means that Russia remains more an obstacle to globalisation.[1]
The problem for the United States, after World War II, which had finally exhausted the old imperial powers through debt owed to the United States, and devastation, was how to push the colonial powers into divesting their empires, while (1) maintaining these ex-imperial states as allies in the Cold War, and (2) support so-called ‘national liberation movements’ that would not align with the USSR. The United States’ opposition to European colonialism was therefore more cautious than it would otherwise have been had the USSR not emerged as a post-war rival rather than continuing her wartime alliance.
Ambivalence characterized U.S. policy during World War II, and was the root of much subsequent misunderstanding. On the one hand, the U.S. repeatedly reassured the French that its colonial possessions would be returned to it after the war. On the other hand, the U.S. broadly committed itself in the Atlantic Charter to support national self-determination, and President Roosevelt personally and vehemently advocated independence for Indochina. F.D.R. regarded Indochina as a flagrant example of onerous colonialism which should be turned over to a trusteeship rather than returned to France. The President discussed this proposal with the Allies at the Cairo, Teheran, and Yalta Conferences and received the endorsement of Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin; Prime Minister Churchill demurred. At one point, Fall[3] reports, the President offered General de Gaulle Filipino advisers to help France establish a ‘more progressive policy in Indochina’—which offer the General received in ‘Pensive Silence.’[4]
Note that Stalin was among those agreeable to Roosevelt’s proposition of trusteeship for Indochina in ousting the French after World War II, whereas Churchill, Prime Minister of the largest of imperial states, was to find himself confronted with American anti-colonial policy. As is often the case, America played a duplicitous policy vis-à-vis its allies:
U.S. commanders serving with the British and Chinese, while instructed to avoid ostensible alignment with the French, were permitted to conduct operations in Indochina which did not detract from the campaign against Japan. Consistent with F.D.R.’s guidance, the U.S. did provide modest aid to French—and Viet Minh—resistance forces in Vietnam after March, 1945, but refused to provide shipping to move Free French troops there. Pressed by both the British and the French for clarification U.S. intentions regarding the political status of Indochina, F.D.R maintained that ‘it is a matter for postwar.’[5]
. . . Through the fall and winter of 1945–1946, the U.S. received a series of requests from Ho Chi Minh for intervention in Vietnam; these were, on the record, unanswered. However, the U.S. steadfastly refused to assist the French military effort, e.g., forbidding American flag vessels to carry troops or war materiel to Vietnam.[6]
The problem for the globalist vision of a post-war ‘new world order’ was that Stalin, the United States’ wartime ally, had rejected the prospect of the USSR serving as a junior partner with the United States to establish a Brave New World via the United Nations Organization. The USSR, moreover, pursued its own foreign policy that was more like the return of the old European colonialism that the United States was trying to undermine, than like comunist proclamations against imperialism.[7] Hence, the post-war policy pursued by the USSR that resulted in the Cold War required a more cautious approach by the United States in its anti-colonial agenda. In regard to Vietnam as elsewhere, especially in Africa right up until the withdrawal of Portugal from Africa in the 1970s, the United States enacted a policy of opposing colonialism while being cognisant of both losing its European allies and of allowing the Soviet Union to fill the void. In Indochina, while the United States had originally supported Ho’s Viet Minh, there were suspicions of Soviet connections:
. . . However, the U.S., deterred by the history of Ho’s communist affiliation, always stopped short of endorsing Ho Chi Minh or the Viet Minh. Accordingly, U.S. policy gravitated with that of France toward the Bao Dai solution. At no point was the U.S. prepared to adopt an openly interventionist course. To have done so would have clashed with the expressed British view that Indochina was an exclusively French concern, and played into the hands of France’s extremist political parties of both the Right and the Left. The U.S. was particularly apprehensive lest by intervening it strengthen the political position of French Communists. Beginning in 1946 and 1947, France and Britain were moving toward an anti-Soviet alliance in Europe and the U.S. was reluctant to press a potentially divisive policy.[8]
. . . Increasingly, the U.S. sensed that French unwillingness to concede political power to Vietnamese heightened the possibility of the Franco-Viet Minh conflict being transformed into a struggle with Soviet imperialism. U.S. diplomats were instructed to ‘apply such persuasion and/or pressure as is best calculated [to] produce desired result [of France’s] unequivocally and promptly approving the principle of Viet independence.’ France was notified that the U.S. was willing to extend financial aid to a Vietnamese government not a French puppet . . .[9]
Interestingly, in 1948, the Office of Intelligence Research in the U.S. Department of State conducted a survey of communist influence in Southeast Asia, reporting that it was the French rather than the Viet Minh who were suspicious of U.S. motives:
To date the Vietnam press and radio have not adopted an anti-American position. It is rather the French colonial press that has been strongly anti-American and has freely accused the U.S. of imperialism in Indochina to the point of approximating the official Moscow position.[10]
The same situation confronted the United States and the USSR in North Africa in regard to France. Both powers, as rival contenders to fill the power vacuum after European colonial scuttle, were obliged to take a softly-softly approach towards France in the Cold War. Yahia Zoubir writes of this:
The decolonization of the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) confronted the United States and the Soviet Union with challenging and similar dilemmas. The process of decolonization took place at the peak of the Cold War, a time of high tension in many places around the globe. The two superpowers’ difficulties stemmed from the challenge not only of calculating how best to preserve their vital interests in the region and maintain their good relationship with France, the colonial power, but also of reconciling this need with winning over the colonial peoples seeking independence from France, thus preventing them from joining the rival’s bloc.[11]
Zoubir states that ‘both superpowers pursued similar policies aimed at reconciling contradictory objectives to safeguard their own strategic, political, and economic interests. Owing to the importance they accorded to their respective relationships with France, they sought to appease the colonial power while simultaneously trying to gain the friendship of the nationalist movements opposed to it.’ In fact, according to Zoubir, the USSR and the French Communist Party believed that the North African colonies should remain within the ‘French Union.’ Zoubir states that ‘The Soviets mistrusted the political and ideological inclinations of the Maghrebi [French North Africa] nationalist leaders due to the latter’s contacts with American officials whose support they solicited in their anticolonial struggle.’[12] The USSR, pursuing realpolitik rather than communism, saw France—which pursued an independent foreign policy—as a bulwark against U.S. influence. Zoubir states:
This explains why Americans played a much more active role in the Maghreb than did the Soviets. But, it was this vigorous role assumed by the U.S. which compelled the Soviets and the French to be equally distrustful of American objectives in the Maghreb. Therefore, not surprisingly, Stalin’s policy consisted in preserving the status quo in the French colonies and in preventing them from becoming part of the American sphere of influence.[13]
What temporarily thwarted the United States’ anti-colonial intentions was the need to rebuild Europe in the aftermath of World War II, in face of Soviet expansion. This also necessitated rebuilding the economies of the colonial powers. Hence, an ambiguous policy had to be pursued, which stated ‘that in any given colonial issue, the United States must make a determination as to whether its security interests are best served by a support of the position of the colonial power or by the efforts to bring adjustments in the direction of the demands of nationalist groups.’[14]
As in Indochina, the French remained suspicious o
f U.S. objectives in North Africa, while U.S. diplomats and politicians tried to allay France’s concerns. After the independence of Morocco and Tunisia, the U.S. granted economic support to these states. Following the discovery of oil in the Algerian Sahara, France’s suspicions of the United States increased, and were aggravated by U.S. arms shipments to Tunisia following Franco-Tunisian clashes on the Algerian border.[15]
The consequences for the former colonial powers have included their own reverse ‘colonisation’ by migrants from their former colonies, while the former colonies, freed from the old European empires, have been integrated into a new world empire focused on Wall Street.
The Congress of Berlin (1884–85)
The Congress of Berlin showed how Europe could act collectively vis-à-vis non-Europeans. Although the Portuguese had established their colonies in Africa since the 16th century, the Congress brought the European colonial powers together to delineate spheres of interest to allow for the harmonious development of the Continent.[16] Even here, however, the United States was a signatory, showing that it had wider interests in the world than suggested by the Monroe Doctrine that supposedly focused U.S. interests over the Americas, and was intended to keep European powers out of the Americas.