BY Alastair Crooke

 

BRICS 11 establishes a pole of influence and global heft that has the potential to eclipse in scope that of the G7.

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Whilst it has become clear to increasing numbers of people in the West that something has gone terribly wrong with the élites’ Ukraine project, and that the exaggerated predictions and expectations of Russian forces being ‘knocked for six’ by an armoured ‘fist’ have proved spectacularly wrong, those same élites are going wrong again – on another strategically decisive issue: They again largely ignore ‘reality’ – for the sake of control of the ‘narrative’. In this case, the West prefers to sneer at the implications of the new accessions to BRICS (let alone the other 40 states ready to join): ‘Nothing to see there’.

The BRICS is just a jumble of states lacking any cohesion, or common thread, western MSM proclaims. It can never challenge the U.S. global power, nor the sheer financial weight of the dollar sphere. However, China’s Global Times explains in mild tones, a different backdrop:

“The reason why the BRICS mechanism has such great appeal … reflects a general disappointment of many developing countries with the global governance system dominated and interfered by the U.S. and the West. As China has repeatedly emphasized, the traditional global governing system has become dysfunctional, deficient and missing in action, and the international community urgently expects the BRICS mechanism to strengthen unity and cooperation”.

Others in the Global South say it more starkly: The BRICS mechanism is seen as a means to slough off the last vestiges of western colonialism and to acquire autonomy. Yes, of course, BRICS 11 initially will be more cacophony than smooth opera, but nonetheless, it represents a profound shift of global consciousness.

BRICS 11 establishes a pole of influence and global heft that has the potential to eclipse in scope that of the G7.

The ‘mess’ in Ukraine is commonly attributed to mere ‘miscalculation’ by the western élites: They did not expect Russian society to be so robust, nor so steadfast under pressure.

Yet this was no minor ‘slip up’ by the West, since the recognition of NATO’s doctrinal contradictions, its second-rate weaponry and its inability to think rigorously – beyond tomorrow’s sound-bite – has (inadvertently) shone the spotlight on the deeper dysfunction within the West – one that runs far deeper than just the situation around the Ukraine project. Many in the West see major institutions of society locked within suffocating orthodoxy; in an intense level of political and cultural polarisation; and with political reform effectively locked-down.

The proxy war on Russia nevertheless was launched through Ukraine, precisely to reaffirm western global vigour. It is doing the opposite.

The financial war (as opposed to the ground war in Ukraine) was the counter-play to generating regime change in Moscow: Financial war was intended to underline the futility of opposing the sheer ‘muscle’ that dollar hegemony – acting in concert – represented. It was the jealous hegemon demanding obeisance.

But this back-fired spectacularly. And this has directly contributed not just to the expansion of BRICS, but to the energy resources of the Middle East and the raw materials of Africa sliding out of western control. Rather than the western scatter-gun threats of sanctions and financial ostracisation creating fear and reaffirming obsequiousness, the threats contrarily, have mobilised anti-colonial sentiments across the globe; fed the understanding that the western financial construct amounted to tutelage, and that any acquisition of sovereignty required the act of de-dollarisation.

And here, again, egregious mistakes were committed: Errors of geo-strategic magnitude were embarked upon almost casually, and without due diligence.

The primordial mistake was that of Team Biden (and the EU) illegally seizing Russia’s overseas reserve assets; expelling Russia from the financial clearing system, SWIFT; and imposing a trade blockade so complete that (it was hoped in the White House) its effects would tear down President Putin. The rest of world understood – they easily could be next. They needed a sphere that was resistant to western financial predations.

Yet, the second strategic error by Biden (& Co.) magnified the error of their initial ‘unprecedented’ financial blitz. This blunder marked the ‘second shoe to drop’ in Biden’s de-fenestration of the American financial imperium: He treated Mohammad bin Salman (and the Saudis generally) with contemptuousness: ordering them to increase oil production (in order to bring down the price of gasoline before the mid-term Congressional elections), and disdainfully threatening the kingdom with “consequences”, were it to fail to comply.

Perhaps Biden, so consumed with his electoral prospects, did not think it through. Even now, it is not clear that the White House understands the consequences of it having treated MbS as some aberrant underling. There is an eleventh-hour attempt to dissuade Saudi from joining BRICS, but it is too late. It’s application to join has been approved and will take effect from 1 January 2024. The West misread the mood.

The shared ethos within Gulf states is one of self-assured, assertive leaders, who are no longer willing to accept binary ‘with us or against us’ U.S. demands.

For the avoidance of mis-understanding, Biden, through the combination of these two strategic mistakes, has launched the West’s financial hegemony onto a slipway leading to incremental unwinding of much of the $32 trillion of foreign investment in fiat dollars which has accumulated in the U.S. system over the last 52 years – with an implicit acceleration towards ‘own currency trading’ amongst the majority of no-western states.

Ultimately this likely will lead to a BRICS trade settlement medium – possibly anchored to gold. Were a trading currency to be anchored in some way to a gram of gold, that currency would, of course, acquire status as a store of value, based on that of the underlying commodity (in this case gold).

The point here is that when inflation was zero-bound, U.S. Treasury bonds were seen as a store of (enduring) value. However, wide de-dollarisation undermines the synthetic (i.e. the imposed) demand for dollars that owed entirely to the Bretton Woods and the Petro-dollar frameworks (that demanded that commodities be traded only in U.S. dollars) and to the implicit understanding that U.S. Treasuries offered a certain store of value.

But what did Team Biden do? They have driven Saudi Arabia – the lynchpin to the Petro-dollar, and one of the pillars (together with other Gulf States and China) underpinning the huge holdings of U.S. Treasury debt – into the arms of BRICS. Put simply, the BRICS 11 incorporates six out of nine of the top global energy producers, as well as the principal energy consumers. OPEC+, in effect, has been swallowed to make a self-enclosed, self-sufficient circle of trading in energy (and raw materials) that does not need to touch dollars. And over time, this will amount to a major monetary shock.

The ‘consequences’ threated towards Saudi Arabia by the White House have been rendered inconsequential. Saudi and Iran can sell their oil to other BRICS consumers (in non-dollar currencies). Members no longer need to be so concerned at western threats – one of the key provisions of BRICS is the joint refusal of all members to permit or facilitate any ‘regime change’ manoeuvres against BRICS members.

To be clear, what this all means is further price inflation in the West, reflecting the falling purchasing power of fiat currencies as dollar-demand subsides. Inevitably, a weakening dollar will lead to higher interest rates in the U.S. This – simply – will be one major consequence of de-dollarisation. Higher interest rates will impose great stress on the U.S. and European banks.

The first BRICS 11 summit is set for October 2023 in Kazan. By ‘coincidence’, full membership of the new states will coincide with Russia taking the rotating annual presidency of the BRICS on 1 January 2024. Putin already has made clear his determination to move towards resolving the complexities of a separate BRICS currency – “one way or another”.

 

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White supremacy and modern Australia

The visionary Alfred Deakin had dark visions for the nation, writes Tony Wright.

Indigenous singer, songwriter and author, the late Archie Roach, was at a writers’ festival discussing his book Tell Me Why, about the pain of life as a child stolen from his parents, when Peter Sharp told him he believed he knew who was responsible.

It was, he said, Alfred Deakin.

This was a monumentally confronting claim.

Deakin is a revered Australian politician and lawmaker, a father of Australia’s Constitution, the nation’s first attorney-general and three times a prime minister during the first decade of Australia’s federation, of which he was visionary and prime mover.

Deakin University is named for him and so is the suburb in Canberra that is home to the prime minister’s residence, The Lodge.

Deakin was also Peter Sharp’s greatgrandfather. And here was the greatgrandson standing at a writers’ festival in Geelong in 2019, just across town from the central campus of Deakin University, declaring to Roach, who wrote and sang the heartbreaking Took the Children Away, that Alfred Deakin was, in essence, father of the Stolen Generations.

Roach was in broader discussions at the festival and simply replied that he found Sharp’s comment very interesting.

But Peter Sharp was not about to let it go. He has spent years uncovering the evidence for his contention that his great-grandfather, considered a social progressive who was instrumental in creating modern Australia, was also responsible, more than virtually anyone else, for policies designed to demolish Aboriginal Australia.

Deakin, he says, was determined to create ‘‘a continent reserved for Anglo-Saxons only’’, which ‘‘necessitated ensuring the elimination of the Aboriginal population’’.

The vision of a white Australia was mainstream in Deakin’s time, of course. But Deakin, a journalist with The Age as a young man, was also a mystic and spiritualist who was obsessed with signs and prophecies, as historian Dr Al Gabay makes clear in his 1992 book of Deakin’s secret written thoughts, The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin.

Put simply, Deakin believed he had a divine destiny to create a nation for whites only. In 1884, aged just 28, he wrote one of the numerous prayers that would guide him: ‘‘Make me Thy servant and the servant of my race, and grant to me greatness and thoroughness of service though at every step I must sacrifice myself.’’

He would, as Australia’s first attorney-general in 1903, rule in the service of his race that people of mixed Aboriginal and white blood were not Aboriginal at all. The only real Aboriginal people, he asserted, were ‘‘full bloods’’, and they were dying out.

It was an attitude he had made law in Victoria in 1886, leading to catastrophe for Aboriginal communities. It was a view that informed his arguments while helping shape the Constitution, which excluded Aboriginal people (that is, those with a ‘‘preponderance of Aboriginal blood’’) from being counted within the Australian population, and which forbade the federal parliament making laws for Aboriginal peoples.

These provisions remained in the Constitution until 1967, when by referendum, more than 90 per cent of Australians voted to remove them.

Now, as Australia is impelled to its first referendum of the 21st century, its citizens required to decide whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be granted what they have always been denied – a Voice to parliament enshrined within the Constitution – Sharp has decided it is time to pull the curtain on what he believes were his great-grandfather’s efforts to try to make Aboriginal Australia disappear.

Sharp worried for years that despite his research, he was nothing but an amateur historian. But he became heartened to discover that in recent years, his views have the support of a growing number of historians.

He points to a long study of Deakin’s racial attitudes, published in 2018 by Dr Fred Cahir and Dr Dan Tout of Federation University, which reaches similar conclusions to his. The academic paper finds the racialist legacies of Deakin have not been given the attention they deserve by most historians, and that the truth had been consigned, wrongly, to ‘‘the Great Australian Silence’’.

In 2020, a group of 16 academics from Deakin University issued a challenge to discuss the fact their university was named after a racist. ‘‘We need to talk about Alfred Deakin and his ideal of a White Australia’’, they called their seminar.

‘‘Arguably,’’ they wrote, ‘‘[Deakin’s] most infamous statement regarding race is the prediction [in 1901] that: ‘In another century the probability is that Australia will be a white continent with not a black or even dark skin among its inhabitants. The Aboriginal race has died out in the south and is dying fast in the north and west, even where most gently treated. Other races are to be excluded by legislation if they are tinted to any degree. The yellow, the brown, and the copper-coloured are to be forbidden to land anywhere.’

‘‘From our experience, when staff and students at Deakin University hear this quote and the many others like it for the first time, they are shocked. Some ask why a university would be named after someone whose values are so incompatible with those embodied in the university today,’’ the academics wrote.

But Sharp does not urge a changing of the university’s name. Instead, he says he wants the truth to be told about Deakin, and hopes Australians will change the Constitution at the referendum. He admits that when he first discovered Deakin’s personal role in denying mixed-race Aboriginal people their very identity ‘‘it was of course a great shock, and will affect me for the rest of my life’’.

‘‘But quite quickly I realised, first, that the shame I felt was more as a citizen than a descendent and, second, that I would have most shame if I did not try to bring it into the light.’’

His shock, he says, came in 2017 when reading Professor Judith Brett’s biography of his great-grandfather, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin.

Within its pages he discovered it was Deakin, as chief secretary of Victoria, who shoved through the Victorian parliament in the dead of night on December 15, 1886, an act that remains infamous as ‘‘the Half-Caste Act’’.

Its official title, in the grand tradition of political forces reversing the meaning of their intention, was an amendment to ‘‘An Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria’’.

Its effect was calamitous to Aboriginal communities. It meant Aboriginal people of mixed descent (known as ‘‘half-castes’’ at the time) were no longer classified as Aboriginal and were to be expelled from the reserves on which they lived. Only those classified as ‘‘full-blood Aboriginal natives’’ and their long-term spouses aged more than 34 could remain.

Its effect, beyond breaking up the reserves, was to extend the power of authorities to remove children from their families. Other states followed quickly with similar legislation.

Families and communities were ripped apart and a whole class of people formerly considered Aboriginal were consigned to the far edges of Australian society, neither Aboriginal in the view of officialdom, nor white in the eyes of the wider population.

It was not until 1910 when a kinder premier, John Hunter, re-established through the Aboriginal Act the right of those who were ‘‘half-caste’’ to be considered Aboriginal again. But it did not stop the removal of children from their families, which continued for much of the 20th century.

The so-called ‘‘Half-Caste Act’’ was long considered to have been driven by the Aboriginal Protection Board, which wanted to reduce the cost of maintaining Aboriginal people on publicly funded reserves.

But this doesn’t properly explain Deakin’s personal interest in seeing it passed into law, nor his choice to ram it through parliament around midnight just before Christmas 1886, Sharp says.

Deakin was a famed orator who regularly spoke for hours, but this time he spoke for no more than 10 minutes, omitting to say that the definition of those who were to be defined legally as Aboriginal was to be turned on its head.

Nor did he mention the act would not only allow, but enforce, the removal of mixed-ancestry ‘‘infants’’ able ‘‘to earn his or her living’’, nor that orphans be removed to the department of neglected children.

Sharp sees Deakin’s behaviour as an early sign of what would become his deeper and darker beliefs and intentions.

He believed, and regularly stated, that Aboriginal people were destined to die out. By defining those of ‘‘full blood’’ as the only ‘‘native Aboriginals’’ in 1886, white Australia under this theory would soon enough be rid of them. But figures at the time showed the population of Aboriginal people to be rising, which undercut Deakin’s claim.

By redefining those of mixed ancestry as ‘‘half-castes’’, and even personally removing the word ‘‘Aboriginal’’ in the legislation from what had previously been the term ‘‘half-caste Aborigine’’, he was drastically reducing the number of people who could be called Aboriginal.

He was at the time just 30, and had attained the high office in the cabinet of the chief secretary of Victoria.

Yet, earlier in his life, Deakin had maintained ostensibly friendly relations with Aboriginal elders.

The highly respected Aboriginal leader William Barak trusted Deakin enough to make personal representations to him. In 1882 Deakin drafted a petition to parliament opposing the closure of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve, 60 kilometres east of Melbourne, where Barak and his people lived.

Yet Deakin ended the petition with telling words that would become his mantra: ‘‘They are the last remnant of a dying race which in a few years will have passed from the continent we have colonised and all we desire is that... they may be enabled to end their days in peace,’’ he wrote.

One of Peter Sharp’s earliest memories, while visiting his grandmother, Deakin’s daughter Vera, was standing on what he believes may have been a possum-skin rug given as a gift to his great-grandfather by Barak.

But after becoming chief secretary of Victoria in 1886, Deakin’s attitude towards Indigenous people hardened alongside his political ambitions, Sharp says. ‘‘William Barak walked 60 kilometres from Coranderrk to Melbourne to plead with Deakin about the harshness of the 1886 act, but his voice was ignored,’’ he says.

By then, Alfred Deakin was on his own march. To keep Australia white.

 

SMH 02/09/2023

 

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