BETWEEN FIVE WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN, PERU AND AUSTRALIA.
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS and FIVE LANGUAGES

1.  Sino-Indian Dispute
2.  Vietnam
3.  Afghanistan, Iraq
4.  Ukraine
5.  Korea (and Vietnam)
6.  Yugoslavia and Serbia
7.  NATO Pretexts
8.  The Vicious Circle
9.  Anglo-Saxon ‘Values’
10.Khrushchev-anti Cold War
11.Memory Notes

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More than sixty years, spent in five continents, gaining fluency in three difficult languages, and dealings with a multitude of people – from power brokers, Kosygin and Gromyko, in the Kremlin and Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People, to ping-pong players in Beijing, house cleaners in Moscow and neoNazis in Ukraine.  

Here in Japan in semi-retirement (and in semi-exile), on a very green hill looking out over a very blue Pacific, it all seems rather distant. Even so I feel we are headed in a dangerous direction, where democracy becomes more dangerous than autocracy and wars become permanent.

Democracy requires votes. Votes require funds. The funds from the military/industrial complex will go to the party which seems to be best able to invent enemies. The incentive to find or create enemies and then go to war is great. 

In fact war has become so easy to promote and so profitable, that the complex now funds both sides in democracies, to make sure the wars start, and then continue. War has become permanent, the pressure to find or create enemies unending. And that is the situation we find today

It is a process that can only end in Armageddon.

Wars and disputes have remained constant throughout my career, and most of them were avoidable.  

…

1.The Sino-Indian Dispute.  

My first job as a novice foreign affairs official was to study the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict. 

We had the facts, and the maps.  It was clear India was trying to push into Chinese-claimed Himalayan territory as part of Nehru’s openly announced Forward  policy.  

He was angry over the way China had occupied Tibet, where he believed India had traditional rights.  

In October,1962, and despite repeated warnings from the Chinese side,  India had moved troops across the line of actual control (LAC) separating the two sides in the Thagla Ridge area. It was also making forays elsewhere, in Ladakh especially, across the LAC.

At first China had responded with pleas for restraint.   But the Thagla Ridge incident went too far. China decided to send in troops, and to continue into India’s northern province of Arunachal Pradesh (which it had long claimed, having given it the name of South Tibet because of the large Tibetan population and religious culture there).  

Then after giving India a lesson, China returned captured weapons, and withdrew its troops out of Arunachal (South Tibet),  precisely back to the line of control which India had violated and where the fighting had started. 

With wounded pride New Delhi then set about expelling all Chinese from India and looking for allies in the West, which was only too happy to accept the Indian version of the dispute. It condemned this Chinese ‘aggression’ and used it to pull India to its anti-China camp. 

Border clashes have continued ever since with still-miffed India later joining with Canberra and Tokyo in the anti-China Quad. China still keeps its forces north of the Line of Control over which it is supposed to have aggressed.

In the Ladakh area since borders were unmarked and there was no clear LAC it is hard to call aggression. But China managed to stabilise its claimed territory and highway to Sinkiang in the north.

…

Throughout all this we had the evidence needed to prove that India had attacked China first in the Thagla La area.

But the Cold War bureaucrats said No: China had made an unprovoked attack against India.  

And so with the help of a compliant media, a lazy academia, and a biased bureaucracy the myth was created that said not even a friendly, peace-loving India was safe from an aggressive, expansionist China. 

That myth later was to do much to persuade policy makers and policy influencers to encourage intervention in the Vietnam War.

2. Vietnam.    

For me at the time the Vietnam War with its daily gloating accounts of bomber raids and body counts was the defining experience. 

It was then I realised there were no limits to the brutality the US side would use to win its interventions. Without US help the pro-Hanoi Vietnamese would have had no trouble defeating the corrupt and unpopular government in Saigon.  Initially the Vietcong alone could have done that.

No, said the Cold War bureaucrats. The Vietnamese population favoured Saigon but for some reason would not fight for Saigon. So we had to do the fighting for them.

And so it continued – bright shining lie after bright shining lie, fiction after fiction, with much of the world impervious to the cruelty that would descend on this small Asian nation for ten long years.

I tried in vain to introduce the idea of an ‘enclave solution’ for the war. 

…

I knew how a primeval fear of China had led Australia into that war.   I spent a year producing a book – In Fear of China – trying to dispel the fear, but whose main effect was to give the UK-Australian establishment the pleasure of seeking to derail its publication.

A Vietnam side-bar had been the ugly British moves in the immediate postwar years.  Having left defeat of the Nazi enemy mainly to the Soviets, the UK was keen to find some postwar action to justify its place in the postwar world. So it joined with the French their colonialist Vietnam War,  and set about the cruel suppression of the local Chinese who had bravely resisted the Japanese in Malaya and had been promised some political freedom by the UK as a reward – a promise quickly forgotten. 

I hope it is proud of that record.  The tactics of the British for that successful suppression in Malaya were much used to convince the US and Australian bureaucracies the same tactics would work in Vietnam. 

Britain has gone on to several more squalid foreign wars and interventions. Its incurable hatred of Russia led directly to the Ukraine war

3. Afghanistan, Iraq   

2001-2021 in Afghanistan saw the Cold War enemy creation machine out of control.  

A proud nation which the Soviets had done much to help modernise (see photo in earlier chapter) was reduced to abject poverty and backwardness, first by the supply of US lethal arms to Islamist guerrillas, and then by direct US (and Australia) military intervention against the very same Islamists they had armed.

It began as a ten year anti-Soviet, Cold War exercise. After the 9.11 attacks, the ‘war-on-terror’ excuse allowed the bureaucrats and military/industrial complex to extend the war for another ten years.  

‘War on terror’ gave the complex a bonus via a war with Iraq. This time the WMD lies were so blatant that even amateurs like myself could see through them.

Then just as that bonus was about to end, Yemen and the badly delayed Russian reaction to the US-backed 2014 coup in Ukraine provided a bonanza for the military/industrial complex – a bonanza which it is determined to extend by provoking a war with China. 

Failing that, a war with North Korea.

Hopefully the Chinese will have enough sense not to be provoked. Their innate dislike of war is an antidote we warlike Westerners could use.

The North Koreans, unfortunately, will be obliterated 

4. Ukraine.   

Anyone following the escalation of events in Ukraine would realise Moscow’s position: it had been deceived by the 2014-5 Minsk Accords which were supposed to protect the large Russian-speaking population in Donbas from the tender mercies of NATO-trained and armed ‘neoNazi’ brigade attacks after the US-backed 2014 Maidan coup.

UN figures show 8,000 Russian speakers killed in the first year after 2014 events. The total was 18,000 killed in the eight years before Moscow’s 2022 intervention, an intervention finally triggered by Ukraine’s plan to send its NATO-trained army in to occupy the remaining areas of the Donbas provinces of Donetsk and and Luhansk they had not already invaded.

The fact that both provinces had been promised autonomy under the Minsk Accords was not allowed to bother the consciences of the NATO generals and bureaucrats. 

That Moscow’s badly needed and badly delayed intervention to stop the massacre of Russian speakers in Ukraine is invariably described as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, even by Moscow supporters, shows how little this background is understood. 

And now we have the almost desperate Western attempts to link the Taiwan conflict with Ukraine in the hope that one war will lead to another, and the profits to the military/industrial complex will escalate further.

5. Korea (and Vietnam). 

1950-75     Vietnam helped me look back to the reality of the 1950-53 Korean War.   Both countries were artificially divided, North and South, by the West. Both had governments, North and South, seeking reunification. 

The US imposition of a rightwing regime in South Korea also matched events in South Vietnam, with both regimes relying on US backing to execute or assassinate thousands of their citizens for the ‘crime’ of having turned leftwing or simply nationalist in their struggle to oppose the former Japanese colonialists (in North Korea) or French and US forces (in South Vietnam) respectively. 

As in Vietnam, the cruel, corrupt South Korean regime had to depend almost entirely on US military power to resist its stronger rival in the North.

And as in Vietnam, a biassed media had no trouble insisting that the North was guilty of unprovoked aggression, even though in both cases the South was also planning to attack the North. 

And as in Vietnam, the military intervention by the North in Korea was also justified by the need to end the killings in the South.

Somehow the North Korean forces, denied the massive air power available to the US and lacking the jungle cover in Vietnam, managed with Chinese help to end the war with a draw.

 …

Then with only a pause after the Korean War we were into the Vietnam War and its US-inspired horrors – massive B52 carpet bombing, the CIA assassination Phoenix Program,  Agent Orange, tiger cages and prisoners dumped from helicopters, etc., etc.  Fortunately, and after exposure to Korean War realities (the massive bombing of all towns and countryside), most US allies preferred not to be involved, apart from a China-obsessed Australia and a blood-thirsty South Korean military. 

Here  jungle cover helped give a win to Hanoi, despite its lack of air power.

US defeat in Vietnam and the Kissinger initiative in China did much to cure the bureaucratic hawk-military/industrial complex war hunger in Asia.  But that was soon to be replaced by US involvement in the former Yugoslavia.

6. Yugoslavia and Serbia    

Tensions in that multi-cultural, multi-religious nation had long provided the opportunity for meddling by US, UK and German hawks.

And they succeeded, with much killing – Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia. 

That left Serbia. Part of its multi-cultural heritage had been to allow migration of Albanians to its large southern province of Kosovo, to the point where they could demand autonomy, which was granted.

But for the Albanian extremists that was not enough.  With Western arms they set out to expel the original Serbian population and other minorities, plus the symbols of Serbia’s cultural heritage. They wanted an all Albanian state.

When the Serbians objected, with force to match the force of the Western-armed Albanian extremists, they were bombed by NATO in 1999, ruthlessly, for 78 days. 

The NATO members at the time included a Germany which only a generation or two earlier had sent its Nazi armies to invade and slaughter Serbians.  They were bombing one of the few European nations which had had the courage to stand up against Nazi Germany, and had paid a dreadful price for doing so. 

That illegal (non-UN approved) NATO attack included bombing of crucial infrastructure, destruction of a nascent car industry (un-noticed by a blinkered West) and the killing of employees in the national broadcasting organisation.

The Chinese embassy was also hit with a floor-penetrating bomb probably aimed to kill Chinese experts examining the remains of a captured US stealth fighter in the Embassy basement.

The NATO excuse for this mayhem? The claimed sufferings of the Albanian population in Kosovo province even though such sufferings as there were came as a result of attacks on Serbians by the Albanian extremists.  It had culminated in a cynically encouraged, very temporary, but highly media publicised exodus of some Albanians to provide the excuse for the subsequent NATO attack.

7. NATO pretexts. 

 By any standard the 1999 bombing of Serbia was a war crime. Even NATO seemed to realise it had to create pretexts.

 Serbia was offered the Rambouillet draft agreement over Kosovo. But that called for free movement of NATO troops throughout Serbia. 

Even Kissinger said ‘it was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing. ‘Rambouillet is not a document that even an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form.’

 (Henry Kissinger, The Daily Telegraph, 28 June 1999.)

The historian Christopher Clark said that the terms of the 1914 Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia appeared lenient compared to the NATO demands.

A former staffer on the State Department’s Yugoslavia desk, George Kenney, reported in May 1999 that a senior State Department official had briefed journalists off the record that “[we] deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept”.

For the Serbs, the Rambouillet agreement would have meant signing away all Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. It was not even a “take it or leave it” proposition, as Secretary of State Albright emphasised back in February 1999; rather, it was “sign it or get bombed.” Negotiations were denied. 

It was an excuse to bomb Serbia into submission so the US could expand its zone of domination in the Balkans. As soon as Serbia was forced by the bombing to agree to independence for Kosovo, the US set about creating yet another base, Camp Bondsteel,  to add to its 800 plus bases around the globe

…

In 2024 NATO was to resume military interventions, this time in Ukraine. 

This time it claimed the need to counter claimed Moscow ‘aggression’ for having sent in troops to stop ‘neoNazi’ Ukrainian forces seeking to crush the autonomy for the Russian-speaking majority in Donbas promised under the UN-approved 2014-5 Minsk Accords.  

Its intervention continues, to the approval of an ignorant West which has almost no idea of the has been going on.

I speak Russian and have visited Donbas. NATO and Kiev are engaged in pure ethnic cleansing.

8. The Vicious Circle.  

 And so for almost thirty years we have, in effect, been forced to accept the concept that the West, by virtue of its alleged superior values, can on any spurious pretext order the bombing and destruction of other peoples.

And that the military/industrial complex could enjoy enormous profits as a result – profits that would be used again to encourage more wars in Europe and Asia.

The more we have wars, the greater the wealth and arrogance of the military/industrial complex; the greater the wealth and arrogance of that complex, the more we have wars.

Add the nuclear threat and it is the ultimate vicious circle.

…

The military/industrial complex has much more than arms-producing wealth going for it.

In one form or another it controls the bulk of our media.  It controls the paid politicians and the power-hungry pundits, the pro-war journalists, the system of donors funding pro-war, local base-hungry US congressmen, to the point where even the Democrats in the US call for 10-20 percent increases in already bloated Pentagon budget requests, to please the donors

Few dare to vote against these requests. If they do the complex (or AIPAC) will make sure they lose their electorates.

Now with its amply funded networks of think tanks, fake news sources, biassed commentators, undercover agents – the complex can swing our societies like rag dolls in whatever direction it likes.

The next rag doll to be held up as a so-called ‘existential threat’ could well be North Korea.  Fortunately it is now nuclear armed to avoid a repeat of the dreadful bombing it suffered in the Korean War.  

…

Over the years I have seen time and time again – sometimes at a distance, sometimes closeup – how the complex operates. And not just over North Korea but also over China, Hong Kong, Syria, Taiwan, Georgia, Iraq, Ukraine…

9. Anglo-Saxon Values. 

 In trying to fix blame for the ugliness in the world we face something of a dilemma.

This is the fact that the nations best able to produce non-aggressive leaders seem to beleaders of the autocratic, not democratic, nations.

Autocrats can ignore the demands of their military/industrial complexes. They do not need donors with policy demands to stay in power.

…

The key excuse for the orgy of aggression by the West is the claimed superiority of Western democratic values. But it is not the so-called West which is at fault.   Rather it is the small grouping of Anglo-Saxon culture societies – the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand – that has come to dominate the concept of ‘the West.’

There we find most the claims to the right to aggression. Usually they are  based on claims to sustain and promote superior democratic values which the grouping says it aims to spread around the world. 

In fact the grouping dominates largely through its past murky colonial record based on superiority in arms production.  After the defeat of Nazi Germany, its vigorous efforts to promote a Cold War with a weakened Soviet Union also allowed it to claim domination.

Any current pretence of democratic virtue disappears with the events over Ukraine, and with the CIA record of coups and assassinations.  

To the drumbeat of that assumed ‘superiority of Western values’, this apology for a second-rate, war-obsessed value system with its biassed media and public ignorance believes it has the right to decide the fate of the world – a world with a much richer history and values that anything we Anglo-saxons have scraped together in the past 200 or so years. 

And this apology for a system of values operates with the same logic that it once used to impose slavery and colonialism on much of the rest of the world – the logic of arms superiority

Unfortunately via institutions such as NATO the Anglos have now been able to infect the other Western societies with its aggressive, might-is-right philosophy.

…

With the breakup of the Soviet Union I had wondered what they would do without a communist enemy, given that Gorbachev was so obviously a progressive who despised war. 

I need not have wondered. Our Western warmongers had the answers.  They quickly reneged on their NATO non-expansion promises and set out to turn non-communist Russia into an enemy. 

The 78 day NATO bombing of Serbia to gain control of Kosovo was one move.The deliberate destruction of Libya was another.

They were proof, if there was no other, of the total lack of any moral superiority in Western values.

Today, one satisfaction is seeing the harm the Europeans have self-inflicted on their own societies since they now have to take refugees from the Middle Eastern and North African societies they so recklessly destroyed.

The other is the formation and rapid growth of the BRICS.

10.Khrushchev, anti-Cold War

Khrushchev was no dove. But he was realist enough to become be the one voice of sanity in this Western-led procession of violence and mendacity.  I got to see him close up in Moscow in 1964.

In the late fifties Khrushchev had begun his first move to end the Cold War, with a call for a Paris conference between the USSR and the leading Western powers. 

US hawks set out immediately to disrupt Khrushchev’s plans, by reviving U2 spy plane flights over Soviet territory.

But they needed publicity for the success of the plan. It was a timed bomb in the back of the aircraft, not Soviet rockets (they could not fly high enough) that arranged for the plane to crash on Russian territory.

The resulting uproar was bound to frustrate Khrushchev’s plans for that Paris conference and for peace with the West.

In bid to recover face with the world and against his Soviet opponents, Khrushchev had demanded an Eisenhower apology for the incident.  US hawks blocked the apology.  The world went back to the Cold War.  

(Khrushchev’s further attempts to get rapprochement with Kennedy were sabotaged by the CIA-inspired invasion of Cuba.)

The record of other CIA-US hawk interventions to prevent any easing to East-West tensions is long. One of the first, and least known, was the move to prevent Taiwan leader, Chiang Ching-kuo (1978-88, Chiang Kai-shek’s son), from opening contacts with Mainland China. 

More recently we have the US-UK 2022 moves to prevent a settlement in Ukraine.

11. Memory Notes

Before I end, some notes from the scrap-book called my memory.

1. Within weeks of the US being defeated in Vietnam I was a witness to Washington with its Australian allies giving the green light to the Indonesian military to commit similar atrocities against poor, harmless East Timor. 

As in the Vietnam war, a China-threat was concocted to serve as the excuse for the atrocity.   (The main political force, Fretilin, was supposed to be pro-China.)

On a per population basis, the East Timor atrocity was even worse than that of Vietnam. In terms of moral squalor it had no equal.

2. Ten years earlier the Anglos had looked on or encouraged the massacre of one million allegedly leftwing Indonesians, many of them Chinese-Indonesian and many of them the people with the education to lay the basis for the industrialisation Indonesia was to lack for the next fifty years.

Once again the excuse for accepting or encouraging the killings was the paranoiac belief they were under Chinese influence. 

Another victory for Western values? 

3. In Vietnam, the massacre figures reached three million.

To justify the slaughter of the three million Canberra repeatedly denounced Hanoi as a Beijing puppet. Was there any apology or explanation from Canberra when it became clear that Vietnam was not a puppet of Beijing – that it was Vietnam, the ‘puppet’, not Australia or the rest of Asia, that was to be the ‘domino’ victim of China as a result of Hanoi’s victory.?

Of course no apology. Superior Western moral values means you never have to say sorry.

Earlier efforts by myself from Moscow to point out Hanoi’s close relations with the USSR and strained relations with China did not go far against the determination to push the China ‘threat’.

4. Over Kosovo  the BBC began honestly, reporting the killing off of elderly Serbs in rural villages. But it had much less to say about the real ‘ethnic cleansing’ atrocity in Kosovo, namely the brutal expulsion of the 30 percent Serb population (today it is only 5 percent, crowded into a Serbia-Kosovo buffer zone). 

As over Ukraine, BBC real news turned to fake news the moment the UK government decided to get involved on the side of the killers. The commentator who in 2014, Ross Aitkins, had told us about the dangerous Nazi-influences in Ukraine in 2020 told us how reports of such influences were greatly exaggerated.

In fact, they had greatly increased.  So much for BBC anti-spin claims.

The cruel expulsion of the Serbian majority in Croatian-held Krajina was barely noticed by our biassed anti-Serb media.  

5. How to be two-faced:

January 1, 1979, US-China joint communique:  “The United States of America recognizes the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China.” 

January 1, 1979, Taiwan Relations Act:  “shall maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or social or economic system, of the people of Taiwan.”

6. My detailed work proving India was at fault in the 1962 first Himalayan border dispute was overturned with a cynical notation from superiors: ‘We fail to see it is not in our interest to see India and China at each others throats.’ 

From several sources (including Kissinger, Whitlam etc),  the dogma of Chinese aggression in the Himalayas led directly to support for the Vietnam War intervention, also seen as Chinese aggression.

7. Over North Korea I saw closeup how the efforts of a Japanese diplomat, an acquaintance, to persuade his government to agree that in exchange for release of five Japanese abductees it should sign a declaration which would have seen relations with North Korea normalised, NK population released from starvation and its rocket testing ceased.

All this was overturned by a corrupt, rightwing, Western-admired politician called Abe Shinzo, determined to keep North Korea as an enemy. 

8. In 1973 I got to talk to US B52 pilots setting off early morning from Andersen base, Guam, to fly 6 hours to bomb innocent Cambodian farmers on what they said were ‘pretty green fields.’ They were fretting over whether they could return in time PM for the steak dinner and Filipino band. 

9. In 1975 I had to experience the stupidity of a society seeking to axe its prime minister over the phoney Vietnam Cables affair set up by treacherous Whitlam appointee, Alan Renouf OBE. It was left solely to me to save Whitlam’s name and, as it turned out, at the great damage to my own. 

Also the stupidity of a bureaucracy that allowed the 1975 breakdown of talks for a friendly relations treaty with Japan and for a sensible Australia Japan Foundation. (See my chapters on events in Canberra in 1975 for details.)

10. After being pushed aside by the free trader fanatics unable to grasp the merits of the Tariff Auctioning scheme which I saw in the seventies (and its later similarity, the US Selective Foreign Investment scheme) as the sole way to rescue Australia’s manufacturing base, I had the small satisfaction many years later watching those same free traders scrambling to embrace the ridiculous idea that building nuclear submarines in South Australia would rescue that manufacturing base. 

11. Shortly after one of the worst Western postwar atrocities (the WMD Iraq War – one million dead), I discovered an Australian involved in promoting the WMD lies for the US, Richard Butler, had been appointed governor of Tasmania by an ALP government. Few seemed to have realised.

12. In November,1964, I was to witness an Australian foreign minister sitting in the Kremlin trying to convince Soviet prime minister Kosygin and Foreign Minister Gromyko of China’s non-existent designs against Soviet territory and that this was why Moscow should join Australia and the US in Vietnam to defeat alleged Chinese aggression.

13. For a while I had hoped Japan with its  postwar pacifism and then its economic miracle would provide a model that could compete with the Western militarist arrogance. But Japan too was to be pushed by its militarist minority into becoming a member of the Western military/industrial complex. 

14.  Of all the Western policy mistakes of the last century the most outstanding is also the most little known – the effort to prevent Lee Kwan Yew from coming to power in Singapore.  He was seen as too leftwing – a trojan force for Chinese communist infiltration.

Instead Australia, the UK and US backed with large funds the hopeless Anglified Lim Yew Hock who could never win an election against Lee.

15. The lies and distortion over Ukraine after the successful, US-backed, rightist (‘neoNazi’) colour revolution of the 2014 Maidan was on a par with Vietnam as an example of  Western foreign policy mendacity.

The Minsk agreements aimed to deceive a trusting Moscow, and to give NATO, in partnership with Ukraine’s rightists, time of retrain and kill 18,000 people in Donetsk and Luhansk before Moscow finally moved to end this atrocity must rank high in European history for its cynicism.

 Moscow was then accused of unprovoked aggression when in fact its delay in making its justified intervention allowed others to make their aggressions.

It will be decades before the world will recover from these egregious mistakes.

The Future. 

So where do we go from here?

China still does not have a military/industrial complex. It does not aggress on its neighbours.

Is this our only hope for a better world? 

I admire its ability to absorb and overcome the unrelenting Western pressures and provocations over the South China sea and elsewhere (where its territorial claims are far less than Taiwan’s). I see its economic progress as continuing. I wait for the day when the West has no choice but to respect its leadership in foreign affairs via the BRICS system, and accept the value of what it has to offer in other areas.

Meanwhile we as individuals have to cope with the Anglo war-hungry environment in which we find ourselves now. 

We can only write and pray that the so-called West will thrash itself into military exhaustion and cease its arrogant abuse of democracy.

What else can we do? 

Learn an Asian language is my advice.

It will broaden your outlook, and encourage humility.