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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://popularresistance.org/group-of-seven-should-finally-be-shut-down/">popularresistance.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Group Of Seven Should Finally Be Shut Down</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">By Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute For Social Research.</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">10–13 minutes</div>
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<img src="cid:ii_li62sf7t0" alt="image.png" width="392" height="111"><br><p>Above Photo: Leon Golub (USA), Vietnam II, 1973.</p>
<p>During the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit, the leaders of
Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the
United States visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, near where
the meeting was held. Not doing so would have been an act of immense
discourtesy. Despite many calls for an apology from the US for dropping
an atomic bomb on a civilian population in 1945, US President Joe Biden
has <a href="https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/05/c89d25ee10b8-biden-not-to-issue-apology-in-hiroshima-for-us-use-of-atomic-bomb.html">demurred</a>. Instead, he <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/05/20/national/politics-diplomacy/g7-leaders-hiroshima-museum-guestbook/">wrote</a> in the Peace Memorial guest book: ‘May the stories of this museum remind us all of our obligations to build a future of peace’.</p>
<p>Apologies, amplified by the tensions of our time, take on interesting
sociological and political roles. An apology would suggest that the
1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong and that the US did
not end their war against Japan by taking the moral high ground. An
apology would also contradict the US’s decision, backed fully by other
Western powers over 70 years later, to maintain a military presence
along the Asian coastline of the Pacific Ocean (a presence built on the
back of the 1945 atomic bombings) and to use that military force to
threaten China with weapons of mass destruction amassed in bases and
ships close to China’s territorial waters. It is impossible to imagine a
‘future of peace’ if the US continues to maintain its aggressive
military structure that runs from Japan to Australia, with the express
intent of disciplining China.</p>
<p>UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was given the errand to warn China about its ‘economic coercion’ as he <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-to-rally-g7-on-protecting-economy-from-state-threats">unveiled</a>
the G7 Coordination Platform on Economic Coercion to track Chinese
commercial activities. ‘The platform will address the growing and
pernicious use of coercive economic measures to interfere in the
sovereign affairs of other states’, Sunak said. This bizarre language
displayed neither self-awareness of the West’s long history of brutal
colonialism nor an acknowledgement of neocolonial structures – including
the permanent state of indebtedness enforced by the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) – that are coercive by definition. Nonetheless,
Sunak, Biden, and the others preened with self-righteous certainty that
their moral standing remains intact and that they hold the right to
attack China for its trade agreements. These leaders suggest that it is
perfectly acceptable for the IMF – on behalf of the G7 states – to <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-63-african-debt-crisis/">demand</a> ‘conditionalities’ from debt-ridden countries while forbidding China from negotiating when it lends money.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the final <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/05/20/g7-leaders-statement-on-economic-resilience-and-economic-security/">statement</a>
from the G7 did not mention China by name, but merely echoed the
concern about ‘economic coercion’. The phrase ‘all countries’ and not
China, specifically, signals a lack of unity within the group. European
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for instance, used her <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/von-der-leyen-nudges-biden-on-subsidies-at-g7-summit/">speech</a>
at the G7 to put the US on notice for its use of industrial subsidies:
‘We need to provide a clear, predictable business environment to our
clean tech industries. The starting point is transparency among the G7
on how we support manufacturing’.</p>
<p>One <a href="https://www.cgdev.org/publication/how-china-lends-rare-look-into-100-debt-contracts-foreign-governments">complaint</a>
from Western governments and think tanks alike has been that Chinese
development loans contain ‘no Paris Club’ clauses. The Paris Club is a
body of official bilateral creditors that was set up in 1956 to provide
financing to poor countries who have been vetted by IMF processes,
stipulating that they must pledge to conduct a range of political and
economic reforms in order to secure any funds. In recent years, the
amount of loans given through the Paris Club has declined, although the
body’s influence and the esteem its strict rules garner remain. Many
Chinese loans – particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative –
refuse to adopt Paris Club clauses, since, as Professor Huang Meibo and
Niu Dongfang <a href="https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202107/1229605.shtml">argue</a>,
it would sneak IMF-Paris Club conditionalities into loan agreements.
‘All countries’, they write, ‘should respect the right of other
countries to make their own choices, instead of taking the rules of the
Paris Club as universal norms that must be observed by all’. The
allegation of ‘economic coercion’ does not hold if the evidence points
to Chinese lenders refusing to impose Paris Club clauses.</p>
<p>G7 leaders stand before the cameras pretending to be world
representatives whose views are the views of all of humanity.
Remarkably, G7 countries only contain 10 per cent of the world’s
population while their combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is merely <a href="https://www.worldeconomics.com/Regions/G7/">27 per cent</a>
of global GDP. These are demographically and increasingly economically
marginalised states that want to use their authority, partly derived
from their <a href="https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2023/world-military-expenditure-reaches-new-record-high-european-spending-surges">military power</a>,
to control the world order. Such a small section of the human
population should not be allowed to speak for all of us, since their
experiences and interests are neither universal nor can they be trusted
to set aside their own parochial goals in favour of humanity’s needs.</p>
<p>Indeed, the agenda of the G7 was plainly laid out at its origin,
first as the Library Group in March 1973 and then at the first G7 summit
in France in November 1975. The Library Group was created by US
Treasury Secretary George Schultz, who brought together finance
ministers from France (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), West Germany (Helmut
Schmidt), and the UK (Anthony Barber) to hold private consultations
among the Atlantic allies. At the Château de Rambouillet in 1975, the G7
met in the context of the ‘oil weapon’ wielded by the Organisation for
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973 and the passage of the <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-regionalism-new-international-order/">New International Economic Order</a> (NIEO) in the United Nations in 1974. Schmidt, who was appointed German chancellor a year after the Library Group’s formation, <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2292-the-poorer-nations">reflected</a>
on these developments: ‘It is desirable to explicitly state, for public
opinion, that the present world recession is not a particularly
favourable occasion to work out a new economic order along the lines of
certain UN documents’. Schmidt wanted to end ‘international <em>dirigisme</em>’ and states’ ability to exercise their economic sovereignty.</p>
<p>The NIEO had to be stopped in its tracks, Schmidt said, because to
leave decisions about the world economy ‘to officials somewhere in
Africa or some Asian capital is not a good idea’. Rather than allow
African and Asian leaders a say in important global matters, UK Prime
Minister Harold Wilson suggested that it would be better for serious
decisions to be made by ‘the sort of people sitting around this table’.</p>
<p>The private attitudes displayed by Schmidt and Wilson continue to
this day, despite dramatic changes in the world order. In the first
decade of the 2000s, the US – which had begun to see itself as an
unrivalled world power – overreached militarily in its War on Terror and
economically with its unregulated banking system. The war on Iraq
(2003) and the credit crunch (2007) threatened the vitality of the
US-managed world order. During the darkest days of the credit crisis, G8
states, which then included Russia, asked surplus-holding countries of
the Global South (particularly, China, India, and Indonesia) to come to
their aid. In January 2008, at a meeting in New Delhi (India), French
President Nicolas Sarkozy <a href="https://socialistproject.ca/2010/06/b375/">told</a>
business leaders, ‘At the G8 summit, eight countries meet for two and a
half days and on the third day invite five developing nations – Brazil,
China, India, Mexico, and South Africa – for discussions over lunch.
This is [an] injustice to [the] 2.5 billion inhabitants of these
nations. Why this third-grade treatment to them? I want that the next G8
summit be converted into a G13 summit’.</p>
<p>There was talk during this period of weakness in the West that the G7
would be shut down and that the G20, which held its first summit in
2008 in Washington, D.C., would become its successor. Sarkozy’s
statements in Delhi made headlines, but not policy. In a more private –
and truthful – assessment in October 2010, former French Prime Minister
Michel Rocard <a href="https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WL0510/S00015/cablegate-ambassadors-meeting-with-michel-rocard.htm">told</a>
US Ambassador to France Craig R. Stapleton, ‘We need a vehicle where we
can find solutions for these challenges [the growth of China and India]
together – so when these monsters arrive in 10 years, we will be able
to deal with them’.</p>
<p>The ‘monsters’ are now at the gate, and the US has assembled its
available economic, diplomatic, and military arsenals, including the G7,
to suffocate them. The G7 is an undemocratic body that uses its
historical power to impose its narrow interests on a world that is in
the grip of a range of more pressing dilemmas. It is time to shut down
the G7, or at least prevent it from enforcing its will on the
international order.</p>
<p>In his radio address on 9 August 1945, US President Harry Truman <a href="https://www.pbs.org/perilousfight/psychology/the_atomic_option/letters/">said</a>:
‘The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first
attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians’. In
reality, Hiroshima was not a ‘military base’: it was what US Secretary
of War Henry Stimson called a ‘virgin target’, a place that had escaped
the US firebombing of Japan so that it could be a worthwhile testing
ground for the atomic bomb. In his <a href="http://www.doug-long.com/stimson5.htm">diary</a>,
Stimson recorded a conversation with Truman in June about the reasoning
behind targeting this city. When he told Truman that he was ‘a little
fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so
thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not
have a fair background to show its strength’, the president ‘laughed and
said he understood’.</p>
<p>Two-year-old Sadako Sasaki was one of 350,000 people living in
Hiroshima at the time of the bombings. She died ten years later from
cancers associated with radiation exposure from the bomb. The Turkish
poet Nazim Hikmet was moved by her story and wrote a poem against war
and confrontation. Hikmet’s words should be a warning even now to Biden
for laughing at the possibility of renewed military conflict against
China:</p>
<blockquote><p>I come and stand at every door<br>
But none can hear my silent tread<br>
I knock and yet remain unseen<br>
For I am dead for I am dead.</p>
<p>I’m only seven though I died<br>
In Hiroshima long ago<br>
I’m seven now as I was then<br>
When children die they do not grow.</p>
<p>My hair was scorched by swirling flame<br>
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind<br>
Death came and turned my bones to dust<br>
And that was scattered by the wind.</p>
<p>I need no fruit I need no rice<br>
I need no sweets nor even bread<br>
I ask for nothing for myself<br>
For I am dead for I am dead.</p>
<p>All that I need is that for peace<br>
You fight today you fight today<br>
So that the children of this world<br>
Can live and grow and laugh and play.</p></blockquote>
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