G7 Should Be Shut Down

[Bill Totten]

G7 Should Be Shut Down

This 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.

by Vijay Prashad

https://thetricontinental.org (May 25 2023)

https://consortiumnews.com (May 27 2023)

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Leon Golub. US, "Vietnam II", 1973.

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
demurred. Instead, he wrote in the Peace Memorial guest book: "May the
stories of this museum remind us all of our obligations to build a
future of peace".

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 its war against Japan by taking the moral high ground.

An apology would also contradict the US 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.

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Tadasu Takamine, Japan, Still frame from: "God Bless America", 2002.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was given the errand to warn China about
its "economic coercion" as he unveiled 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 acknowledgment of
neocolonial structures - including the permanent state of indebtedness
enforced by the International Monetary Fund - 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 demand "conditionalities" from
debt-ridden countries while forbidding China from negotiating when it
lends money.

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Kent Monkman, Canada, "The Scream", 2017.

Interestingly, the final statement 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 speech 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.

One complaint 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 that 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 argue, 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.

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Francesco Clemente, Italy, "Sixteen Amulets for the Road (XII)", 2012-2013.

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 percent of the world's
population while their combined Gross Domestic Product is merely 27
per cent of global GDP.

These are demographically and increasingly economically marginalised
states that want to use their authority, partly derived from their
military power, 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.

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Elisabeth Tomalin, UK, "Head", ca. 1920.

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 (Valery Giscard
d'Estaing), West Germany (Helmut Schmidt), and the UK (Anthony Barber)
to hold private consultations among the Atlantic allies.

At the Chateau 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 New International
Economic Order (NIEO) in the United Nations in 1974.

Schmidt, who was appointed German chancellor a year after the Library
Group's formation, reflected 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 dirigisme" and states' ability to
exercise their economic sovereignty.

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".

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Louise Rosler, Germany, "Street", 1951.

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, French President Nicolas
Sarkozy told 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.

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, DC, 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 told 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".

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.

https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-12.jpeg

Fabienne Verdier, France, "Branches et Bourgeons, Etude Vegetal" -
"Branches and Buds, Nature Study", 2010.

In his radio address on August 09 1945, US President Harry Truman said:




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 diary, 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".

Two-year-old Sadako Sasaki was one of 350,000 people living in
Hiroshima at the time of the bombings. She died 10 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 against laughing at the possibility of renewed military
conflict against China:

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead.

I'm only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow.

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind.

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead.

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play.

_____

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an
editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute
for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang
Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has
written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations (2008) and
The Poorer Nations (2014). His latest books are Struggle Makes Us
Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism (2022) and, with Noam
Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility
of US Power (2022).

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not
reflect those of Consortium News.

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Links: The original version of this article, at the URLs below,
contains several links to further information not included here:

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/g7-summit/

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/05/27/g7-should-be-shut-down/


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