THE French interior minister, Manuel Valls, reacted with shock and horror at the revelations in the French newspaper Le Monde that the US spy agency had intercepted French phone calls on ‘a massive scale’.
The scale is indeed massive, with the US National Security Agency (NSA) being reported as having recorded 70.3 million phone calls made by French citizens between 10 December 2012 and 8th January 2013.
Valls complained that ‘If a friendly country – an ally – spies on France or other European countries, that is completely unacceptable.’
The French government of Francois Hollande has indeed tried its best to prove itself a loyal ally to US imperialism, offering total support to Obama’s attempt to form a coalition of the willing to invade Syria, and engaging in imperialist adventures in Africa, but this has not prevented the NSA from targeting the country and treating it as an enemy.
For the brutal reality of capitalism is that there are no allies only capitalist competitors who, at this stage of the world crisis, will have to be smashed if US capitalism is to survive.
The subjects of this intense surveillance were not ‘terrorists’ or criminals but the main targets were business men and women, politicians and members of the French administration.
The object clearly was to amass as much information as possible which could be of use in any economic war against France and every other country in the world.
Mexico has also this weekend complained about new allegations made by the German magazine, Der Spiegel, that the NSA had hacked the email of its previous president, Felipe Calderon, while he was still in office.
The magazine reported that in 2010 the NSA had hacked into his account and turned his office into ‘a lucrative source of information’ on diplomatic and economic issues.
According to Der Spiegel, the NSA amassed a huge amount of ‘diplomatic, economic and leadership communications which continue to provide insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability’.
The Mexican government condemned the NSA hacking saying ‘This practice is unacceptable, illegal and against Mexican and international law,’ before complaining that ‘In a relationship between neighbours and partners there is no place for the actions that allegedly took place’.
Brazil has also been targeted as a priority despite its new president, Dilma Rousseff, doing her best to cuddle up to US imperialism.
Five weeks ago she cancelled a trip to Washington and launched a blistering attack on the spying operation conducted by the NSA and mainly targeted on economic intelligence especially relating to the oil corporation in which the Brazilian government holds a majority stake.
Brazil possesses enormous offshore oil reserves and US imperialism certainly has its eye on securing them by whatever means necessary.
These revelations are just the tip of the iceberg, as the whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed, the NSA, along with its faithful followers at Britain’s spy agency GCHQ, have developed systems enabling it to hack and tap virtually every phone call and email in the world.
The shock expressed by these governments like France and Mexico, comes from the realisation that all this spying by the US is not just aimed at the working class and its organisations – the real enemy as far as the capitalist governments of the world are concerned – but is also aimed at every other capitalist nation.
In this period of catastrophic capitalist crisis, US imperialism has no ‘friends’ or ‘allies’ it only has competitors that must be ruthlessly crushed in order to defend American capitalism.
The only future that capitalism holds for humanity is one of war against both the working class and its rivals. The only class that can offer humanity a future is the working class advancing to carry out the world socialist revolution.
This means building the revolutionary leadership of the Fourth International in every country