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Category: Obituary

  • Pasifika leaders remember ‘stand-out community leader’ Fa’anānā Efeso Collins

    By Eleisha Foon, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Fa’anānā Efeso Collins is being remembered as a pillar of the Pacific community with a “big heart of service”, who loved being a husband and father.

    The 49-year-old Samoan-Tokelauan leader and Greens MP has been described as someone who embodied the Samoan proverb: “o le ala i le pule o le tautua” — the pathway to leadership is through service.

    Prominent leaders say Fa’anānā was “a strong community advocate”, known for serving disadvantaged communities.

    A beloved father, husband, brother and friend, Fa’anānā died suddenly in Auckland yesterday afternoon and leaves behind a strong legacy of service as someone whose mission was helping the poor.

    Health leader Sir Collin Tukuitonga said his death sent shock waves across the region, especially in the heart of South Auckland, where he grew up and had spent most of his time serving others.

    “Shocking is an understatement. He was on the same mission as the rest of us [Pacific leaders]. A good man. Good community values. It’s absolutely devastating for his family, for the Pasifika community, for NZ and beyond.

    “Efeso was a rare person. The Pasifika community is not well endowed with community leaders like Efeso – ethical, strong, community-minded.”

    ‘Stand out community leader’
    Tukuitonga noted Fa’anānā’s contribution to students when he became the first Polynesian president of the Auckland University Students’ Association in the late 1990s.

    “He did a lot at university for students, for local government. He was a stand-out community leader. A number of us were hopeful he would also have an impact at national Parliament, no doubt his legacy will live on in many of the things he had supported.”

    National candidate and longtime friend Fonoti Agnes Loheni said he was “a very special person”.

    “I am grateful for our friendship. His faith in God made him strong. He was a very fearless and fierce voice for the poor. He had a big heart of service. He was not only an advocate but also a man of action,” she said.

    Loheni acknowledged his family, wife and two girls, saying just last week they had connected during his induction into Parliament and he shared with her just how much he loved his family.

    “He was catching me up on his wife and his daughter. That was it for him, being a husband and a father were the main roles for him. The most important.”

    Loss felt across region
    Former minister for Pacific peoples Aupito William Sio said the loss was being felt across the region.

    Tonga’s Princess also paid tribute online.

    “It was no mystery to any of us in the islands how loved he was by many of our Pasifika community in New Zealand.”

    Aupito William Sio
    Aupito William Sio . . . “His [Fa’anānā’s] profile reached the four corners of the Pacific region.” Image: Johnny Blades / VNP

    Sio said: “His [Fa’anānā’s] profile reached the four corners of the Pacific region. He was getting support from overseas when he ran for mayor. He gave everybody the belief that anybody can achieve the highest office in NZ society. Even though he didn’t win it he got major endorsements from two political parties and made everyone hopeful of the future.”

    Sio said Fa’anānā was always speaking truth to power, recalling the night of his swearing-in as an Auckland councillor.

    “He confronted racism and discrimination in the council. I think he made everyone uncomfortable and made them reflect on their behaviours. I think he was fearless, he woke everybody up. It enabled the next generation to build some confidence in who they were.”

    Friends and colleagues of Fa’anānā have told RNZ Pacific their thoughts were with his family, wife and children.

    ‘He was always there to help’
    Hana Schmidt, a director of Papatoetoe-based, Pasifika-led creative agency Bluwave, counted Fa’anānā as one of her mentors and supporters.

    She told RNZ Nights that a lot of young people were able to relate to him and speak to him, because he could relate to their experiences growing up in South Auckland

    “He was an awesome person gave a lot of guidance to those in south Auckland who are in the community space, and also the business space and the governance space.”

    She said he was always there to help, and wasn’t always wearing his political hat

    “He would rather have genuine connections with the youth that he did come into contact with, the conversations were very genuine and close to heart.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • They’re Lying about Alexei Navalny “Putin’s Enemy”

    Was Alexei Navalny really Putin’s main opponent? Was he poisoned by the Russian government who then killed him in prison? Was he even popular in Russia? Well, no to all of those things and we show you what the West will not tell you while they mourn their favorite media darling.

    The post They’re Lying about Alexei Navalny “Putin’s Enemy” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tributes flow over death of French ‘peacemaker’ minister in New Caledonia

    By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific French Pacific desk correspondent

    One of the key players in the restoration of peace in New Caledonia in the 1980s, Louis Le Pensec, died last week aged 87.

    Le Pensec is regarded as one of the main actors in the negotiations that led to the signing of the Matignon-Oudinot Accords in 1988 which put an end to half a decade of a bloody civil war in the French Pacific territory.

    He was then French Minister for Overseas Territories and was specifically tasked by French Prime Minister Michel Rocard to bring pro-France and pro-independence politicians and militants to a truce and an eventual agreement.

    The first of the two agreements, the Matignon Accord, was signed between pro-French leader Jacques Lafleur and the charismatic pro-independence figure Jean-Marie Tjibaou under the auspices of Socialist PM Rocard.

    Le Pensec took care of the second pact, the Oudinot Accord, signed a few weeks later in August 1988.

    The set of agreements mostly enacted the return of civil peace in New Caledonia, but also paved the way for a possible self-determination future for New Caledonia.

    Return to civil peace
    Ten years later, in 1998, the Nouméa Accord paved the way for a series of pro-autonomy measures, including the creation of three provinces and their assemblies, a Congress and a local “collegial” government.

    It also prescribed a series of three referendums on New Caledonia’s self-determination, which have now taken place between 2017 and 2021.

    Tributes flowing from all sides
    The announcement of Le Pensec’s passing was followed by emotional reactions in New Caledonia.

    New Caledonia’s local government paid homage to the former minister, and the “essential role” he played in the 1980s negotiations to restore peace.

    “He laid the foundation stones for a lasting peace and a pacific coexistence between our different communities,” a statement said.

    “He contributed to the search for consensual solutions in order to lay the foundations of a constructive dialogue . . .  He opened the way to a period of social and political stability, thus allowing New Caledonia to progress serenely towards its destiny.

    “May we keep following this peaceful and brotherly path that he has left us,” New Caledonia’s government concluded.

    The local government also recalled Le Pensec explaining the context of the negotiations in the 1980s and how he was given the New Caledonian mission by French PM Rocard.

    “He told me: ‘Louis, now for you it’s [New] Caledonia’. I was shocked because I knew how big a challenge that was.

    And then (Rocard) told me: ‘You’ll see, a Breton [person from Brittany region, Western France] like you will get along fine with the Kanaks . . .  Later, I realised how true that was, how that Kanaks customs were in many ways similar to the customs of my Brittany,” he confided in 2018.

    “During our meetings, we never went straight to the point, first we would talk for about two hours about non-essential things, like the weather . . .  and also there was this thing we had in common, the feeling of belonging to what you can call minority people”.

    “So all this facilitated a mutual confidence, I do realise how lucky I have been to live that and above all to see that sometimes political talk can silence weapons”.

    Le Pensec was France’s Minister for Overseas Territories between 1988 and 1993.

    Some of the reactions coming from Paris included French Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who recently held the Overseas portfolio.

    “Through his participation to the building of the Matignon-Oudinot Accords, [Le Pensec] allowed the opening of a path of hope and peace for New Caledonia,” he messaged on X, formerly known as Twitter.

    Pro-independence politician and current chair of New Caledonia’s Congress, Roch Wamytan, paid tribute to Le Pensec’s “humanity” and capacity to listen and foster fructuous dialogue, “as opposed to his present colleagues”.

    Pro-independence demonstration in the streets of Nouméa
    Coinciding with the ex-minister’s death announcement, in Nouméa, on Thursday, one of the components of the pro-independence umbrella FLNKS, the Union Calédonienne (UC), was demonstrating in front of the Congress to voice its opposition to what they described as the French government’s “forceful” manners in its plans to change New Caledonia’s electoral roll eligibility with a constitutional amendment.

    The plan, announced after Christmas, is scheduled to set a vote in the French Congress (a special gathering of France’s two Houses, the National Assembly and the Senate) during the first quarter of 2024.

    Brandishing banners denouncing the “people’s colonisation” on Thursday, protesting participants included UC members and sympathisers, but also close entities such as the USTKE trade union, as well as a UC-revived, self-styled “field action coordination cell”.

    Other components of the FLNKS, such as the Kanak Liberation Party (PALIKA) and the Melanesian Progressist Union (UPM) are not taking part in those actions and have advised their members and supporters to refrain from doing so.

    Since last year, the French government has been trying to bring back pro-France and pro-independence politicians to the table so that they can reflect and envisage a new agreement for New Caledonia’ s political and institutional future.

    After more than 25 years of existence, the Nouméa Accord is deemed to have expired, but is now waiting for a new document to replace it.

    Just before her resignation, a few days ago, then Prime minister Elisabeth Borne had given New Caledonia’s political players until 1 July 2024 to agree on a new consensus for New Caledonia.

    She also announced France’s plan to “unfreeze” New Caledonia’s electoral roll (which was “frozen” under temporary restrictions for the implementation of the Nouméa Accord) so that French citizens who have resided in the territory for more than 10 years are eligible to vote for local elections.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • John Pilger: “A Majority of One”

    Last week, the Observer reported that the slogan ‘united we will win’ is a fixture on Israeli screens ‘for most TV news and talk shows’. Raviv Drucker, one of Israel’s leading investigative journalists, commented:

    In general, the Israeli media is drafted to the main goal of winning the war, or what looks like trying to win the war…

    The shock [of 7 October] was so brutal, and the trauma is so hard that journalists see their role now, or part of their role, to help the state to win the war. And part of it is showing as little as possible from the suffering in Gaza, and minimising criticism about the army.

    This is better termed anti-journalism, a propaganda system censoring even the most crucial facts. Thus, Anat Saragusti, press freedom director for Israel’s Union of Journalists and one of the few Israeli journalists to have reported from Gaza independently of the military during previous conflicts, commented:

    They cover the Palestinians only in the framework of security. You hardly see any women, no kids. The spirit is that they are all Hamas. I know it’s not easy, but I think the media are not doing their job.

    The Israeli public, then, is not seeing the footage of tiny, shivering infants with grotesque head wounds, of injured mothers cradling their dead babies – scenes that have been traumatising the rest of us on social media for three months. In a moment of stunning self-unawareness, the Observer added:

    US president Joe Biden warned Israelis soon after 7 October against repeating America’s mistakes in its wars of vengeance in Iraq and Afghanistan. He could also have warned about the failings of journalists who smoothed the path to those conflicts.

    One of the ‘failings of journalists who smoothed the path’ in the Observer, the Guardian, and everywhere else, was to portray the 2003 war of opportunity for oil in Iraq as an irrational ‘war of vengeance’ or a paranoid ‘war of national security’. To this day, British and US anti-journalism cannot discuss the brute fact that US-UK armies blasted the way open for US-UK oil companies like BP and Exxon to do big business in Iraq at the cost of more than one million Iraqi lives. Why? Because, as in Israel, ‘journalists see their role now… to help the state to win the war’. The global dominance of this anti-journalism is the correct context in which to evaluate the rare, authentic journalism of John Pilger, who died on 30 December, and the response of the corporate critics smearing him.

    ‘Reclaiming The Honour Of Our Craft’

    In exact opposition to the way Israeli ‘journalists’ are now burying the truth of their government’s genocide in Gaza, Pilger wrote in 2006:

    In reclaiming the honour of our craft, not to mention the truth, we journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are assigned – that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to “us”, and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us.

    Is it difficult to understand that war-winning propagandists deem the trashing of real journalists like Pilger a key part of their role? This week, Declassified UK reported:

    Recently declassified files show how the UK government covertly monitored Australian journalist John Pilger, and sought to discredit him by encouraging media contacts to attack him in the press.

    Consider that, in 2005, Pilger said of Blair and Iraq:

    By voting for Blair, you will walk over the corpses of at least 100,000 [ultimately, in excess of one million] people, most of them innocent women and children and the elderly, slaughtered by rapacious forces sent by Blair and Bush, unprovoked and in defiance of international law, to a defenceless country.’ (Pilger, “By voting for Blair, you will walk over the corpses of at least 100,000 people,” New Statesman, 25 April 2005.)

    Naturally, anti-journalism reflexively brands this ‘an extreme left-wing and anti-American bias’ that ‘consistently underscored much of’ Pilger’s reporting, as The Times opined in its obituary. In fact, there is nothing ‘extreme’, ‘anti-American’ or even ‘left-wing’ about opposing the mass killing of civilians for profit. The Times noted the Orwellian effort to transform Pilger’s name into a verb:

    … to Pilger, Pilgerise, or be Pilgered. It was defined as: “To present information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion; using emotive language to make a false political point; treating a subject emotionally with generous disregard for inconvenient detail; or making a pompous judgment on wrong premises.

    A clearer case of psychological projection can hardly be imagined from a newspaper that has done all this and more in promoting the West’s wars of aggression. Even if everything The Times said was true, the fact that Pilger was right in opposing numerous war crimes and The Times was not just wrong but complicit in supporting them, renders their criticism absurd. The Times continued that Pilger’s ‘polemical approach’ involved ‘looking at all international conflicts through an anti-American prism’ leaving him ‘a dupe of the eastern bloc and, later, the Putin regime’.

    No prejudicial prism is required to perceive the unmissable carnage generated by the American empire in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Gaza and Ukraine. Pilger was no more a dupe of Putin than he was ‘anti-American’. He wrote in 2022:

    ‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.

    When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.

    Of course, the ‘but’ was a betrayal for anti-journalism, but this was a rational question raised by a wide range of credible sources like Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Alastair Crooke and many others.

    ‘A Target No-One Else Can See’

    Oliver Kamm, formerly a leader writer for The Times, went further in a CapX blog republished in the Telegraph:

    Pilger was not really an investigative journalist at all, he fabricated his conclusions in order to accord with his premises. He operated with a combination of evasion, misdirection and fakery for decades.

    Kamm lamented ‘the weakness of his technical grasp of almost any given subject’.

    Back in the real world, Bill Haggerty, former Assistant Editor at the Mirror, wrote:

    Was a time when young students planning a career in print journalism wanted to be John Pilger – even the girls….

    I have never worked with anyone who came even close to matching the fire, outrage and descriptive power employed by Pilger when reporting from Vietnam, Cambodia and other hotspots for The Daily Mirror.’ (Bill Haggerty, ‘Hanging out with celebs has surpassed unearthing news,’ 15 November 2004, The Independent.)

    This needs emphasising – no-one else even came close. Schopenhauer observed:

    Talent hits a target no-one else can hit; Genius hits a target no-one else can see.

    For thirty years, we have tried to see the target Pilger so consistently hit. How did his writing stand completely apart in delivering such inspirational, oxygenating impact? Part of the answer is that Pilger’s work transcended the dry intellectuality of more academic dissidents. He wrote with their precision and insight, but with an added dimension of passion, emotion and personal warmth. His writing is ablaze with an outrage rooted, not in some mindless ‘anti-American’ hatred, but in its exact opposite: a deeply felt love for ordinary people treated as trash by the powerful. Pilger really did care, injustice tortured him, and it is this compassion that is communicated to readers and viewers in every article, book, film and in the many emails he sent us over two decades. Remarkably, reading and watching Pilger enhances our sense of our own dignity because he reminds us of how much we can care, of how much we do care. The last message he sent us on 15 November, six weeks before he died, referred to a recent media alert:

    Dear David

    So good to hear from you, as ever (and thanks for the BBC piece which I hadn’t seen); I’m at my most restorative when my optimism reminds me how blessed I am; the truth is I am on a “journey”, as almost everyone says now, and it sometimes feels like I am still waiting for the bus. I am making progress on paper, and I can walk unaided with a protective guard at my elbow. But it’s calling on a determination I know I have, but prefer to send on a lifelong sabbatical.

    Terrific piece, mate. What creatures Welby and the rest are…

    all my best

    John (Email to David Edwards, 15 November 2023)

    Pilger sent us this kind of positivity, often unbidden, time and again, year after year. In the world of left activism – which is rather more competitive and ego-ridden than we might like to imagine – no-one else has done anything remotely comparable. That Pilger sent us one last message of encouragement at a time when he was gravely ill gives an idea of his inexhaustible generosity of spirit. Note, also, the sense of fun and even joie de vivre even in this last message sent at such a difficult time. Pilger’s love of writing, of word play, of supporting other people, came out of a deep love of life. Kamm’s claim that Pilger was ‘famously humourless’ is magnificently off. The extra ingredient we haven’t mentioned – the spice that helped him hit the target no one else can see – was a wonderfully understated, sardonic humour aimed at the many ‘windbags’ he so loved to deflate. He emailed us about the BBC’s famous and compromised Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen:

    A few years ago, [Bowen] invited me to take part in a BBC special about war correspondents, and we spent an enjoyable hour or so “in conversation”. Although it was clear that tales of derring-do would have been preferred, I raised the unwelcome subject that the BBC was an extension and voice of the established order in Britain and its reporting on the Middle East and elsewhere reflected the prevailing wisdom — with honourable exceptions from time to time. My contribution was cut entirely from the programme. I emailed Bowen and sometime later received an unsatisfactory response that there wasn’t “time or space” in the film — something unsurprising like that. Censorship by omission is standard, if undeclared practice. (Email to David Edwards, 18 April 2008.)

    Kamm again lamented:

    While he talked a lot about the power of language, he didn’t know much about it.

    Again, this couldn’t be more wrong. Pilger had an uncanny ability to capture the truth of an individual, idea, or issue with spectacular concision. In this single, witty sentence he caught and burst the much-lauded myth of BBC ‘objectivity’:

    I’ve always found it amusing, bemusing, that so many people in the BBC see themselves as having entered into a Nirvana of objectivity, as if their objectivity and impartiality have been given to them intravenously.

    In October 2003, in 64 words, Pilger demolished the idolatry of Clinton and Blair, the mythmaking of the US-UK ‘special relationship’, the West’s ethical pretensions, the credibility of the Independent and indeed of the entire Westminster press pack:

    “The New Special Relationship” was the next good news, with Blair and Clinton looking into each other’s eyes in the garden at No 10 Downing Street. Here was the torch being passed, said the front page of the Independent, “from a becalmed and aimless American presidency to the coltish omnipotence of Blairdom”. This was the reverential tone that launched Blair into his imperial violence.’ (Pilger, ‘The Fall and Rise of Liberal England,’ New Statesman, 13 October 2003.)

    The focus on Clinton and Blair ‘looking into each other’s eyes in the garden at No 10 Downing Street’ pricked perfectly the Disneyfied charade by which so many are gulled. The contrast between the fawning idolatry of the Independent’s front page and Pilger’s final, pitch-black sentence was devastating. Just these three sentences left the legions of ‘journalists of attachment’, the ‘client journalists’, the ‘presstitutes’, looking exactly what they are – pitiful and foolish. And he did this endlessly. No wonder a journalist friend working in a major British TV news studio told us:

    You must see the reaction in a newsroom when one mentions Chomsky or Pilger. They run the other way, and I can see they are afraid by the look on their faces. Fact is that once you understand and admit what you are doing, you can’t continue with it. When I mentioned Chomsky, one person commented, “Oh, he’s way out there.” “Way out where?” I asked.’ (Email to Media Lens, 8 July 2005.)

    Thoreau observed:

    Any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one already. (Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, Penguin Classics, 1986, p. 397.)

    On all the key issues, Pilger was more right than his neighbours; he was a towering, landslide ‘majority of one’. Kamm left his worst till last in speculating on Kosovo ‘that Pilger himself invented the tale of extensive Nato losses which were being suppressed by the state and the news media, because he wished to stimulate popular opposition to government policy. He was spectacularly lying for the cause, which in this case was to assist a genocidal regime in its campaign of brutal repression’.  Even from Kamm’s perspective this was ill-advised. How can the author of an article devoted to trashing a journalist’s character finally expose himself as someone willing to stoop so low as to accuse someone who has just died, who cannot defend himself, of ‘spectacularly lying’? Any decent person, even Pilger’s enemies, must shrink in revulsion. It is not our intention to suggest that these smears merit serious consideration. But they do provide a reminder of just how blatantly corporate critics are willing to reverse the truth. As Pilger himself said:

    A common recipe for smear is half or quarter truth, conflation, misrepresentation, a pinch of sneer and a dollop of guilt-by-association. Stir briskly. (Email to David Edwards, 29 June 2011.)

    Pilger was able to make light of the many baseless smears but they sometimes wounded him deeply. The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, described Rousseau as ‘one of the most singular of all human beings… his extreme sensibility of temper is his torment’; ‘he is like a man who were stripped not only of his clothes but of his skin’. (Quoted, John Hope Mason, The Indispensable Rousseau, Quartet Books, 1979, p. 5.)

    Pilger was similarly sensitive to injustices perpetrated against others and against himself; hence his reputation for being ‘prickly’. If he was sometimes prickly, it was because he was sincere, human; because he felt things deeply, painfully. His great triumph was to use this sensitivity, this pain, in the cause of truth in defence of the powerless. Over the years, through many tests and travails, highs and lows, we developed a habit of ending our emails to each other with the same words. One last time, then, we say with all love and gratitude: Onwards, John!

    We’d like to express our sincere condolences to John Pilger’s partner, Jane Hill, and to their family. We wish them all the very best.

    The post John Pilger: “A Majority of One” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Revered Papuan chief Lukas Enembe ‘tortured to death like a boiling frog’

    The usually festive Christmas season in West Papua was marred by the death of beloved Papua Governor and Chief Lukas Enembe in an Indonesian military hospital on Boxing Day. The author personally witnessed the emotional village scenes of his burial and accuses the Indonesian authorities of driving him to his death through draconian treatment. Today is one year from when Enembe was “kidnapped” by authorities from his home and most Papuans believe the governor never received justice.

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Yamin Kogoya in Jayapura

    Papuans regard December as both the most sacred and toughest month of the year.

    December holds great significance in West Papua for two distinct reasons. First, the date  December 1 signifies a pivotal national moment for Papuans, symbolising the birth of their nationhood.

    Second, on December 25, the majority of Christian Papuans celebrate the birth of Christ.

    This date embodies the spirit of Christmas every year, characterised by warmth, family gatherings, and the commemoration of Jesus’ birth, which is profoundly revered among Papuans.

    The festive ambiance is heightened by the overlap with the celebration of Papuan independence on December 1, creating a doubly important month for the people.

    Papuans raise the Morning Star flag on December 1 every year to commemorate the birth of a new nation statehood, marked originally in 1961. The month of December is a time of celebration and hope — but it is also tragedy and betrayal, making it psychologically and emotionally the most sensitive month for Papuans.

    If there were an evil force aiming to target and disrupt the heart of Papuan collective identity, December would be the ideal time for such intentions.

    Papua Governor Lukas Enembe
    Papua Governor Lukas Enembe speaks to journalists after his inauguration at the State Palace in Jakarta in 2018. Image: HSanuddin/Kompas/JP

    Jakarta accomplished this on 26 December 2023 — Boxing Day as it is known in the West.

    Instead of offering a Christmas gift of redemption and healing to the long-suffering Papuans, who have endured torment from the Indonesian elites for more than 60 years, Jakarta tragically presented them with yet another loss — the death of their beloved leader, former Papua Governor and Chief Lukas Enembe.

    Enembe died at the Indonesian military hospital in Jakarta at 10 am local time.

    Chief Lukas Enembe died standing
    In the early hours of Tuesday, December 26, Enembe asked visiting family members to help him stand up from his hospital bed. The next thing he asked was for someone close to him to hug and embrace him.

    Before taking his last breath, Enembe looked around and kissed a family member on the cheek. He died while standing and being embraced by his family.

    A doctor was immediately summoned to attend Chief Enembe. Tragically, it was too late to save him. He was pronounced dead shortly after.

    Since October, he had been receiving treatment at the Indonesian military hospital. He fought courageously both legally and clinically for his life after he was “kidnapped” from his home by the Indonesian Corruption Commission (KPK) and Indonesian security forces on 10 January 2023.

    During his prolonged trial, he was severely ill and in and out of courtrooms and military hospitals. Some weeks after falling in KPK’s prison bathroom, he was rushed to hospital but brought straight back to his prison cell.

    Court hearings were sometimes cancelled due to his severe illness, while at other times, he briefly appeared online. At times, hearings took hours due to insufficient or lack of evidence, or the complexity of the case against him.

    Eventually, Chief Judge Rianto Adam Pontoh and other judges read out the verdict on 19 October 2023, in which he was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined Rp500 million for bribery and gratification related to infrastructure projects in Papua.

    One month after the ruling became legally binding, the judge also enforced an extra fine of Rp19.69 billion.

    He continued to maintain his innocence until the day he died.

    A floral tribute to the Enembe family from Indonesian President Joko Widodo
    A floral tribute and condolences to the Enembe family from Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Image: Yamin Kogoya

    Throughout the proceedings, Enembe asserted that he had never received any form of illicit payment or favour from either businessman cited in the allegations.

    Enembe and his legal team emphasised that none of the testimony of the 17 witnesses called during the trial could provide evidence of their involvement in bribery or gratuities in connection with Lukas Enembe.

    “During the trial, it was proven very clearly that no witness could explain that I received bribes or gratuities from Rijatono Lakka and Piton Enumbi,” Enembe said through his lawyer Pattyona during the hearing.

    In addition to asking for his release, Enembe also asked the judge to unfreeze the accounts of his wife and son which had been frozen when the legal saga began. He said his wife (Yulce Wenda) and son (Astract Bona Timoramo Enembe) needed access to their funds to cover their daily expenses.

    This request remains answered until today.

    Enembe asked that no party criminalise him anymore. He insisted that he had never laundered money or owned a private jet, as KPK had claimed. Enembe’s lawyer also requested that his client’s honour be restored to prevent further false accusations from emerging.

    As Enembe appealed the verdict for justice, he became seriously ill and was admitted to military hospital on October 23. He could nit secure the justice he sought, nor did he receive the medical care he persistently pleaded for.

    Singaporean medical specialist tried to save him
    Within a week of being admitted to the military hospital, his health rapidly deteriorated.

    Upon an emergency family request, Dr Francisco (a senior consultant nephrologist) and Dr Ang (a senior consultant cardiologist from Singapore Royalcare, heart, stroke and cancer) visited Chief Lukas on October 28.

    Under his Singaporean doctors’ supervision, Enembe underwent successful dialysis the next day.

    Enembe’s family requested a second visit on November 15 in carry out treatment for further dialysis and other complications..

    A third visit was scheduled for next week after the doctors were due to return from their holidays. Doctors were in the process of requesting that the chief be transported to Singapore for a kidney transplant.

    The doctors were shocked when they learned of the death of their patient — a unique and strong human being they had come to know over the years — when they returned from holiday.

    In her tribute to the former governor, Levinia Michael, centre manager of the Singapore medical team, said:

    “Mr Governor left us with a broken heart, but he is at eternal peace now. I think he was totally exhausted fighting this year battle with men on earth.”

    Requests for immediate medical treatment rejected
    There have been numerous letters of appeal sent from the chief himself, the chief’s family, lawyers, and his medical team in Singapore to the KPK’s office, the Indonesian president, and the Indonesian human rights commission, all requesting that Enembe be treated before going on trial. They were simply ignored.

    Before his criminalisation in 2022 and subsequent kidnapping in 2023, the torment of this esteemed Papuan leader had already begun, akin to a slow torture like that of a boiling frog.

    He confided to those near him that Jakarta’s treatment was a consequence of his opposition to numerous West Papua policies. His staunch pro-Papuan stance, similar to other leaders before him, ultimately sealed his fate.

    The real cause of the death of this Papuan leader and many others who died mysteriously in Jakarta will never be known, as Indonesian authorities are unlikely to allow an independent autopsy or investigative analysis to determine the real cause of death.

    This lack of accountability and lack of justice only fuels Papuan grievances and strengthens their unwavering commitment to fight for their rights.

    Emotional Papuan responses
    On the morning of December 28, the governor’s body arrived in Port Numbay, the capital of West Papua, or Hollandia during the Dutch era. (Indonesia later renamed the city Jayapura, meaning “city of victory”.)

    As the coffin of the beloved Papuan leader and governor began to exit the airport corridor, chaos erupted. Mourning and upset Papuans attacked the Papua police chief, and the acting governor of Papua, Ridwan Rumasukun’s face was smashed with rocks.

    Burning Indonesian flags during a protest at Chief Lukas Enembe's home village of Mamit
    Burning Indonesian flags during a protest at Chief Lukas Enembe’s home village of Mamit. Image: APR

    Papuan tribes of the highland village of Mamit, from where Chief Eneme originates, have asked all Indonesian settlers to pack their belongings and return home. His village’s airstrip was closed and there was a threat to burn an aircraft.

    Thousands marched while burning Indonesian flags and rejecting Indonesian occupation.

    Jayapura and its surroundings completely changed upon his arrival. All shops, supermarkets, malls, and offices were closed. The red-and-white Indonesian flag was flown half-mast.

    Condolence posters, messages, and flowers
    Condolence posters, messages, and flowers for the funerals of Lukas Enembe. Image: Yamin Kogoya

    The streets, usually heavily congested with traffic emptied. There were almost no Indonesian settlers visible on the streets. Armed soldiers and policemen were visible everywhere, anticipating any possible uprising, creating an eerie atmosphere of dread and uncertainty.

    Despite this, thousands of Papuans commenced their solemn journey, carrying the coffin on foot from Sentani to Koya while flying high West Papua’s Morning Star flag.

    Papuan mourners said goodbye to their governor with a mixture of sorrow and pride — a deep sense of sorrow for his tragic death, but also a sense of pride for what he stood for.

    Papuan mothers, fathers, and youth stood along roadsides waving, holding posters, and bidding farewell. They addressed him as “goodbye son”, “goodbye father”, “good rest chief of Papuan people”, “father of development”, “father of education”, and “most honest and loved leader of Papuan people”.

    The setting mirrored Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, greeted with palm leaves and resounding hosannas, only to face an unjust trial and execution on a Roman cross.

    Tens of thousands of Papuans carry the coffin of Chief Lukas Enembe
    Tens of thousands of Papuans carry the coffin of Chief Lukas Enembe from Sentani to Koya on December 28. Image: Screenshot APR

    At midnight, thousands of Papuans carried the coffin by foot to the chief’s home, and the funeral continued until the next day. About 20,000 people gathered, and not a single Indonesian settler or high Indonesian or security forces official was visible.

    Hundreds of flowers, posters with condolence messages from Indonesian’s highest offices, government departments, NGOs, individual leaders, governors, regencies, ministers, and even President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo himself flooded the chief’s home — which was displayed everywhere from the streets to the walls and fences.

    Finally, on the December 29, Governor and Chief Lukas Enembe was buried next to the massive museum he had built dedicated to West Papua and Russia in honour of his favourite 19th century Russian scientist, anthropologist and humanist, Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, who sought to save Papuans from European racism and savagery in the Papua New Guinea north-eastern city of Madang in the 1870s.

    Governor Chief Lukas Enembe built a museum
    Governor Chief Lukas Enembe built a museum to honour Russian scientist, anthropologist and humanist Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay. Image: Yamin Kogoya

    Thousands of TikTok videos, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, and other social media outlets have been flooded with many of his courageous speeches, remarks, and other observations made during his leadership.

    Papuans carry leaders’ coffins as sign of respect
    West Papua has had only four other Papuan leaders besides Chief Enembe who have been carried on foot by thousands of Papuans as a sign of honour and respect since Indonesian occupation began in 1963.

    Governor Chief Lukas Enembe was greeted by Papuan mothers and youth with flowers
    Governor Chief Lukas Enembe was greeted by Papuan mothers and youth with flowers as thousands carried his coffin from Sentani to Koya on December 28. The moment invoked the welcome of Jesus to Jerusalem with hosannas. Image: Screenshot APR

    They were Thomas Wainggai in 1996, a prominent West Papua independence advocate; Theys Eluay (2001), killed by Indonesian special forces; Neles Tebay, a Papuan leader who actively sought a peaceful resolution of conflict in West Papua through his Catholic faith and network; and Filep Karma, a prominent West Papuan independence leader and governor.

    When Papuans carry their dead leader by foot chanting, singing, dancing with a Morning Star flag, it means these leaders understood the deepest desire and prayers for Papuans people and that desire and prayer is freedom and independence to West Papua.

    Chief Lukas Enembe’s uniqueness lies in the fact that he was the only Indonesian colonial governor to receive such honour and respect from Papuans. While the other four honoured were not governors, they were active participants in the independence movement in West Papua.

    ‘Act of revenge’ by Jakarta against a courageous Papuan leader
    Jakarta finally accomplished what it had set out to accomplish for decades when Enembe became a threat to Jakarta’s grip on West Papua — to engineer his death.

    A direct assault on Lukas Enembe posed too much risk for Jakarta. Instead, Jakarta systematically criminalised, abducted, subjected him to legal processes, and clinically tortured him until his death on December 26.

    Regardless of how vile and malicious a criminal is in Western nations, if they are injured during their illegal acts, are captured alive or half alive, police, paramedics, and ambulances immediately transport them to a hospital to be treated until they are physically and mentally capable of standing a fair trial.

    This is protected under the western central legal doctrine — a person must be fit for trial.

    Governor and Chief Lukas Enembe was evidently unfit for trial or imprisonment. However, the Indonesian government, using its corruption-fighting institution (KPK), detained an ailing man in prison until he died.

    While Indonesians may see his death as a consequence of kidney failure, to Papuans he was tortured to death like a “boiling frog” much as Jakarta is doing to Papuans in West Papua as a whole.

    In less than 20-50 years from now, indigenous Papuans will be reduced to a point where they will be unable to reclaim their land. The Papuans themselves must unite and fight for their land.

    If the outside world fails to intervene, the fate of the Papuans will be like that of the original indigenous First Nation peoples of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

    A door of hope for reclaiming their land is becoming narrower and narrower as Jakarta employs every trick to divide them, control them and eliminate them.

    The Indonesian government is using highly sophisticated means to exterminate Papuans without the Papuans even being aware of it. Those who are aware are being eliminated.

    Chief Lukas Enembe was one of the few leaders who realised Papuans may face this bleak fate.

    Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Vale John Pilger, at times a near-lone voice for truth against power

    OBITUARY: By Peter Boyle and Pip Hinman of Green Left

    Sydney-born investigative journalist, author and filmmaker John Pilger died on December 31, 2023.

    He should be remembered and honoured not just for his impressive body of work, but for being a brave — and at times near-lone — voice for truth against power.

    In early 2002, the “war on terror”, launched by then United States President George W Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attack, was in full swing.

    After two decades, more than 4 million would be killed in Iraq, Libya, Philippines, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere under this bloody banner, and 10 times more displaced.

    The propaganda campaign to justify this ferocious, US-led, global punitive expedition cowed many voices, not least in the settler colonial state of Australia.

    But there was one prominent Australian voice that was not silenced — and it was John Pilger’s.

    ‘Breaking the silence’
    On March 10 that year, Sydney Town Hall was packed out with people to hear John speak in a Green Left public meeting titled “Breaking the silence: war, propaganda and the new empire”.

    Outside the Town Hall, about 100 more people, who could not squeeze in, stayed to show their solidarity.

    Pilger described the war on terror as “a war on world-wide popular resistance to an economic system that determines who will live well and who will be expendable”.

    He called for “opposition to a so-called war on terrorism, that is really a war of terrorism”.

    The meeting played an important role in helping build resistance in this country to the many US-led imperial wars that followed the US’ bloody retribution exacted on millions of Afghans who had never even heard of the 9/11 attacks, let alone bore any responsibility for them.

    That 2002 Sydney Town Hall meeting cemented a strong bond between GL and John.

    GL is proud to have been the Australian newspaper and media platform that has published the most articles by John Pilger over the years.

    Shared values
    For much of the last two decades, the so-called mainstream media were always reluctant to run his pieces because he refused to obediently follow the unspoken war-on-terror line.

    He refused to go along with the argument that every military expedition that the US launched (and which Australia and other loyal allies promptly followed) to protect privilege and empire were in defence of “shared democratic values”.

    The collaboration between GL and John was based on real shared values, which he summed up succinctly in his introduction to his 1992 book Distant Voices:

    “I have tried to rescue from media oblivion uncomfortable facts which may serve as antidotes to the official truth; and in doing so, I hope to have given support to those ‘distant voices’ who understand how vital, yet fragile, is the link between the right of people to know and to be heard, and the exercise of liberty and political democracy …”

    GL editors have had many exchanges with John over the years. At times, there were political differences. But each such exchange only built up a mutual respect, based on a shared commitment to truth and justice.

    The last two decades of John’s moral leadership against Empire were inadvertently confirmed a few weeks before his passing when US President Joe Biden warned Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu not to repeat the US’ mistakes after 9/11.

    “There’s no reason we did so many of the things we did,” Biden told Netanyahu.

    Focus on Palestine struggle
    John had long focused on Palestine’s struggle for self-determination from the Israeli colonial settler state. He condemned Israel’s most recent genocidal campaign of Gaza and, on X, praised those marching for “peaceful decency”.

    He urged people to (re)watch his 2002 documentary film Palestine is Still The Issue, in which he returned to film in Gaza and the West Bank, after having first done so in 1977.

    John was outspoken about Australia’s treatment of its First Peoples; he didn’t agree with Labor’s Voice to Parliament plan, saying it offered “no real democracy, no sovereignty, no treaty between equals”.

    He criticised Labor’s embrace of AUKUS, saying it was about a new war with China, a campaign he took up in his documentary The Coming War on China. While recognising China’s abuse of human and democratic rights, he said the US views China’s embrace of capitalist growth as the key threat.

    John campaigned hard for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange’s release; he visited him several times in Belmarsh Prison and condemned a gutless Labor Prime Minister for refusing to meet with Stella Assange when she was in Australia.

    He spoke out for other whistleblowers, including David McBride who exposed Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.

    Did not mince words
    John did not mince words which is why, especially during the war on terror, most mainstream media refused to publish him — unless a counterposed article was run side-by-side. He never agreed to this pretence of “balance”.

    John wrote about his own, early, conscientisation.

    “I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal,” he said on the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the 20th century — Vietnam.

    “I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.”

    John Pilger will be remembered by all those who know that facts and history matter, and that only through struggle will people’s movements ever have a chance of winning justice.

    Investigative journalist John Pilger
    Investigative journalist John Pilger was a journalistic legend . . . the Daily Mirror’s tribute to his “decades of brilliance”. Image: Daily Mirror

    Republished with permission from Green Left Magazine.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • RIP John Pilger

    A bright star in the firmament of justice has gone out.  One of the greatest journalists of our era has passed away.

    John Pilger was always on the side of the oppressed. He denounced Imperialism and all its violent predations–war, genocide, exploitation–as well as its endless lies and propaganda.  Till his death, he fought tirelessly for the freedom of Julian Assange, and his last article was a call to solidarity.

    John gave voice to the invisible and the voiceless: the hungry, the poor, the handicapped, the conscripted, the sanctioned & bombed,  the dispossessed, refugees, the chemically experimented on, the structurally adjusted, the coup’ed, the famine-expendable, the colonized, the genocided, the silenced, shining a light in the hidden, dark recesses of the hell of Empire and Capital.

    He denounced and fought racism, war, privatization, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, propaganda, advertising, nuclear madness, US coups,

    His filmography and writing is a rap sheet of the unceasing criminality of Empire.

    Arguably giving him the best homage it could render, the British Television Authority described him as “A threat to Western Civilization.”

    John was also prophetic: in 1970, he chronicled the insurrection of troops against the Vietnam war in The Quiet Mutiny.  In 1974, and again in 2002, he spoke out that “Palestine was still the Issue,” demanding that “the occupation of Palestine should end now”.  He warned about Japanese militarism and revisionism. In 2014, he warned that Ukraine, a “CIA theme park”, was preparing  “a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself”. Seven years ago, when only a few were aware, and even fewer were speaking out–in short words and articles–he released a full-length, full-throated documentary warning the world that the US was escalating catastrophically to War with China.

    John was not only a powerful critical journalist and world-changing filmmaker–Cambodia Year Zero is considered one of the most influential documentaries of the 20th century.  He was also a craftsman, a poet, artist–he understood the power of language but also understood that in a medium restricted by word counts, what it meant to make every word count.

    But it was John’s rich, resonant delivery–like a Shakespearean actor–that always struck me.  It contained the unmistakable, unimpeachable courage of moral integrity: a voice that knows it is speaking the truth.

    You will hear many things about him in the days to come–as we speak, the MSM are retrieving their pre-written, canned obituaries from the deep freeze–but John’s own words are most insightful.

    On the form of journalism:

    In all these forms the aim should be to find out as many facts and as much of the truth as possible. There’s no mystery. Yes, we all bring a personal perspective to work; that’s our human right. Mine is to be skeptical of those who seek to control us, indeed of all authority that isn’t accountable, and not to accept “official truths”, which are often lies. Journalism is or ought to be the agent of people, not power: the view from the ground.

    On making a difference:

    … the aim of good journalism is or ought to be to give people the power of information – without which they cannot claim certain freedoms. It’s as straightforward as that. Now and then you do see the effects of a particular documentary or series of reports. In Cambodia, more than $50 million were given by the public, entirely unsolicited, following my first film; and my colleagues and I were able to use this to buy medical supplies, food and clothing. Several governments changed their policies as a result. Something similar happened following the showing of my documentary on East Timor – filmed, most of it, in secret… Did it affect the situation in East Timor? No, but it did contribute to the long years of tireless work by people all over the world.

    On Social Media:

    Ironically, they can separate us even further from each other: enclose us in a bubble-world of smartphones and fragmented information, and magpie commentary. Thinking is more fun, I think

    On US Foreign Policy:

    seldom use the almost respectable term, US foreign policy; US designs for the world is the correct term, surely. These designs have been running along a straight line since 1944 when the Bretton Woods conference ordained the US as the number one imperial power. The line has known occasional interruptions such as the retreat from Saigon and the triumph of the Sandinistas, but the designs have never changed. They are to dominate humanity. What has changed is that they are often disguised by the modern power of public relations, a term Edward Bernays invented during the first world war because “the Germans have given propaganda a bad name”.

    On the economy:

    With every administration, it seems, the aims are “spun” further into the realm of fantasy while becoming more and more extreme. Bill Clinton, still known by the terminally naive as a “progressive”, actually upped the ante on the Reagan administration, with the iniquities of NAFTA and assorted killing around the world. What is especially dangerous today is that the US’s wilfully and criminally collapsed economy (collapsed for ordinary people) and the unchallenged pre-eminence of the parasitical “defence” industries have followed a familiar logic that leads to greater militarism, bloodshed and economic hardship.

    On peace activism:

    The current spoiling for a fight with China is a symptom of this, as is the invasion of Africa….I find it remarkable that I have lived my life without having been blown to bits in a nuclear holocaust ignited by Washington. What this tells me is that popular resistance across the rest of the world is potent and much feared by the bully – look at the hysterical pursuit of WikiLeaks. Or if not feared, it’s disorientating for the master. That’s why those of us who regard peace as a normal state of human affairs are in for a long haul, and faltering along the way is not an option, really.

    On the future:

    I’m confident that if we remain silent while the US war state, now rampant, continues on its bloody path, we bequeath to our children and grandchildren a world with an apocalyptic climate, broken dreams of a better life for all and, as the unlamented General Petraeus put it, a state of “perpetual war”. Do we accept that or do we fight back?

    John Pilger, Presente!

    *****
    Read and watch more of John Pilger’s work on his website: https://johnpilger.com/
    https://johnpilger.com/videos
    https://johnpilger.com/filmography

    The post RIP John Pilger first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Henry Kissinger: Snake Oil Salesman of Gangster Realism

    “‘He’ll have ye smilin’,” an old Irish saying goes, “while he takes the gold out of your teeth’.”

    — Charles Glass, London Review of Books, Oct 20, 2022

    The obituaries of criminals, masterful or otherwise, are always going to be sordid matters.  Either one has time for the deeds, giving column space to their execution and legacy, or one focuses on the extraneous details: voice, accent, suit, demeanour. “He may have killed the odd person or two, but he did have style.”

    Much of the Henry Kissinger School of Idolatry is of the latter propensity.  The nasty deeds are either misread or diminished – notably when they have to do with the global infliction of mass death, prolongation of conflict, or the overthrow of democratic governments.  Instead, time is given to the perceptions of what is supposedly meant to have been the workings of an oversized brain in international relations.  Rather than seeing the inside of a prison or being bothered to the gallows by overly fussy lawyers, Kissinger spent ample time at high level receptions receiving huge wads of cash for offering his inner expertise.  He was admired, adulated and pampered; the critics kept at bay.

    As former National Security Advisor and US Secretary of State, he was meant to be the great exponent of realism, which, rebadged, might simply be described as elevated gangsterism at play.  His 1957 work, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 studied the Europe of the admired diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternich, revealing a mind keen on keeping international power in fine equilibrium.  Stability and order were primary goals; justice and human rights were concepts that had little to no role to play.

    Metternich, alongside British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh, was to construct a post-Napoleonic order suspicious, even paranoid, of revolutionary movements.  It held social and political progress in check; doused the fires of freedom.  As a result, Kissinger reasons, Europe maintained stability from Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. For all that, Kissinger would write that Metternich lacked “the ability to contemplate an abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome – or perish in the process.” As if envisaging his own future role in US diplomacy, he suggested that “men become myths, not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but the tasks they set themselves.”

    This gnomic drivel was precisely the sort that fed a media illusion of the big-brained sage in command.  His bloodied hands were washed on the international stage by such absurd titles as “Henry of Arabia,” one given to him by Time Magazine in 1974.  The same magazine would give him front-cover billing in February 1969 as one keen on “New Approaches to Friends and Foes”, and repeat the treatment on no fewer than fourteen other occasions.  Not to be outdone, Newsweek was positively crawling in depicting the German-Jewish émigré who made his name at Harvard and on the world stage as “Super K”.

    As the Establishment Courtesan, Kissinger sought out such society reporters as Sally Quinn of The Washington Post to emetically inquire why she did not assume the master strategist to be “a secret swinger”.  Sadistic touches to his curriculum vitae could thereby be ignored, including a butcher’s bill that would eventually run into roughly 3 million souls from the Vietnam War to Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh, the “dirty wars” of Latin America, and a number of encouragements and interventions in Africa.

    This also meant that abysmal contributions such as his spoiling role in prolonging the war in Vietnam by several years in order to satisfy the electoral lust of his eventual boss, Richard Nixon, could be overlooked in favour of “shuttle diplomacy ” in ending the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973.  In this, he resembled, as Charles Glass suggested with striking salience, a certain “American frontier archetype: the peddler whose wagonload of patent medicines promised to cure every ailment.  By the time the rubes realised that his bottles contained snake oil, he had left town.”

    A far better appreciation of the Kissinger legacy would be gained by consulting such publications as that ever reliable, if bleak source of primary documents, the National Security Archive.  The Archive pursued the US government with admirable tenacity, alleging that Kissinger had sought to remove, retain and control some 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of his phone conversations (“telcons”) as “personal papers” when he left office in 1977.

    As the director of the Archive, Tom Blanton, piquantly remarked, “Kissinger’s aides later commented that he needed to keep track of which lie he told to whom.”  But the telcons are also illustrative, less of Kissinger the realist who furnished his employer with fearless advice than that of a truckler, obedient to his paymaster.  When Nixon made the decision to commence the secret bombing of Cambodia to target Hanoi’s supply routes in March 1969, Kissinger conveyed the order to Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird without demur. He also states firmly that “there is to be no public comment at all from anyone at any level either complaining or threatening”.  When public comment did make its way to the New York Times in May that year, Kissinger badgered the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to place a number of selected government officials and journalists under surveillance.

    While one’s death is rarely a planned thing – the Grim Reaper makes calls at all unexpected hours – there was a sense in Kissinger’s case that he had cheated it just long enough.  He made it to a century without his collar being fingered.  He avoided, in the early 2000s, attempted legal suits for human rights violations in the UK and France.  Despite failing health, he was surrounded by the Establishment sycophants of which he had been one, worshipping power over principle while proffering snake oil.  And there were a goodly number of them for the sendoff.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Evil That Men Do

    Although I have never been anything but a professional dilettante, I have spent some time in a number of professions. One of these was political correspondent at the United Nations headquarters from 1985 until 1987. Another was as professor of English in Berlin after the GDR was annexed in 1989. In the accidents of my amateur activity, I have managed to meet or at least hear in person a few personalities of public life (in German: Personen öffentliches Leben). These include artists as well as politicians and other notorious people.

    One September day, my spouse at that time and I went from our Westend home to one of Berlin’s many private theaters, the Renaissance Theater in Charlottenburg. The occasion was an event sponsored by the Bertelsmann Stiftung (a powerful Westphalian media conglomerate with the expected orientations). The Berliner Lektionen (Berlin Readings— or lessons) was lecture series with an eclectic choice of people from all aspects of public life. The program was directed by Ulrich Eckart, then director of the Berlin Festival.

    My particular excitement, not shared by my far less politically interested wife, was the meeting on the stage of the then grand old man of foreign policy in US-occupied Germany and the semi-retired Rockefeller courtier, Heinz Kissinger, aka known as Henry. Well aware that Heinz Kissinger was born in Germany and recalling that he always spoke English with an atrocious accent, I was curious to hear the man in person in the once capital of the country in which he was born and — like Leo Strauss — abandoned for Columbia before the Great War against the Soviet Union began.

    After a duly laudatory introduction by his junior, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Heinz Kissinger began his introduction in the language he learned at birth. My wife and I listened with incredulity as he told the audience he could not speak German. After this attempt at humility by a man notorious for his lack thereof, he began his lecture in English. My wife, although a native of the region north of the Rhine, was fluent in English. She looked at me with consternation. She could barely understand a word he spoke once he switched to English. As a teacher far more accustomed to the bandwidth in which English is spoken by non-native speakers, I was merely insulted by the rudeness of a man who lacked the courtesy to speak to his former countrymen in their own tongue.

    Heinz Kissinger spoke his entire life to those for whom obsequiousness was a paramount virtue. It is difficult to say whether he was honored by so many because of the diplomatic readiness for self-deception or the vanity of power itself. It could not have been the talent for language or communication. For decades, Heinz Kissinger has been praised as a sober representative of balance of power politics. His entire career was based ostensibly on the lessons of the Congress of Vienna. However, the Metternich order was just the first step of reaction against the Peace of Westphalia and the attempt to democratize it in the French Revolution. His famous opening to China was nothing more than calumny to aggravate the divisions between the Soviet Union. And most recently the Establishment press propagated the same “mystique du Kissinger” when he travelled to Beijing. His recent homilies about Ukraine and Russia are the pathetic wheezing of a man who maybe felt in his last breaths that one or two sane words might save him from the Gates.

    As I was considering my reaction to the demise of this grand courtier of capitalism, I searched for the date when I had the dubious honor of an audience. It was 11 September 1994.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Laurie Wiseberg, pioneer human rights defender, is no more

    On 12 October 2023, Laurie Wiseberg’s son, Jesse Scoble, informed the world on her passing on 11 October 2023 in Montréal. 

    “It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of Dr. Laurie Sheila Wiseberg, Laurie to most, Dr. Wiseberg to a few, Libby to her family, Nama to my kids, and mom to me. How does one sum up a life, let alone one as impressive and eventful as hers?

    It would take another lifetime to try to capture it. She described herself in simple terms as:

    Dr. Laurie S. Wiseberg (project advisor and contributor) was a human rights scholar/advocate who taught and wrote extensively about the work of human rights for non-governmental organizations. She served as Executive Director of a human rights NGO (Human Rights Internet) for 20 years. Dr. Wiseberg spent the following 20 years doing humanitarian work “in the field”, assisting United Nations agencies in providing better protection for persons displaced as a result of conflict or environmental disasters in countries across the globe.

    Jesse will write a proper obit for her in the coming days, but wanted us to know that after a year long struggle she left this world on her own terms. “A glass of red wine in her hand“.

    I personally have known Laurie almost all of my ‘human rights life’, starting with the creation of HURIDOCS some 40 years ago. Here the first picture i have of her, September 1978 in Cambridge at an Amnesty meeting.

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Dianne Feinstein: National Security State Diva

    The tributes for the late Democratic Senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, heaped up as word got out. Having served as San Francisco mayor and a senator for three decades from what, on paper at least, is meant to be a progressive state, Feinstein proved herself to be an establishment creature of gusto and brass.

    The tributes have been laudatory in their endorsed, burnished sexism – womanhood heralded as a bulwark for the National Security State (NSS). They do show, on some level, that she could play and scrap on the imperial board along with her male colleagues in ways equally apologetic, shallow and vulgar. As a member of the George W. Bush administration, former national security advisor and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice ceremonially saluted Feinstein as one who would “always be remembered as an extraordinary human being in American political history”.

    Republicans such as Ted Cruz flattered and gushed with totemic, boyish reverence at this “trailblazer for women”. The CIA Director, William Burns, praised her role as “the first woman to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

    It all made sense: the senator was a paid-up member of the NSS with a ring seat, lounge points and frequent flyer miles in the game of empire. Voting for war came naturally, be it the bombing of Serbia in 1999 or supporting the October 2002 Iraq war resolution, the latter endorsed despite Feinstein’s briefing by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter that no evidence had been found suggesting that Iraq continued to possess weapons of mass destruction.

    According to Ritter, he met the senator along with a half-dozen staffers and aides in a conference room in the Capitol building only to face the following: “Your position is causing us some difficulty,” she grumbled. “You are making the US look bad in the eyes of the world.” When confronted by Ritter about whether she had seen “unequivocal proof that Iraq retained WMD,” the senator admitted: “I have seen no such intelligence.” The agenda had been set, the dish pre-cooked for an invasion deserving the condemnation of being a crime against peace.

    What must surely strike some of her flower garlanding adulators as curious is that Feinstein’s devotion to the national security state was so profound it led her to formulate a critical, contemporary argument of dangerous import: Publishers, even if based in a foreign jurisdiction and not being US nationals, should still be prosecuted for publishing the national security details of the United States, even material disclosing war crimes, atrocities and the like. The reasoning for this is evident in a Wall Street Journal article in December 2010; her unwavering target: Julian Assange.

    From the outset, the senator insisted that the release of the “250,000 secret State Department cables” by WikiLeaks had damaged the US national interest and endangered “innocent lives.” Assange “should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.” Feinstein, with no sound evidence or reason, told her readers that the Australian publisher “continues to violate the Espionage Act of 1917,” a wartime relic that criminalises the possession or transmission by an unauthorised person of “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe would be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

    She goes on to tell her readers that Assange was undoubtedly “aware of this law,” a clumsy, sinister stab at journalists that they best know their place when it comes to showing the undergarments of the US imperium.

    Feinstein proves ignorant of the bumbling journalists at the Guardian, who left the key for decrypting the files public and vulnerable prior to the now infamous “dump” of documents. “Guardian investigations editor, David Leigh, recklessly, and without gaining our approval,” WikiLeaks stated at the time, “knowingly disclosed the decryption passwords in a book published by the Guardian.”

    Feinstein shows a deep, unquestioning interest in the advice from November 27, 2010, sent by US State Department Legal Advisor Harold Hongju Koh. To read such advice is to understand the current indictment against Assange, and the legal theory that so enthralled the Trump administration and the Department of Justice.

    Tediously, and not acknowledging the fact that the US State Department cables had already been, in their entirety, published by other outlets (Cryptome, anybody?), Koh rambles about ground rather familiar to the current prosecution effort: The documents Assange had disclosed would, “Place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals – from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security”.

    Other meretricious views follow with boring banality, all intent on showing the US imperium as faultless and noble. The disclosure, Koh argues, risked compromising “ongoing military operations, including operations to stop terrorists, traffickers in human beings and illicit arms”; and the jeopardising of “on-going cooperation between countries – partners, allies and common stakeholders – to confront the common challenges from terrorism to pandemic diseases to nuclear proliferation that threaten global stability.” The NSS is truly troubled when its lid gets blown.

    Instead of expectorating at such erroneous gabbling (no evidence of these claims has ever been proven), California’s good senator chewed the cud with bovine diligence, steaming away at the claim that Assange broke “the law and must be stopped from doing more harm”. And as for the First Amendment? “[T]he Supreme Court has held that its protections of free speech and freedom of the press are not a green light to abandon the protection of our national interests.”

    The senator, in views that anticipated the current indictment against the publisher, goes on to undercut the constitutional buttressing offered by the First Amendment by denying Assange the tag of “journalist”. “He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”

    Not content with stopping there, Feinstein went further in sharply condemning the publisher’s attempts to create a “social movement” (how dare he?) that would involve exposing the secrets of the US imperium. For the senator, the secret is always good, the clandestine, necessary.

    Throughout her Congressional tenure, notably as chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Feinstein would continue to condemn the very leaks that oxygenate the democratic polity and check imperial overreach. In 2012, she condemned a spate of leaks disclosing the US role in the “Stuxnet” cyberattack that crippled Iran’s nuclear program, the executive decision-making process behind extrajudicial killings by US drones in Pakistan and Yemen and the infiltration of an al-Qaeda Yemeni affiliate by an agent. People, she exclaimed with resignation to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “just talk too much. And this didn’t used to be the case, but suddenly, it’s – it’s like a spreadable disease.”

    While Feinstein continues to be feted, Assange continues to battle a cobbled, cod nasty legal document of spurious stretching that should make any lawyer blush. But as we are not dealing with the law here so much as vengeful politics against everything from concrete revelations to what Umberto Eco called the “empty secret,” the matter is almost academic. Feinstein, now passed, finds herself on the fast track for canonisation by the NSS. Truly something to make any progressive Californian proud.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Obituary: Meraia Taufa Vakatale – Fiji anti-nuclear activist and feminist trailblazer

    By Asenaca Uluiviti and Sadhana Sen

    Fiji recently lost Dr Meraia Taufa Vakatale, a monumental woman leader who broke many glass ceilings with her numerous firsts. As an educationalist, diplomat and politician, she profoundly impacted on the lives of tens of thousands in Fiji and the Pacific region, particularly young women in politics and anti-nuclear activists.

    Dr Vakatale was Fiji’s first woman deputy prime minister, the first woman to be elected as a cabinet minister, the first female to be appointed as a deputy high commissioner, and the first Fijian woman principal of a secondary school in Fiji.

    Dr Vakatale was also a fervent anti-nuclear activist. In 1995 she took a costly stand against her party and the then Sitiveni Rabuka government on renewed French nuclear testing on Moruroa Atoll in “French” Polynesia.

    Joining a protest march against French testing led to her losing her cabinet position in the Rabuka-led government, in which she served as a member of the Soqosoqo ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei (SVT) party.

    She held the portfolio of Education, Science and Technology in two stints — from 1993 to 1995 and then, after being reinstated, from 1997 to 1999. In 1997, she was appointed Deputy Prime Minister.

    In 2000, she resigned as President of the SVT party over the 2000 coup fallout.

    She was a woman ahead of her time. Dedicated to her principles, she “paid it forward” to Pasifika generations by her fight to keep the Pacific a nuclear-free zone.

    Idealism inspired thousands
    Dr Taufa Vakatale’s spirited and unwavering determination, her activism, idealism and her principles inspired thousands of women and youth to fearlessly pursue their dreams.

    The name Taufa Vakatale was first linked to the renowned all-girls Adi Cakobau School when she became a pioneer student there in 1948, aged 10 years. She was also the first female student at the all-male Queen Victoria School.

    She completed her 6th form year at Suva Grammar School, where she became the first Fijian female to pass the NZ University Entrance. She entered the University of Auckland and in 1963 was the first Fijian woman to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree, privately funding her studies from her wages as a teacher in Fiji.

    Taufa Vakatale went on to further studies in the United Kingdom from 1963 to 1971. On return to Fiji, she became the first Fijian woman president of the Fiji YWCA and principal of her old school, the Adi Cakobau School.

    The YWCA in Fiji was the driving force of the anti-nuclear protest movement in the early 1970s, while she was president.

    In her time as an educator, Dr Vakatale disciplined fairly, understood her students, and entrusted them with positive goals for their future, instructing them to “leave the world better than we found it”.

    She was respected and honoured. Her feats helped ease the students’ own steps, to bring to life the Adi Cakobau School motto.

    Towering moral stature
    Of petite and elegant frame, in moral stature Dr Vakatale towered above many. In diplomacy she served as Fiji’s Deputy High Commissioner to the UK in 1980, while single-handedly raising her daughter to become a lawyer.

    The University of St Andrews in Scotland awarded her an Honorary Doctorate of Letters for her contribution to the cause of Pacific women, while Fiji bestowed her with the Order of Fiji in 1996.

    The extraordinary Dr Meraia Taufa Vakatale died on 24 June 2023, aged 84. She leaves behind her only daughter Alanieta Vakatale, three granddaughters, and many more following in her footsteps to leave this world a better place.

    Thirty eight years on from the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and the adoption of the Pacific nuclear-free zone treaty, the Rarotonga Treaty, and with the imminent release of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant radioactive waste into the Pacific ocean, the leadership and sacrifices of Dr Vakatale must be hailed, and her life celebrated.

    Asenaca Uluiviti is a community legal officer in Auckland. She has worked as a state solicitor in Fiji and at its diplomatic mission in the UN, and has served as chairperson of Fiji YMCA, and on the NZ board of Greenpeace. She went to the Adi Cakobau School. Sadhana Sen is regional communications adviser at the Development Policy Centre. Republished from the DevPolicy blog through a Creative Commons licence.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Moce Sri Krishnamurthi . . . sports journalist, democracy activist, storyteller and advocate

    By David Robie

    New Zealand-adopted Fiji journalist, sports writer, national news agency reporter, anti-coup activist, media freedom advocate, storyteller and mentor Sri Krishnamurthi has died. He was just two weeks shy of his 60th birthday.

    Fiji-born on 15 August 1963, just after his elder twin brother Murali, Sri grew up in the port city of Lautoka, Fiji’s second largest in the west of Viti Levu island. His family were originally Girmitya, indentured Indian plantation workers shipped out to Fiji under under harsh conditions by the British colonial rulers.

    “My grandmother, Bonamma, came from India with my grandfather and came to work in the sugar cane fields under the indentured system,” Sri recalled in a recent RNZ interview with Blessen Tom.

    Pacific Media Centre journalist Sri Krishmamurthi
    Pacific Media Centre journalist Sri Krishmamurthi . . . accredited for the 2018 Fiji elections coverage with the Wansolwara team at the University of the South Pacific. Image: David Robie/PMC

    “They lived in ‘lines’ — a row of one-room houses. They worked the cane fields from 6am to 6pm largely without a break. It was basically slavery in all but name.”

    However, the Krishnamurthi family became one of the driving forces in building up Fiji’s largest NGO, TISI Sangam.

    He made his initial mark as a journalist with The Fiji Times, Fiji’s most influential daily newspaper. However, along with many of his peers, he became disillusioned and affected with the trauma and displacement as a result of Sitiveni Rabuka’s two military coups in 1987 at the start of what became known as the country’s devastating “coup culture”.

    Sri migrated to New Zealand to make a new life, as did most of his family members, and he was active for the Coalition for Democracy (CDF) in the post-coup years. He worked as a journalist for many organisations, including the NZ Press Association, the civil service, Parliament and more recently with RNZ Pacific.

    Tana’s ‘sleepless nights’
    His last story for RNZ Pacific was about Tana Umaga ”expecting sleepless nights” as the new coach of Moana Pasifika.

    “A friend to many, he is best known in the journalism industry for his long-time stint at NZPA covering sport, and more recently for his work with the Pacific Media Centre,” said New Zealand Herald editor-at-large Shayne Currie in his Media Insider column.

    “During his NZPA career, he covered various international rugby tours of New Zealand, America’s Cups, cricket tours, the Warriors in the NRL and was also among a handful of reporters who travelled to Mexico in 1999 for the All Whites’ first-ever appearance at Fifa’s Confederations Cup.”

    Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie and Pacific Media Watch contributing editor Sri Krishnamurthi
    The Pacific Media Centre’s team working in collaboration with Internews’ Earth Journalism Network on climate change and the pandemic . . . then centre director Professor David Robie and Pacific Media Watch contributing editor Sri Krishnamurthi. Image” Del Abcede/PMC

    His mates remember him as a generous friend and dedicated journalist.

    “He enjoyed being a New Zealander, a true Kiwi if we can call someone that,” recalled Nik Naidu, an activist businessman, former journalist and trustee of the Whanau Community Centre and Hub, when speaking about his lifelong family friend at the funeral on Friday.

    “Sri was one of the few Fijians and migrants over 30 years ago who embraced Māoridom and the first nation people of our land. It is only now in New Zealand that the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi is becoming better understood by the mainstream.

    “Sri lived Te Tiriti all those years ago, and advocated for Māori and indigenous rights for so long.”

    Postgraduate studies
    I first got to know Sri in 2017 when he rolled up at AUT University and said he wanted to study journalism. I was floored by this idea. Although I hadn’t really known him personally before this, I knew him by reputation as being a talented sports journalist from Fiji who had made his mark at NZPA.

    I remember asking Sri why did he want to do journalism — albeit at postgraduate level — when he could easily teach the course standing on his head. And then as we chatted I realised that he was rebuilding his life after a stroke that he had suffered travelling from Chennai to Bangalore, India, back in 2016.

    Sri Krishnamurthi with longstanding Fiji friends
    Sri Krishnamurthi (from left) with longstanding Fiji friends media and constitutional lawyer Richard Naidu, Whānau Community Centre and Hub trustee Nik Naidu and Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre coordinator Shamima Ali sharing a joke about Coalition for Democracy in Fiji (CDF) days in Auckland in 2018.

    Well, I persuaded him to branch out in his planned Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies and tackle a range of challenging new skills and knowledge, such as digital media. And I was honoured too that he wanted to take my Asia Pacific Journalism studies postgraduate course.

    He wanted to build on his Fiji origins and expand his Pacific reporting skills, and he mentored many of his fellow postgraduates, people with life experience and qualifications but often new to journalism, especially Pacific journalism.

    I realised he was somebody rather special who had a remarkable range of skills and an extraordinary range of contacts, even for a journalist. He seemed to know everybody under the sun. And he had a friendly manner and an insatiable curiosity.

    From then he gravitated around Asia Pacific Journalism and the Pacific Media Centre. Next thing he was recruited as editor/writer of Pacific Media Watch, a media freedom project that we had been running in the centre since 2007 in collaboration with the Paris-based global watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

    In spite of his post-stroke blues, he was one of the best project editors that we ever had. He had a tremendous zeal and enthusiasm no matter what handicap was in his way. He was willing to try anything — so keen to give it a go.

    95bFM radio presenter
    Sri became the presenter of our weekly Pacific radio programme Southern Cross on 95bFM, not an easy task with his voice issues, but he gained a popular following. He interviewed people from all around the Pacific.

    Sri Krishnamurthi on 95bFM
    The Pacific Media Centre’s weekly Southern Cross radio programme on 95bFM presented by Sri Krishnamurthi. Image: David Robie/PMC

    Next challenge was when we sent him to the University of the South Pacific to join the journalism school team over there covering the 2018 Fiji General Election. We had hoped 2006 coup leader Voreqe Bainimarama would be ousted then, but he wasn’t – that came four years later last December.

    However, Sri scored an exclusive interview with the original coup leader, Sitiveni Rabuka, the man responsible for Sri fleeing Fiji and who is now Prime Minister of Fiji. Sri got the repentent former Fiji strongman to admit that he was “coerced” by the defeated Alliance party into carrying out the first coup.

    He graduated from AUT with a Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies (Digital Media) in 2019 to add to his earlier MBA at Massey University. Several times he expressed to me that his ambition was to gain a PhD and join the USP journalism programme to mentor future Fiji journalists.

    At AUT, he won the 2018 RNZ Pacific Prize for his Fiji coup coverage and in 2019 he was awarded the Storyboard Award for his outstanding contribution to diversity journalism. RNZ Pacific manager Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor tells a story about how he had declared to her at the time:  “I’m going to work for RNZ Pacific.” And he did.

    However, the following year, our world changed forever with the COVID-19 pandemic and many plans crashed. Sri and I teamed up again, this time on a Pacific Covid and Climate crisis project, writing for Asia Pacific Report.  He recalled about this venture: “The fact that we kept the Pacific Media Watch project going when other news media around us — such as Bauer — were failing showed a tenacity that was unique and a true commitment to the Pacific.”

    ‘Virtual kava bar’
    It was a privilege to work with Sri and to share his enthusiasm and friendship. He was an extraordinarily generous person, especially to fellow journalists. I was really touched when he and Blessen Tom, now also with RNZ, made a video dedicated to the Pacific Media Watch and my work.

    Sri Krishnamurthi with West Papuan communications student and journalist Laurens Ikinia
    Sri Krishnamurthi with West Papuan communications student and journalist Laurens Ikinia in Newmarket in 2022. Image: Nik Naidu/APR

    Nik Naidu shares a tale of Sri’s generosity with a group of West Papuan students last year when their Indonesian government suddenly pulled their scholarships and left them in dire straits. AUT postgraduate communications Laurens Ikinia was their advocate, trying to get their visas extended and fundraising for them to complete their studies.

    “Many people don’t know this, but Lauren’s rent was late by a year — more than $3000 — and Sri organised money and paid for this. That was Sri, deep down the kindest of souls.”

    During his Pacific Media Watch stint, Sri wrote several generous profiles of regional colleagues, including The Pacific Newsroom, the “virtual kava bar” news success founded by Pacific media veterans Sue Ahearn and Michael Field, and also of the expanding RNZ Pacific newsroom team with Koroi Hawkins appointed as the first Melanesian news editor.

    "Man in a black hat" - Sri Krishnamurthi
    “Man in a black hat” . . . a self image published by Sri Krishnamurthi with his 2020 dealing with a stroke article. Image: Sri Krishnamurthi

    But he struggled at times with depression and his journalism piece that really stands out for me is an article that he wrote about living with a stroke for three years. It was scary but inspirational and it took huge courage to write. As he wrote at the time:

    “You learn new tricks when you have a stroke – words associated with images, or words through the process of elimination worked for me. And then there was the trusted old Google when you couldn’t be bothered.

    “You learn to use bungee shoelaces or Velcro shoes because tying shoelaces just won’t happen. The right arm is bung and you are back to typing with two fingers – as I’m doing now. At the same time, technology is your biggest ally.”

    Sri Krishnamurthi died last week on August 2 — way too early. He was a great survivor against the odds. Moce, Sri, your friends and colleagues will fondly remember your generous spirit and legacy.

    Dr David Robie is a retired journalism professor and founding director of the AUT Pacific Media Centre. He worked with Sri Krishnamurthi for six years as an academic mentor, friend and journalism colleague. This was article is published under a community partnership with RNZ.

    RNZ Pacific manager Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor (from left) with Sri Krishnamurthi
    RNZ Pacific manager Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor (from left), Sri Krishnamurthi, TVNZ Fair Go’s Star Kata and Blessen Tom, now working with RNZ, at the 2019 AUT School of Communication Studies awards. Photo: Del Abcede/APR

  • Sir Kostas ‘touched the lives’ of many Pacific people, says Samoan PM

    By Gorethy Kenneth in Port Moresby

    Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa’s tribute to Papua New Guinea’s  businessman Sir Kostas Constantinou was very touching as she recapped how his businesses touched the lives of the people of Samoa.

    Her message, read out by Samoa’s High Commissioner to Australia, Hinari Petana during Sir Kostas’ wake in Brisbane where he died from heart complications last month, was a reminder to his children to continue the legacy he had left in Samoa.

    High Commissioner Petana and her entourage, including Sir Kostas’ Samoan family, were all present throughout his funeral service, the burial and the wake.

    PNG businessman Sir Kostas Constantinou
    PNG businessman Sir Kostas Constantinou . . . a development visionary in the Asia-Pacific region. Image: IB

    There was also a fitting ceremony where George Jr, son of the late Sir Kostas, was handed Samoa’s chiefly red ‘ulafala (pandanus key necklace) most often worn by Samoan tulafale (orator chiefs).

    His father was adorned with a chiefly title Tulaniu in Samoa — George Jr will take over the reign as the next in line. He was also presented a Samoan ie toga, a fine mat.

    “He touched the lives of so many spirits in the Pacific region, in particular in our country, Samoa, and its people through rewarding and inspirational investments,” Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa said in her message.

    “The contribution of Sir Kostas to our country has been hugely significant, especially in our economic growth.

    ‘Passion and influence’
    “His passion and influence in our communities will be remembered by everyone that enters the doors of Taumeasina Island Resort, the Bank of South Pacific, as much as he shaped everything, our cultural values, during one of his few visits to Samoa, including his acceptance of his chiefly title.

    “To George Jr and the children, may you continue your father’s legacy in Samoa and join us as a family in the coming years.”

    Sir Kostas, 66, was regarded as a visionary businessman who employed thousands of people and developed businesses across the Asia-Pacific region.

    He was the founder of Constantinou Group of Companies.

    His leadership and commitment to excellence and innovation was a key factor in driving the Constantinou Group, including Airways Hotels and Apartments, Hebou Construction, Lamana Hotel and Lamana Development Ltd, Monier Ltd and Rouna Quarries Ltd in PNG to success.

    Sir Kostas served as chair of the Bank South Pacific Financial Group Ltd and Air Niugini for many years.

    He was also a director of Oil Search Ltd.

    He was the father of Constantia, George, Andrea and Theophilus and grandfather to Imogen, Syliva, Harry, Zoe and George.

     

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Daniel Ellsberg: The Establishment’s Whistleblower

    In 1972 Stanley K. Sheinbaum, chairman of the Pentagon Papers Fund, wrote with a hot pertinence that remains striking (at this time Julian Assange is facing grave prospects of being extradited to the United States) that both Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo had “struck a blow for us all when they gave the Pentagon Papers to the press and to the Senate: against the war in Vietnam and against new adventures in Cambodia, Laos, or elsewhere”. And more besides, including striking against government secrecy in both domestic and foreign policy and directing a blow “for freedom of the press, freedom of the American people to be informed of what crimes their government might be committing in their name.”

    The Nixon administration was mustard keen to bang up Ellsberg for what would have been 115 years, and Russo for 35. The charges, absurd reading then as they are now, were for conspiracy, espionage, and larceny. Central to this particularly vicious effort on the part of President Richard Nixon and his inner circle was the release of the Pentagon Papers, a government document running into 7,000 pages that was much at odds with public statements made by respective presidential administrations on US involvement in the Indo-China War. Both men had been analysts and researchers at the RAND Corporation, with the former tasked with nuclear wargaming scenarios. Russo had aided Ellsberg in the mammoth task of copying the papers.

    The treatment dished out by the US national security state was very much the blueprint for what is taking place against the WikiLeaks founder. Initial indictment, followed by further grand jury hearings, followed by another round of indictments. As Sheinbaum remarked, the absurdity of the charges was self-evident. “Conspiracy against whom?” he asked. “The American people to whom the documents belonged in the first place? The press to whom the Pentagon Papers were given – not sold – so that they could better inform the people on how a succession of administrations had deceived them and wasted this country’s lives, resources, and honor?”

    The case, thankfully, collapsed. The presiding judge, William M. Byrne Jr., even before the jury’s verdict was in, dismissed the action in May 1973, citing serious government misconduct (the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist had been burgled by the infamous “White House Plumbers”), not to mention illegal wiretapping. As part of that most Nixonian of sagas, the judge also revealed that he had been offered the role of FBI director by John Ehrlichman, the President’s assistant for domestic affairs.

    Initially in agreement with policies in the Cold War rollback of communism, Ellsberg came to have trouble with the narrative of one’s country, right and wrong. In a sense, he became something of a model whistleblower: a figure initially besotted, a believer in the role of US power, only to then find evidence at odds with that belief.

    While working at RAND, he visited Haverford College in August 1969, where his attendance at a conference of the War Resisters’ International proved turning. He had initially found the participants, as he recfalls in his memoir Secrets, unduly simplistic, unnecessarily negative, dogmatic and extremist. It took a demonstration outside the trial of draft resister Bod Eaton to invest him with necessary confidence. “I had become free of the fear of being absurd, of looking foolish, for stepping out of line.”

    Then came a moving talk by peace activist Randy Kehler. The impression left by Kehler, far from being banally corny and naff, helped complete the Damascene conversion: the RAND employee would commit to the task of ending a war effort he had been complicit in advancing. His establishment skin would be sloughed.

    As Spencer Ackerman observes, the strength of Ellsberg’s whistleblowing was the locus of power; it came from a figure so highly placed in the national security apparatus he had the ear of presidential advisors. In the post-9/11 era, there has been no equivalent, no reputational shedding of skin. The leaks and disclosures have come from such individuals as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Daniel Hale, all vitally important, yet all several steps removed from the centre of power. “The people of Ellsberg’s equivalent rank and early-career promise more typically chose to serve the War on Terror, not resist it, going along with atrocities abroad and democratic destabilization at home.”

    Ellsberg’s tenacious advocacy for Assange, for whom he acted as witness in the extradition trial in September 2020, was fortifying. “My own actions in relation to the Pentagon Papers and the consequences of their publication have been acknowledged to have performed such a radical change of understanding,” he outlined in his statement to the court. “I view the WikiLeaks publications of 2010 and 2011 to be of comparable importance.”

    He also warned about that most odious feature of the Espionage Act of 1917, upon which 17 of the 18 charges against Assange have been framed. Motivation, he recalled in his own 1973 trial, was dismissed by government lawyers as irrelevant: the offences imputed “strict liability”. As he told the Central Criminal Court in London, the Act effectively disallowed genuine whistleblowing to permit “you to say you were informing the polity. So I did not have a fair trial, no one since me had a fair trial on these charges and Julian Assange cannot remotely get a fair trial under those charges if he was tried.”

    As he revealed in December 2022, Ellsberg had been the WikiLeaks “backup” for releasing the documents that were eventually published in 2010. Assange, he told the BBC Hardtalk program, “could rely on me to get it [the information] out.”

    In any final reflections on what Ellsberg did, the conscientious duty of a figure to disclose evidence of government misconduct, to enlighten the citizenry more broadly as political agents rather than obedient subjects, shines. “From the point of view of a civilization and the survival of eight or nine billion people, when everything is at stake, can it be worth even a small chance of having a small effect?” he reflected in an interview with Politico. “The answer is: Of course.”

  • Daniel Ellsberg: Rest in Power & Peace

    Daniel Ellsberg has died at the age of 92. For those not fully familiar with his significance, I’ll reshare something I wrote six months ago:

    Never forget the Pentagon Papers & the importance of brave resistance now

    Mickey Z.
    December 9, 2022

    Never forget the Pentagon Papers & the importance of brave resistance now

    “The Pentagon Papers are mesmerizing, not as documentation of the history of the U.S. war in Indochina, but as insight into the minds of the men who planned and executed it.” (Arundhati Roy) On June 13, 1971, the New York Times published an article by Neil Sheehan called, “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.” It …

    Read full story

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Diamonds for the Antichrist

    This is the exposé I wrote for The Guardian that killed off “Reverend” Pat Robertson’s billion-dollar financial scams parading under the banner of The Christian Coalition.

    Note: The juiciest parts I got from Robertson himself, recorded on a miniature reel-to-reel tape recorder hidden inside a fake cigarette lighter.

    No-one asked why I had a cigarette lighter—but no cigarettes.  The story won The Guardian a nomination for Britain’s Business Story of the Year.

    Today, Rev. Pat passed away. I’m sure that as I write this, the de-frocked Reverend will be greeted at the burning gates by his host, “Pleased to meet you, Reverend. Hope you guessed my name….”

    By Greg Palast for The Guardian

    It’s time someone told you the truth. There is an Invisible Cord easily traced from the European bankers who ordered the assassination of President Lincoln to German Illuminati and the “communist rabbi” who is the  connecting link to Karl Marx, the Trilateral Commission, the House of Morgan and the British bankers who, in turn, funded the Soviet KGB. This is the “tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer.”

    You don’t know about Invisible Cord? Then you haven’t read New World Order by the financier named chairman of the Bank of Scotland’s American consumer bank holding company: Dr. Marion “Pat” Robertson.

     
    In May 1999, the oldest financial enterprise in the English-speaking world, the Bank of Scotland, decided to launch into the cyber-future with the largest-ever telephone and Internet bank operation, to be based in the US. Their choice of partner and chairman for the enterprise, US televangelist “Reverend” Robertson, raised some eyebrows in Briton.  But the United Kingdom’s business elite could dismiss objections with a knowing condescension.  To them, Robertson was just another Southern-fried Elmer Gantry bigot with a slick line of Lordy-Jesus hoodoo who could hypnotize a couple of million American goobers into turning over their bank accounts to the savvy Scots.

    I had a different view of the Reverend Pat. For years, I’d kept tabs on the demi-billionaire media mogul who had chosen one president of the United States (named Bush) and would choose another (same name) … and who left a scent of sulphur on each of his little-known investments from China to the Congo. The Feds were already on his case, but I could speak  to insiders in the born-again Christian community, once high in Reverend Pat’s billion-dollar religious-commercial-political empire, who would never talk to officialdom.  Their evidence suggests the Reverend broke a number of commandments handed down by the Highest Authority: the IRS.

    Interestingly, the Scottish bank’s official biography of Robertson failed to mention New World Order, the 1991 bestseller which a Wall Street Journal review uncharitably described as written by “a paranoid pinhead with a deep distrust of democracy.”

    The bank left out much about this man of wealth and taste, for example, that Dr. Robertson is best known to Americans as the leader of the 1.2 million-strong ultra-right political front, Christian Coalition. The Bank of Scotland says it is not concerned with Dr. Robertson’s religious beliefs. Nor, apparently, is Dr Robertson concerned with theirs. He has called Presbyterians, members of Scotland’s established Church, “the spirit of the Antichrist.”

    What would entice the Bank of Scotland to join up with a figure described by one unkind civil liberties organization as “the most dangerous man in America”? Someone more cynical than me might suspect that the Bank of Scotland covets Dr. Robertson’s fiercely loyal following of two million conspiracy wonks and Charismatic Evangelicals.

    A former business partner of Robertson’s explained The Reverend’s hypnotic pull on their wallets: “These people believe he has a hot-line to God. They will hand him their life savings.” Robertson drew believers to his other commercial ventures. “People remortgaged their homes to invest in his businesses,” the insider told me. If he Pat Robertson, General Pinochet, Pepsi-Cola and the Antichrist did use his ministry to promote his business, this would cross several legal boundaries.

    When we finally met, Dr. Robertson swore to me he will keep bank commerce, Christianity and the Coalition completely separate. But a look into the Robertson empire, including interviews with his former and current business associates, reveals a hidden history of mixing God, gain and Republican campaign. Not all has been well concealed. Tax and regulatory authorities have tangled for decades with his supposedly non-partisan operations.  But government gumshoes still missed some of the more interesting evidence of self-dealing, and worse. The combination of Christianity and cash has made Dr. Robertson a man whose net worth is estimated at somewhere between $200 million and $1 billion. He himself would not confirm his wealth except to tell me that his share in the reported $50 million start-up investment in the bank deal is too small for him to have taken note of the sum.

    Neil Volder, president of Robertson’s financial business and future CEO of the bank venture, emphasizes Robertson’s selflessly donating to his church 65–75 per cent of his salary as head of International Family Entertainment. I was surprised: that amounted to only a few hundred thousand dollars yearly, pocket change for a man of Dr. Robertson’s means. There was also, says Volder, the $7 million he gave to “Operation Blessing” to help alleviate the woes of refugees fleeing genocide in Rwanda. Or did he? Robertson’s press operation puts the sum at only $1.2 million – and even that amount could not be corroborated.

    More interesting is how the “Operation Blessing” funds were used in Africa.

    Through an emotional fundraising drive on his TV station, Robertson raised several million dollars for the tax-free charitable trust. “Operation Blessing” purchased planes to shuttle medical supplies in and out of the refugee camp in Goma, Congo (then Zaire). However, investigative reporter Bill Sizemore of the Virginian-Pilot discovered that, except for one medical flight, the planes were used to haul heavy equipment for something called the African Development Corporation, a diamond mining operation distant from Goma. African Development is owned by Pat Robertson.

    Did Robertson know about the diversion of the relief planes? According to the pilots’ records, he himself flew on one plane ferrying equipment to his mines.  One of Robertson’s former business partners speaking on condition of confidentiality told me that, although he often flew with Dr. Robertson in the minister’s jet, he never saw Robertson crack open a Bible or seek private time for prayer. “He always had the Wall Street Journal open and Investors’ Daily.” But on the Congo flight, Robertson did pray. The pilot’s diary notes, “Prayer for diamonds.”

    Volder told me that Robertson’s diverting the planes for diamond mining was actually carrying out God’s work. The planes, he asserts, proved unfit for hauling medicine, so Robertson salvaged them for the diamond hunt which, if successful, would have “freed the people of the Congo from lives of starvation and poverty.” None the less, the Virginia State Attorney General opened an investigation of “Operation Blessing.”

    Volder asserts that Robertson was “not trying to earn a profit, but to help people.” As it turned out, he did neither. The diamond safari went bust, as did Robertson’s ventures in vitamin sales and multi-level marketing. These disastrous investments added to his losses in oil refining, the money pit of the Founders Inn Hotel, his jet leasing fiasco and one of England’s classier ways of burning money, his buying into Laura Ashley Holdings (he was named a director). One cannot term a demi-billionaire a poor businessman but, excepting the media operations handed him by his non-profit organization, Robertson the “entrepreneur” seems  to have trouble keeping enterprises off the rocks. Outside the media, Robertson could not cite for me any commercial success.

    Undeniably, Dr. Robertson is a master salesman. To this I can attest after joining the live audience in Virginia Beach for 700 Club, his daily television broadcast.  The day I arrived, he was selling miracles. Following a mildly bizarre “news” segment, Dr. Robertson shut his eyes and went into a deep trance. After praying for divine assistance for his visions, he announced, “There is somebody who has cancer of the intestines … God is healing that right now and you will live! … Somebody called Michael has a deep chest cough … God is healing you right now!”

    It is not clear why the Lord needs the intervention of an expensive cable TV operation to communicate to Michael. But more intriguing theological issues are raised by the program hosts’ linking miracles to donations made to Robertson’s organization. In a taped segment, a woman’s facial scars healed after her sister joined the 700 Club (for the required donation of $20 per month). “She didn’t realize how close to her contribution a miracle would arrive.” It ended, “Carol was so grateful God healed her sister, she increased her pledge from the 700 Club to the 1000 Club,” which means kicking up her monthly pay-out to Pat to $84.

    The miracles add up. In 1997, Christian Broadcast Network, Robertson’s “ministry”, took in $164 million in donations plus an additional $34 million in other income.

    Earlier tidal waves of tax-deductible cash generated by this daily dose of holiness and hostility paid for the cable television network which was sold in 1990 to Rupert Murdoch, along with the old sit-coMs  that filled the nonreligious broadcast hours, for $1.82 billion. Seven years prior to the sale of this media bonanza, the tax-exempt group “spun it off” to a for-profit corporation whose controlling interest was held by Dr. Robertson. Lucky Pat.

    Robertson donated hundreds of millions of dollars from the Murdoch deal to both Christian Broadcast Network (CBN) and CBN (now Regent) University.   That still left Robertson burdened with heavy load of cash to carry through the eye of the needle.

    Cosmetics for Christian Crusaders

    In his younger days, Robertson gave up worldly wealth to work in the Black ghettos of New York. But, says former Coalition executive Judy Liebert, “Pat’s changed.”  She noted that he gave up his ordination as a Baptist minister in 1988. (He is still called, incorrectly, “Reverend” by the media.) His change in 1988 was accelerated when, says another associate, his former TV co-host Danuta Soderman Pfeiffer, “he was ensnared by the idea that God called him to run for president of the United States.”

    The 1988 run for the Oval Office began with Robertson’s announcing his endorsement by The Almighty.  I asked Volder how Robertson could have lost the Republican primary if God was his campaign manager.  But the Lord did not tell Robertson to win, He told Pat to run.  And this “losing” race generated a mailing list of three million sullen Americans of the heartland whose rage was given voice by Robertson forming, out of defeat, the Christian Coalition.  Volder offers that this may have been, in fact, the Lord’s stratagem: to generate the fearsome lists. The Coalition lists, like the CBN lists, are worth their weight in gold.

    One doubts the Lord would permit the use of this list of Crusaders to line to Reverend’s pockets.  Indeed, Robertson swore to me they would not be used in for the banking business.  And whatever the Lord’s intent, to dip into the Coalition lists uncompensated to promote the new bank would breach the law.

    But abuse of these lists lies at the heart of charges by ex-partners.  Two former top executives in the for-profit operations who have never previously spoken to media (nor government) state that Robertson personally directed use of both the tax-exempt religious group’s lists and the “educational” Christian Coalition lists to build what became Kalo-Vita, The Reverend’s pyramid sales enterprise which sold vitamins and other products.

    Kalo-Vita collapsed in 1992 due to poor management amid lawsuits charging deception.  A former officer of the company alleges some operations were funded, without compensation, including offices, phones and secretarial help, by the ministry, stretching laws both secular and ecclesiastical.   When insiders questioned Robertson’s using viewers’ donations for a personal enterprise, Robertson produced minutes of Board meetings that characterized as “loans” the Kalo-Vita start-up capital obtained from CBN. According to insiders not all Board members were made aware of these meetings until months after they were supposedly held.  Could Dr. Pat have manufactured records of non-existent meetings?  His spokesman responds that they are unfamiliar with the facts of the allegation.

    The executives were also alarmed about Dr. Robertson’s preparing to use the 20,000-strong and growing Kalo-Vita sales force as “an organizational structure to back his political agenda” – and partisan ambitions. US federal investigators never got wind of this alleged maneuver.  (US law bars corporations from giving direct aid to political candidates.)

    “Why Not Just Blow My Brains Out?” – The Missing Bush Papers

    Besides the Kalo-Via lists, there is evidence Robertson used Christian Coaltion mailing lists to help political candidates, especially one named Bush.  A September 15, 1992 memo from the Coalition’s then president, Ralph Reed to the coordinator of President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign says Robertson “is prepared to assist … [by] the distribution of 40 million voter guides … This is a virtually unprecedented level of cooperation and assistance … from Christian leaders.” Unprecedented and illegal, said the Federal Elections Commission, which sued the Christian Coalition, technically a tax- exempt educational corporation, for channelling campaign support worth tens of millions of dollars to Republican candidates. The action was extraordinary because it was brought by unanimous vote of the bipartisan commission which cited, among other things, the Coalition’s favoring Colonel Ollie North with copies of its lists for North’s failed run for the US Senate.

    Records subpoenaed from the Christian Coalition contain a set of questions and answers concocted by the Coalition and the Republican Party for a staged 1992 “interview” with Bush broadcast on the 700 Club. This caught my eye first, because it appears to constitute a prohibited campaign commercial and second, because Robertson months earlier claimed Bush was “unwittingly carrying out the mission of Lucifer.” With Bush running behind Bill Clinton, Robertson must have decided to stick with the devil he knew.

    But the government will never see the most incriminating documents. Judy Liebert, formerly Chief Financial Officer for the Christian Coalition, told me she was present when Coalition President Reed personally destroyed documents subpoenaed by the government. Also, when Liebert learned that the Coalition had printed Republican campaign literature (illegal if true), she discovered that the evidence, contained in the hard drive of her computer, had been removed. Indeed, the entire hard drive had been mysteriously pulled from her machine – but not before she had made copies of the files.

    When Liebert complained to Robertson about financial shenanigans at the Coalition, “Pat told me I was ‘unsophisticated’. Well, that is a strange thing for a Christian person to say to me.”   The Christian Coalition CFO told me that Ralph Reed, a big Republican operative even today, “would got through [the subpoenaed documents] and throw everything on the floor – I mean just pitch it – just take it and throw it on the floor.” (As Arthur Andersen executives can now attest, that’s called Obstruction of Justice.)  When challenged on the legality (and Christianity) of such actions, Reed reportedly said, “Why don’t you just take a gun and blow my brains out.”

    The Coalition has attacked Liebert as a disgruntled ex-employee whom they fired. She responded that she was sacked only after she went to government authorities – and after she refused an $80,000 severance fee that would have required her to remain silent about the Coalition and Robertson. The Feds, notes the Coalition, have never acted on Liebert’s charge of evidence-tampering.

    Little of this information has been reported in the press. Why? The three-hour dog and pony show I was put through at the CBN-Robertson financial headquarters in Virginia Beach culminated in an hour-long diatribe by his CEO Volder about how Robertson was certain to sue any paper that did not provide what he called a “balanced” view. He boasted that by threatening use of Britain’s draconian libel laws and Robertson’s bottomless financial treasure chest, one of his lawyers “virtually wrote” a laudatory profile of Robertson in a UK newspaper. As in the days when the Inquisition required recalcitrants to view instruments of torture, I was made to understand in detail the devastation that would befall me if my paper did not report what was “expected” of me.

    This was said, like all the Robertson team’s damning anthems, in a sweet, soft Virginia accent.

    Would Dr. Robertson use his ministry’s following to promote the Bank of Scotland operation (a legal no-no)? Despite Robertson’s protests to the contrary, his banking chief Volder laid out a plan to reach the faithful, including appearances of bank members of the 700 Club, mailings to lists coincident with their own, and “infomercials” just after the religious broadcasts. This is just the type of mixing that has so upset the election commission and the Internal Revenue Service, which in 1998 retroactively stripped Christian Broadcasting of its tax-exempt status for 1986 and 1987.

    What My Cigarette Lighter Overheard

    It was most difficult to convince the Reverend’s protectors to let me speak directly to “The Doctor” (as they call him) at his compound in Virginia; and once there, getting my wire through the metal detector. (“Officer, could you please hold my cigarette lighter?”)

    I met The Doctor in his dressing room following his televised verbal intercourse with God. Robertson, though three hours under the spotlight, didn’t break a sweat. He peeled off his make-up while we talked international finance.

    Here was no hayseed huckster, but a worldly man of wealth and taste.

    And, despite grimacing and grunts from Volder, Dr. Robertson told me he could imagine tying his Chinese Internet firm (“The Yahoo of China,” he calls it) into the banking operation. Picking up Volder’s body shakes, Dr. Robertson added, “Though I’m not supposed to talk about Internet banking.” And he wasn’t supposed to mention China. His fellow evangelists are none too happy about his palling around with Zhu Rongi, the communist dictator who gleefully jails Christian ministers. Volder defends Dr. Robertson’s friendship with Zhu (and association with deposed Congo strongman Mobutu) on the grounds that “Pat would meet with the Devil if that is only way to help suffering people.” The fact that the political connections assisted in obtaining diamond (Congo) and Internet concessions (China) is secondary.

    The enterprising minister planned to launch his bank through his accustomed routes: phone and mail solicitations. But had he hit the ‘Net, with or without the Chinese, this bank deal would have made Pat Robertson the biggest financial spider on the world wide web. Yet, his choosing the Bank of Scotland as his partner is surprising because, in New World Order, he singled out one institution in particular as the apotheosis of Satan’s plan for world domination: the Bank of Scotland.

    In the fevered coils of NWO, Robertson explains that Scotsman William Paterson first proposed the creation of the satanic “central banks” – specifically the Bank of England and Bank of Scotland – who were manipulated by the Rothschilds to finance diamond mines in Africa which, in turn, funded the satanic secret English Round Table directed by Lord Milner, editor of the London Observer (Ah-Ha!) a century ago. Furthermore, the Scottish banker’s charter became the pattern for the US Federal Reserve Board, a diabolic agency created and nurtured by the US Senate Finance Committee whose chairman was the evil Money Trust’s dependable friend, Senator A. Willis Robertson – Pat Robertson’s father.

    That’s right. Pat is the scion of the New World Order, who gave up its boundless privileges to denounce it.

    Or did he?

    I had done some research on the Antichrist. How would we recognize him?  How would the Great Deceiver win over God-fearing Christians? What name would he use? As I drove away from the chapel-TV studio-university-ministry-banking complex, I realized I’d forgotten to ask a key question. Why does the ex-Reverend go by the name “Pat” – not his Christian name, Marion? It struck me that “Pat Robertson” is an obvious anagram for the Devil’s agent, Paterson of the Scottish bank.

    My silly thoughts piled higher, fuelled by staying up all night to finish New World Order. Suddenly, like Robertson, I too had a vision of an Invisible Cord that went from Lucifer to Illuminati to Scottish bankers to African diamonds to the Senate Finance Committee to Communist Dictators to the World Wide Web … Ridiculous, I know, but strangely, though I thought I’d turned off the radio, it continued to play that damned Rolling Stones song,

    Pleased to meet you!
    Hope you’ve guessed my name …  

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Obituary: Tui Rererangi Walsh O’Sullivan, the ‘flying bird in the sky’

    OBITUARY: By Dominic O’Sullivan

    Tui Rererangi Walsh O’Sullivan, 4 July 1940 — 20 May 2023

    Kia ora koutau katoa. Kia ora mo o koutou haerenga i te ahiahi nei. Kia ora mo o koutou aroha, o koutou karakia mo Tui i te wa o tona harenga ki te rangi.

    I whanau mai a Tui, kei Kaitaia, hei uri o Te Rarawa, i te tau kotahi mano, iwa rau, wha tekau.

    Tui was born in Kaitaia in 1940 — exactly 100 years after her great-great grandfather, Te Riipi, signed the Treaty of Waitangi. She was descended, too, from a Scotsman, John Borrowdale who named his boat Half Caste — after his children. Such was the mystery of race, life and family in 19th century Northland.

    Tui was the last born child of Jack and Maata Walsh, and sister of John, Pat, Rose and Michael. Maata was Te Rarawa, from Pukepoto. Tui lies alongside her at Rangihoukaha Urupa in Pukepoto. She was named Tui Rererangi, the flying bird in the sky, in honour of her uncle Billy Busby — a World War II fighter pilot.

    Maata died when Tui was two years old. She and Rose and their brothers were raised by their father, Jack Walsh, his mother Maud and his sister Lil. Maud was born in Townsville. Her father was a lacemaker from Nottingham who emigrated, with his wife, firstly to Australia and then to the far North of New Zealand.

    Jack was born in Houhora and died when Tui was 23. Jack’s father emigrated from Limerick.
    Early in the next century, the writer Frank McCourt described Limerick, just as it had been in Timothy Walsh’s time, “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

    It was a better world these people sought, in and with, Te Rarawa.

    Tui’s story — almost 83 years — spans a time of rapid social, political and technological development in New Zealand and the world. Her contribution was transformative for the many, many, people she encountered in her professional, social and family lives.

    Tui’s schooling began at Ahipara Native School. Transcending the government’s official purpose of the Native School, of “lead[ing] the lad to be a good farmer and the girl to be a good farmer’s wife” — Tui left primary school with a Ngarimu VC and 28th Maori Battalion Scholarship to St Mary’s College in Ponsonby.

    Some of her friends from St Mary’s are here today, and her granddaughter, named in her honour, started at the school this year.

    Disrupting social orthodoxy was Tui’s life. On leaving school, she enrolled at the University of Auckland, completing a degree in English and anthropology part-time over the next 20 years. During these years she trained as a primary school teacher, working in Auckland, Wellington, Cambridge, Athens and London.

    In the past week, we took a phone call from somebody Tui had taught at Kelburn Normal School in the 1960s. Such was Tui’s impact.

    I was born in Hamilton in 1970. Deirdre in Cambridge in 1973. We moved to Northcote Point in 1975 and, in 1977, Tui became the first woman and the first Māori appointed to a permanent position at what was then the Auckland Technical Institute. I remember her telling me she was going for a job interview and coming into this Church to pray that she would be successful. Deirdre and I did our primary schooling here at St Mary’s.

    Being a working single parent in the 1970s and 80s was hard work. It didn’t reflect social norms, but the Auckland University of Technology, as it’s become, provided Tui, Deirdre and me with security and a home – a home that has been Tui’s since 1978.

    At AUT, she developed the first Women on Campus group. She helped establish the newspaper Password, a publication introducing new English speakers to New Zealand society and culture.

    She taught courses on the Treaty of Waitangi when the treaty was a subversive idea. She contributed to the change in social and political thought that has brought the treaty — that her tupuna signed — to greater public influence. The justice it promises was a major theme in Tui’s working life.

    Tui was interested in justice more broadly, inspired by her Catholic faith, love of people and profound compassion. These values stood out in the memories of Tui that people shared during her tangihanga earlier in the week at Te Uri o Hina Marae.

    On Twitter, like them all, a social media that Tui never mastered, a former student, some 40 years later, recalled “the sage advice” given to a “young fella from Kawerau”. As Tui remembered, for a Māori kid from the country, moving to town can be moving to a different world.

    In a media interview on her retirement, she said: “Coming from a town where you didn’t know names, but everyone was Aunty or Uncle, Auckland was by far a change of scenery”.
    In Auckland, Tui knew everybody. Always the last to leave a social function, and always the first to help people in need.

    Tui helped establish the university’s marae in 1997. She would delight in sharing the marae with students and colleagues. Just as she delighted in her family — especially her grandchildren, Lucy, Xavier, Joey, Tui and Delphi.

    She remembered Sarah Therese. Her grandchildren tell of their special times with her, and her deep interest in their lives. Last year, Deirdre and Malcolm and their children moved from Wellington to be close by. Joey and I came from Canberra for the year.

    We talked and helped as we could. My job was to buy the smokes. I remember saying one day, “I’m going to the supermarket, what would you like for dinner” — “a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of wine”. That was Tui’s diet and she loved it. And it was only in the last few months that she stopped going out.

    At the wake for her brother John’s wife, Maka, in November, she was still going at three in the morning. I worried that three bottles of wine mightn’t have been the best idea at that stage in life, but she was well enough to do it, and loved the company of her family as we loved being with her.

    In December, she took Joey and Tui to mark their birthdays at the revolving restaurant at the Sky Tower, where she also joined in the celebration of Lucy’s 18th birthday a couple of months ago. Delphi liked to take her out for a pancake. She loved Xavier’s fishing and rugby stories.

    Over the last year, she wasn’t well enough to watch her grandchildren’s sport as she would have liked, take them to the beach as she used to love, or attend important events in our lives. But she did what she could right until the end.

    My last conversation with her, the day before she died, was slow and tired but cogent and interesting. We discussed the politics of the day, as we often did. She asked after Joey and Lucy, and after Cara — always concerned that they were doing well. She didn’t speak for long, which was out of character, but gave no reason to think that this would be the last time we spoke.

    Her copy of my book, Indigeneity, Culture and the UN Sustainable Development Goals,  published last month, is still in the post. She didn’t know that it was dedicated to her and that I had explained, in the acknowledgements, that the reasons needed more words than the book itself.

    That was supposed to have been for her to read, and for her to learn, that the dedication was also from her grandchildren. She was the immediate and unanimous choice when I asked them, “to whom should I dedicate this book”.

    No reira, ka nui te mihi ki tena ki tena o koutou. Kia ora mo o koutou manaaki me te aroha.

    Kia ora huihui tatau katoa!

    Dr Dominic O’Sullivan, Tui’s son and professor of political science at Charles Sturt University, delivered this eulogy at her memorial mass at St Mary’s Catholic Church, Northcote, on 27 May 2023. It is republished here with the whanau’s permission. Tui O’Sullivan was also a foundation Advisory Board member of the Pacific Media Centre in 2007 and was a feisty advocate for the centre and its research publication, Pacific Journalism Review, until she retired in 2018.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Raising the Price: Martin Amis and the Post-9/11 Cataclysm

    The death of novelist and essayist Martin Amis on 19 May triggered a ‘mainstream’ wave, not just of admiration, but of adoration. It is clear from the obituaries that Amis died with his reputation intact and untarnished.

    In tweeting a link to his obituary for the Guardian, the Independent’s former literary editor Boyd Tonkin captured the essence of the response:

    ‘I had hoped so much that this would not see the light of day for a very, very long time. But sadly here it is. My obituary of #MartinAmis’

    The Guardian’s chief books writer, Lisa Allardice, wrote of Amis:

    ‘For a time, he seemed happy to fill the role of novelist as public intellectual. He riffed elegantly on everything from the porn industry to the Royal family.’

    Perhaps not everything. Allardice noted that Amis was a public intellectual with a particular focus:

    ‘In his crusade for fine writing and his declaration of war on cliché, Amis made everyone up their game.’

    Amis reported from the front line of this ‘war against cliché’:

    ‘You know, whenever you write, “The heat was stifling”, or, “She rummaged in her handbag”, this is dead freight, you know. And by the way, the war is extended onto another sphere. People who use these mouldering novelties like, “Seen it, done it, got the T-shirt”, “He went ballistic!”, “I don’t think so. Hello!” – all that. These are dead words. They’re herd words. What cliché is, is herd writing, herd thinking and herd feeling.’

    Amis was psychologically astute and he was fiercely opposed to herdthink. How remarkable, then, that in 2007 – in the wake of 9/11 and the London, 2005, 7/7 bombings – the same writer declared:

    ‘The extremists for now have the monopoly of violence, intimidation, and self-righteousness.’

    Edward Herman, co-author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent, responded:

    ‘Bush, Blair, Olmert and their gangs are clearly not the “extremists” Amis has in mind—Bush and friends are the “self-defense” folks just striving for a wee bit of security and human rights, and fighting off the invasions of their territory by the Islamo-fascists. The pitiful giant, with 50 percent of the arms budget of the earth, invading or bombing at least three countries right now, is being overwhelmed by the violent folks, “for now.”’ (Edward Herman, ‘“Look forward, not back,” and other Clichés, Idiocies, and Abused Words’, Z Magazine, April 2009)

    Indeed, much as he might have deplored references to women rummaging in handbags, Amis was here delivering power-friendly ‘herd words’ based on ‘herd thinking and herd feeling’.

    Or consider Amis’s comments in 2008, arguing ‘Against the motion that America has lost [sic] its moral authority’:

    ‘All countries want first of all to be respected. But America’s defining anomaly is that it wants to be loved. Let’s call to mind an immortal and terrible irony, as the US army entered Iraq what was it expecting? It was expecting to be met with sweets and flowers and dancing in the city squares.’

    This is so far from the reality of what US power is and works to achieve, it almost defies comment. Amis added:

    ‘I ask you not to endorse this reflexive, directionless and sterile hatred of the hegemon. The present administration is coming to an end and we may reasonably hope that the new president will be sharply attentive to what has been so blithely neglected. While it’s true that good intentions can be terrifying enough, they are on average decisively better than bad intentions.’ (‘The Great Debaters’, The Independent, 1 May 2008)

    Certainly, ‘the new president’, Barack Obama, was ‘sharply attentive’ to Muslim countries that required fresh or repeat bombing, attacking fully seven of them in eight years, leaving Libya in ruins. Clearly, ‘America’ just ‘wants to be loved’.

    Was Amis, here, waging war on the deadly clichés that facilitate mass killing by obscuring the goals and violence of Great Power? We don’t think so. Hello!

    In his autobiographical novel, Inside Story, Amis recounted (or paraphrased, or invented) a discussion with his close friend Christopher Hitchens about Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and terrorism. Hitchens says:

    ‘If a conspiracy theory traduces America, then Gore’ll subscribe to it. With Gore it’s just a fatuous posture. With Noam, I’m sorry to say, it’s heartfelt. He just doesn’t like America.’ (Amis, Inside Story, Vintage, 2020, e-book, p.133)

    The work of Vidal and Chomsky – two of the most astute, honest and courageous analysts exposing political mendacity – is thus dismissed as conspiracy theorising: a bizarre quirk in Vidal, but a key function of irrational hatred in Chomsky.

    Amis’s reply:

    ‘… Well keep it up, Hitch. You’re the only lefty who’s shown any mettle. It’s your armed-forces blood – the blood of the Royal Navy. And you love America.’

    In October 2015, The Times reported Amis’s prediction that Labour under Corbyn would become ‘hopelessly retrograde, self-absorbed, self-pitying and self-righteous, quite unembarrassed by its (years-long) tantrum, necessarily and increasingly hostile to democracy and, in any sane view, undeserving of a single vote’.

    To the extent that this made sense at all, it was elite, truth-reversing herdthink rejecting Britain’s sole chance in a generation (or longer) of electing a leader who might offer hope of an authentically compassionate politics opposing war, inequality and the destruction of the environment. Again, the unthinking conformity of someone waging a ‘war against cliché’ is astonishing.

    Amis attacked Corbyn’s views on terrorism, saying his comparisons between western troops and ‘the glitteringly murderous theists of Islamic State’ are an example of the ‘dismally reflexive mental habit of seeking tinkertoy moral “equivalence” at every opportunity’.

    As we discussed in a recent media alert, the ‘mainstream’ focus on ‘moral equivalence’ is a constant theme of ‘mainstream’ herdthink.

    ‘Some Societies Are Just More Evolved Than Others’

    Try to imagine the intensity of the response if Jeremy Corbyn, or some other high-profile leftist, said this of the latest brutal example of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the apartheid Israeli state:

    ‘What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Jewish community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’

    As we all know, the political and media class would rise up in an eruption of blistering outrage at this call for the collective punishment, not just of Israelis, not just of the entire Jewish community, but of Jewish children? Such comments would rightly be denounced as obscene, instantly becoming a national and global scandal. And no matter how much Corbyn might subsequently back-track or apologise, his words would never be forgotten; they would be relentlessly cited as the principal reason why he should never be taken seriously, engaged with, or even mentioned, again.

    In a September 2006 interview on terrorism with Ginny Dougary, Amis said:

    ‘What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’

    The New York Times’ Amis obituary makes no mention of this shocking public statement, noting merely:

    ‘In 2008, Mr. Amis published “The Second Plane,” a collection of 12 pieces of nonfiction and two short stories about the Western world and terror. “Are you an Islamophobe?” he was asked by the British newspaper The Independent while he was writing the book.

    ‘“Of course not,” he replied. “What I am is an Islamismophobe. Or better say an anti-Islamist, because a ‘phobia’ is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing people who say they want to kill you.”’

    But what is an ‘Islamismophobe’? In 2007, satirist and filmmaker Chris Morris commented in the Guardian:

    ‘Even Hitchens concedes Amis wrongly conflates Islamism with Islam. By fudging, Amis adds the weight of his reaction against terrorism to his contempt for Muslims in general. Take “Islamism”. What does it actually mean?’

    In his Guardian obituary, Boyd Tonkin wrote:

    ‘Rash interview statements prompted charges of Islamophobia. More soberly, Inside Story concludes that “the real danger of terrorism lies not in what it inflicts but what it provokes”. Still, the op-ed pundit Amis could drop his verbal, even moral, compass.’

    ‘Rash’ statements? Did Amis merely ‘drop’ his moral compass from time to time? Compared to the grim fate that would have awaited Corbyn, or any other high-profile left commentator in our imaginary scenario, this was the tiniest slap on Amis’s reputational wrist.

    In similar vein, Lisa Allardice commented in the Guardian:

    ‘Amis the dazzling young stylist looked in danger of being overshadowed by Amis the grumpy old controversialist, with ill-judged comments on Islamism and euthanasia.’

    Again, ‘ill-judged’? ‘Grumpy’? And that was it – no details were supplied.

    Brief mention of the controversy was buried half-way through an Observer piece by Sarah Shaffi:

    ‘Amis was accused of Islamophobia following a 2006 interview with Ginny Dougary in which he said “there’s a definite urge… to say, ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’”. Talking to the Guardian in 2020 he said he “certainly regretted having said what I said; already by mid-afternoon on that day I ceased to believe in what I said”.’

    But Amis’s hostility to ‘Islamism’ was more than a passing phase. In the same interview with Ginny Dougary, he said:

    ‘It’s a very chilling thought because the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they’re going to get better and better at that. They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.’

    He commented elsewhere:

    ‘The impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.’

    At the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2007, Amis said Muslim states were less ‘civilised’ than western society: ‘Some societies are just more evolved than others.’

    He added: ‘There is no inoffensive way to put this. By evolved, I mean more civilised. We have more respect for civil society.’

    A year earlier, Amis had asserted that Iran, ‘our natural enemy,’ would be willing to accept a nuclear attack in order to realise its dark dreams: ‘They feel they can absorb this hit and destroy Israel.’ (Amis, This Week, 12 October 2006)

    In fact, Iran had no nuclear weapons and, according to US intelligence agencies in 2007, ‘had halted its nuclear weapons programme’ in 2003. But anyway, to suggest that Iran was so fanatical that it would be willing to accept millions of deaths was deeply dehumanising.

    The Telegraph obituary commented only that academic Terry Eagleton ‘had accused Amis of racism after an interview in which he floated the idea of deporting Muslims (a suggestion Amis later dismissed as “stupid”).’

    The obituary added:

    ‘… he was accused variously of misogyny, Islamophobia, ageism, naked greed, nepotism, professional betrayal, dwarfism, extravagant dentistry, and being a neglectful godfather’.

    Amis was accused of everything, then – Islamophobia was just one issue among many.

    The Mail on Sunday observed that Amis had been ‘Accused of Islamophobia or hating Muslims in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks’ while offering his defence – that he was against “Islamism”, not Muslims.‘ No details were given.

    In their pieces for the Observer, columnist Martha Gill and author Geoff Dyer made no mention of the controversy at all.

    ‘How Death Outlives War’ – The Brown University Report

    Light is shed on the moral significance of Amis’s fleeting sense that ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’, and on the ‘mainstream’ media’s near-complete indifference to these comments, by a new Brown University report drawing on UN data and expert analyses.

    On May 15, the Washington Post described how the report, ‘How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health’, has attempted ‘to calculate the minimum number of excess deaths attributable to the war on terrorism, across conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen’.

    The Post commented:

    ‘The accounting, so far as it can be measured, puts the toll at 4.5 million to 4.6 million — a figure that continues to mount as the effects of conflict reverberate. Of those fatalities, the report estimates, some 3.6 million to 3.7 million were “indirect deaths” caused by the deterioration of economic, environmental, psychological and health conditions.’

    The report makes clear that these figures are conservative and constantly rising:

    ‘Some of these people were killed in the fighting, but far more, especially children, have been killed by the reverberating effects of war, such as the spread of disease. These latter indirect deaths – estimated at 3.6-3.7 million – and related health problems have resulted from the post-9/11 wars’ destruction of economies, public services, and the environment. Indirect deaths grow in scale over time. Though in 2021 the United States withdrew military forces from Afghanistan, officially ending a war that began with its invasion 20 years prior, today Afghans are suffering and dying from war-related causes at higher rates than ever.’

    A 2018 survey of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi refugees ‘showed that more than 60% were traumatized by war experiences, including attacks by military forces, coping with the murder or disappearance of relatives, living through torture and solitary confinement, and witnessing murders, abuse, and sexual violence. More than 6% had been raped’.

    The children, a particular focus of Amis’s fleeting ‘urge’, have faced unimaginable suffering. The report calculates that more than 7.6 million children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition, or wasting, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia:

    ‘“Wasting” means, simply, not getting enough food, literally wasting to skin and bones, putting these children at greater risk of death, including from infections that result from their weakened immune systems.’

    A 2014 survey showed that four out of ten school children (under age 16) in Mosul, Iraq had mental health disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder. There are numerous other shocking insights, consistently ignored by British corporate media, on the US-UK devastation of Iraq:

    ‘The UN economic sanctions of the 1990s caused many health providers to leave Iraq, and in the five years following the U.S. invasion in 2003, an estimated 18,000 doctors – over half those remaining at the time – fled the country. In December 2011, when U.S. soldiers officially withdrew, doctors in Baghdad were being killed at a rate of 47.6 per 1,000 professionals per month, and nearly 5,400 doctors were emigrating annually.’

    Between 2014 and 2017, various combatants in Iraq destroyed 63 cities and 1,556 villages; the destruction of residential buildings alone generated over 55 million tons of debris.

    The suffering abounds:

    ‘Middle East households headed by widows are particularly impoverished; there are over one million widows in Iraq and two million in Afghanistan.’

    As for Nato’s devastation of Libya:

    ‘Whereas before Libya’s war, the country’s human development index was ranked the highest in Africa, the war disrupted healthcare and closed hospitals across the country. The war years brought about a large decrease in life expectancy (nine years for men and six for women), and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis surged.’

    In 2021, 50% of households in Libya relied on bottled water and only 22% had access to safe sanitation.

    The icing on this nightmarish cake is the fact that Western corporations got their hands on the oil in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

    In 2007, in a vanishingly rare instance of dissent titled, ‘Shame on us’, published by the Guardian, the Irish novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett damned the media silence in response to Amis’s comments:

    ‘Why did writers not start writing? There is Eagleton and there is the Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who took apart Amis’s strange and chaotic essay on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. But where are the others?’

    Bennett concluded:

    ‘Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.’

    Nothing has changed. As another famous novelist, Mark Twain, observed:

    ‘There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.’ (Twain, Following the Equator – The wit and wisdom of Mark Twain, Dover, 1999, p.4)

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Vale John (Jack) Rice: a well-loved teacher and activist

    John (Jack) Rice played an important role in many organisations. He recognised the critical relationship between theory and activism. He will be greatly missed, writes Paul Petit.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Prairie Populist, Honest Senator James Abourezk, Fearless Fighter for Justice

    Most citizen advocates who work with U.S. senators on a wide variety of issues probably would agree that the late South Dakota Democrat, James Abourezk, was one of a kind. It was not that he was so honest, so down to earth, or so engaging with friend and foe alike. Rather, it was his willingness to be a minority of one pressing into visibility the plight of the forgotten, the oppressed and the excluded.

    During his one term in the Senate (1973 to 1978), he singlehandedly took the plight and causes of Native Americans to heights the long-complicit Congress and media could not ignore. Read what the Associated Press had to say in its obituary:

    Mr. Abourezk was the first chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and successfully pressed for the American Indian Policy Review Commission. It produced a comprehensive review of federal policy with American Indian tribes and sparked the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Indian Child Welfare Act — a landmark piece of legislation meant to cut down on the alarming rate at which Native American children were taken from their homes and placed with white families.

    Abourezk found a keen supporter in fellow South Dakotan Senator George McGovern, who was pioneering Senate hearings “discovering” serious hunger in America, including on Indian Reservations. He grew up on the impoverished Rosebud Reservation and never forgot where he came from.

    As Senator, he visited Lebanon, the ancestral land of his immigrant parents, which introduced him to U.S. policy in the Middle East and the oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel and its main backer, the U.S. government. As a lone voice on Capitol Hill, he championed wider recognition of these racist practices, including discrimination against Arab-Americans (the other anti-Semitism).

    His style was one of dialogue and friendly debate. He co-authored a book with Hyman Bookbinder titled, Through Different Eyes: Two Leading Americans, a Jew and an Arab, Debate U.S. Policy in the Middle East (1987). They travelled together around the country discussing and disagreeing before rapt audiences unused to such two-way dialogues.

    The former Senate Democratic majority leader, South Dakotan Tom Daschle was a Senate aide to Senator Abourezk. He told AP, “He was courageous, he was outspoken. I give him great credit for his advocacy of human rights, especially of the need to recognize the Arab American community in the United States. He was a lone voice for many years. He was a great storyteller; he had great humor; he was quick-witted and people loved to be around him.”

    Not surprising when you learn of all the jobs Abourezk had before and after serving four years in the Navy, earning a civil engineering degree from the South Dakota School of Mines and a law degree from the University of South Dakota School of Law. He worked as a ranger, blackjack dealer, judo instructor, bartender, bouncer, car salesman and wholesale grocery salesman.

    Such experiences can lead to an independence of thought and practice. These jobs gave him a sense of theatre. Saying that sports was not controversial and can bring people together, he arranged for the University of South Dakota basketball team to play a game with the Cuban national basketball team in Cuba, where he met with Fidel Castro.

    After retiring from the U.S. Senate, he wrote a memoir epitomizing his sense of humor, rooted in truth, emerged in force. He wrote of the Senate: “Where else are your doors opened for you, is your travel all over the world provided free of charge, can you meet with world leaders who would otherwise never let you into their countries, have your bad jokes laughed at and your boring speeches applauded? It’s the ultimate place to have one’s ego massaged, over and over.”

    He believed in term limits and practiced what he preached – one term only – to the detriment of the American people that “this prairie populist” so dutifully spoke and acted for in the corporate-dominated Congress. We found him to be the “go-to” person in the Senate when time was of the essence. He took up consumer, labor, and family farmer causes as a matter of duty. With knowledge and intuition, he rose to the occasion, often with his close collaborator, Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH), to challenge big business lobbies.

    After he left the Senate, he founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), practiced law in South Dakota for good causes, and continued to speak out on U.S. foreign policy. Former ADC president, Albert Mokhiber wrote: “We lost a dear friend and mentor, a brave leader and the best that America has and hopefully will continue to offer.”

    In the Nineties, he told me he sometimes regretted leaving the Senate, noting that by then his seniority would have made him chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He observed that had he led that Committee, several top judicial nominees, including Clarence Thomas, would not have been confirmed.

    He was an exceedingly compassionate man. He was quick to express condolences and suggest some award or other legacy be established in honor of the deceased.

    His many friends should gather together and decide what kinds of permanent legacies can be established in honor of a man who stood out, stood tall and proclaimed the needs of justice for the dispossessed. That would be a good way to convey condolences to his outstanding restaurateur wife and author, Sanaa Dieb, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The young generation, turned off by corrupt and cowardly politicians, needs to learn about the luminous life of 92-year-old James Abourezk.

    The post Prairie Populist, Honest Senator James Abourezk, Fearless Fighter for Justice first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Vale Juan Jose (John) Garcia, 1940-2023

    John Garcia, a passionate and sincere person, spent a lot of his life fighting for rights for First Nations’ peoples as well as refugees from tyranny. Robynne Murphy, his friend and comrade, writes about his life.  

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Tongan politician, democracy reformer and scholar Dr Sitiveni Halapua dies

    By Kālino Lātū, editor of Kaniva News

    Dr Sitiveni Halapua, former deputy leader of Tonga’s Democratic Movement, has died aged 74.

    Born on February 13, 1949, he was a respected academic, a pioneer of Tonga’s democratic reforms and pioneer of a conflict resolution system based on traditional practices.

    Halapua earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Kent in the UK and went on to lecture in economics at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji.

    He was director of the Pacific Islands Development Programme at the East-West Centre at the University of Hawai’i for more than 20 years.

    It was while working at the East-West Centre that he developed a conflict-resolution system based on the Polynesian practice of Talanoa, known as the “Talanoa conflict-resolution” system.

    It has been used in the Cook Islands, Fiji and Tonga.

    In November 2005, Dr Halapua was appointed to the National Committee for Political Reform, aimed at producing a plan for the democratic reform of Tonga.

    Blame over report
    In October 2006 the commission recommended a fully elected Parliament. He later accused Prime Minister Feleti Sevele’s of hijacking the report and blamed this for the 2006 Nuku’alofa riots, which destroyed much of central Nuku’alofa.

    Dr Halapua was elected to Parliament as a People’s Representative for Tongatapu 3 in the 2010 elections.

    Four years later, he was ousted as candidate for the Democratic Party after party leader and Prime Minister ‘Akilisi Pohiva’s newspaper, Kele’a, accused him of being at the centre of a plot to seek the premiership.

    As Kaniva News reported at the time, Kele’a claimed that three Democratic Party members, including People’s Representatives Semisi Tapueluelu and Sione Taione planned in 2012 to replace Pohiva with fellow parliamentarian Dr Sitiveni Halapua.

    Kele’a alleged that the plan was made in 2012 when the Democratic government lodged a motion of no confidence against the Prime Minister, Lord Tu’ivakano.

    Both Taione and Halapua denied the story.

    Relations between Pohiva and Halapua had been strained since October 2013 when Dr Halapua abstained from voting for a bill that would have let the Prime Minister be popularly elected.

    Popular bill lost
    The bill was laid before the Tongan Parliament by Democrat MP Dr ‘Aisake Eke and had received massive support from many of the 17 popular electorates, nine of which elected Democrat Members of Parliament. However, the motion was lost 15-6.

    Dr Halapua’s abstention drew strong criticisms from the local media and the Democrats.

    Kele’a lashed out at Dr Halapua’s behaviour, with the editor saying he no longer trusted him as one of the front benchers of the party.

    Dr Halapua had long been an advocate of what he called Pule’anga Kafataha or “Coalition Government”.

    Under the proposal all parliamentarians, whether nobles or commoners, would work together as a coalition.

    In 2010 Halapua told Kaniva News that Democratic Party Parliamentarians voting as members of a coalition could elect a noble rather than his party leader, ‘Akilisi Pohiva, but still keep their allegiance to Pohiva and the Democratic Party.

    After he was removed as a Democrat candidate, Dr Halapua said he would stand as an independent at the next election, but did not run. He stood unsuccessfully in the 2017 election.

    Republished from Kaniva Tonga with permission from the authors.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Vale Shirley Shackleton, fighter for justice for East Timor

    Shirley Shackleton, even with her own tragedy, made common cause with the Timorese people’s struggle and resistance. She will be remembered, writes Stephen Langford.

  • Tony Fala: Pelé – a tribute from Aotearoa and Oceania

    ANALYSIS: By Tony Fala

    Edson Arantes do Nascimento passed away at the age of 82 after a brave battle with colon cancer in Brazil on 20 December 2022. Known as “O Rei”, “The Black Pearl”, and “Pelé”, he was an ambassador, businessperson, community worker to the world, cultural force, leader, soccer player, and politician.

    In this article, I write about why I admired Pelé as a child.

    Writing as an adult and activist, I also pay tribute to Pelé and articulate why “O Rei” remains an important teacher of decoloniality and decolonisation in contemporary Oceania.

    Pelé in my childhood in the 1970s
    I caught brief glimpses of Pelé’s soccer genius in sports highlights on Aotearoa television news as a child in the 1970s.

    I did not grasp the tactical, technical, or strategic intricacies of professional soccer when watching Pelé play for the New York Cosmos as a child. But I did see Pelé’s genius with a soccer ball on television. I remember seeing him play with creativity, joy, and imagination.

    Pelé brought joy into my difficult childhood.

    Like other Pacific Islanders of his generation, my father was a born-again rugby supporter who did not rate football as a sport. But even he would marvel at O Rei’s exploits on Aotearoa television when Pelé appeared.

    Pacific people recognised Pelé’s genius — just as they recognised the extraordinary gifts of Muhammad Ali in the boxing ring.

    Years before the formation of the English Premier League, I grew to love watching the great British players representing the mighty first division English clubs. Aotearoa television would play a weekly English first division match, and we always received televised, free- to-air coverage of FA Cup Finals in the 1970s and 1980s.

    I came to love Division One English club football in the 1970s and 1980s.


    An Al Jazeera tribute to Pelé.

    Historically, Aotearoa has always had a strong affinity with British football. Despite loving the English game, I saw that Pelé played soccer in a radically unique way.

    In later years, I would understand that Pelé played an Afro-Brazilian style of football known as “jogo bonito”, or, the beautiful game — characterised by creativity and improvisation by individual players; off the ball movement; one touch passing; samba like team rhythm and tempo, and superlative dribbling, passing, and attacking movements on the ground and in the air by the entire team.

    I watched documentaries about Pelé as a child and a teen when they appeared on Aotearoa television. But I was too young to see the televised, in-colour spectacle of “jogo bonito” performed by Alberto, Gerson, Jairzinho, Pele, or Rivellino at Mexico City when Brazil beat Italy 4-1 to win the 1970 World Cup. I would only watch these mighty players in the 1970 World Cup after Sky TV played classic matches.

    Pelé, Brazil, and ‘jogo bonito’ in 1982
    But I did witness the “jogo bonito” performed by the 1982 Brazilian side that featured Eder, Falcao, Junior, Socrates, and Zico. Although this side did not win the 1982 World Cup, they remain the greatest sporting team I have ever witnessed — they performed art and played soccer simultaneously.

    Aotearoa’s mighty All Whites played this Brazilian side in the group stages of the 1982 tournament. The team also got to meet Pelé in person when O Rei visited the Aotearoa team changing room before the match.

    I was too young to understand that the 1982 side played a style of Afro-Brazilian soccer that continued the legacy of the beautiful game begun by Didi, Garrincha, Pelé, and Jairzinho long years before. Pelé was one of the innovators of this style of play in Brazil.

    Engaging with Pelé as an adult
    As an adult, I developed a fuller understanding of Pelé, his life, and his historical context.

    1. Pelé was born only 53 years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888 into an Afro-Brazilian family who often struggled to put food on the table. (Pelé writes about his childhood and the hardships he endured in his 2007 autobiography.)
    2. The Black Pearl’s Afro-Brazilian people occupied the lowest socio-economic positions in Brazilian society.
    3. Even today, Afro-Brazilians face discrimination in employment, the justice system, and day-to-day life in Brazil. The Brazilian police still target Afro-Brazilian male youth for violence even today.
    4. Opposing team’s fans made monkey noises — whether Pelé played in Brazil or around the world with his club, Santos. Despite his popularity, Pelé was a target of racism.
    5. Pelé’s Brazilian government prevented him from playing soccer in Europe by making him a “national treasure”. In consequence, Pelé could not sell his labour to European clubs. Critics have stated that this would never have happened to a white Brazilian.
    6. Brazilians accused Pelé of getting too close to figures in the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964-1985 — such as General Medici.
    7. Pelé’s former national teammate, Paulo Cesar Lima, said in the 2021 documentary Pelé that he loved Edson, but Lima also said he felt Pelé functioned as a “submissive Black man” during the height of the dictatorship repressions in 1969. Lima felt a statement by Pelé against the dictatorship in the late 1960s would have “gone a long way”.
    8. Brazilian journalist Juca Kfouri stated that Pelé did not have a guarantee that the Brazilian regime would not torture him if he did speak out.
    9. In Africa, ordinary people treated Pelé as a son when O Rei playing there in the late 1960s. Pelé remains a figure of Trans-Atlantic Black unity in Africa, the US, and in other parts of the Black Diaspora.
    10. Apartheid security forces prevented Pelé from leaving an airport when he visited South Africa in the 1960s. Pelé swore he would never return until South Africa was free from Apartheid. He did return in the 1990s — to spend time with Nelson Mandela.
    11. Pelé was a Goodwill Ambassador for the Rio De Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992.
    12. He was a Minister for Sport in Brazil.
    13. He was an ambassador for the UN, UNICEF, and UNESCO during his lifetime — always seeking to forge relationships with children.
    14. He endured business failures.
    15. He refused to recognise a daughter born out of wedlock.
    16. Pelé was a significant cultural force in Brazil — for good and for bad.
    17. He was a football genius. Football journalists such as Tim Vickery have spoken of Pelé’s soccer skills — Edson’s ability with both feet; acceleration; skills in the air; passing talents; unselfishness; football intelligence, and his psychological strength.

    Pelé’s passing in the media
    Since his untimely passing, television news networks such as Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Television New Zealand have all honoured Pelé’s cultural, historical, political, and sporting legacy.

    Similarly, print media in Aotearoa, Australia, Brazil, Britain, France, and South Africa have represented Pelé as a “cultural icon”, “hero”, “innovator”, “giant of sport”, an “artist”, a “genius”, and a “fine, humble, and warm human being”.

    Print media sources in France and the US have also expressed criticism of Pelé for not doing more against the Brazilian dictatorship.

    Sources in Brazil have criticised Pelé for not taking more of a public stand against racism in Brazil and the world.

    Pelé’s aesthetics
    Brazilian star Neymar wrote a moving tribute for O Rei after the great man died. In one part of his tribute, Neymar stated that Pelé transformed soccer into art. I agree with Neymar’s insight.

    If one watches Pelé on film today, one sees a kinetic aesthetics of balance, gesture, grace, intelligence, power, speed, rhythm, and style — whether Pelé was in the air, in space, or in a crowd of players. One observes Pelé performing an aesthetics of creativity, joy, and improvisation. I have no doubt Pelé’s parents, coaches, friends, and teammates in Brazil all nurtured his aesthetics.

    Simultaneously, I am in no doubt that Pelé’s aesthetic genius was a gift given him by his ancestors and by his historical experience of being Afro-Brazilian.

    I am not Afro-Brazilian and do not pretend to understand the language of decoloniality and decolonisation Pelé performed in living motion on a soccer field. But I am convinced Pelé performed an aesthetics of Afro-Brazilian being, decolonisation, decoloniality, living, and expressing in his every movement on the soccer field.

    Pelé performed the history of his ancestors on the soccer stage.

    Pelé’s lessons for Oceania
    In conclusion, Pelé taught me five things as a Pacific person in Aotearoa.

    1. struggle to embrace joy and freedom in your life,
    2. always extend solidarity to those engaged in the Black struggle,
    3. remember the struggle for justice in Aotearoa, the Moana, Palestine, or West Papua are one with the struggle Black people face around the world,
    4. always look for the talents and potential in your own Moana peoples, and
    5. never be ashamed of your Oceanian ancestors, your genealogy, or your history.

    Despite his handful of personal failings, Pelé remains one of my great teachers in decolonial Oceania.

    The author, Tony Fala, acknowledges the lives of Brazilian football greats Garrincha, Pelé, and Socrates as the inspiration for this article. He also pays tribute to Pacific peoples across Oceania who believe in soccer as a sport that embraces emancipation, participation, struggle, and unity.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Vivienne Westwood: Activism and the Godmother of Punk


    There was the punk scene, Malcolm McLaren, their racy clothes shop at 430 King’s Road that started out as Let it Rock, the creation of a look, and the gathering of the earth rumbling Sex Pistols. In fact, the late Dame Vivienne Westwood was already a proven stirrer, suggesting that she, not Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, a.k.a Johnny Rotten, came up with the title for the barnstorming “Anarchy in the UK”. Boldly, she claimed that prior to McLaren and herself, there was no punk.

    The Westwood look became ubiquitous with enthusiastic teens of the late 1970s, the use of studs, clothes replete with antisocial indignation, and the jarring, spiky hair to match. In the opinion of Dame Zandra Rhodes, “We’d had flower power… then suddenly you had this very-hard hitting punk.”

    In her 2014 memoir, Viv Albertine of Slits fame offered a striking description of aspects of Westwood costumery: “mohair jumpers, knitted on big needles, so loosely that you can see all the way through them, T-shirts slashed and written on by hand, seams and labels on the outside, showing the construction of the piece.”

    For Westwood, fashion was always meant to be a spear for change. But as she noted in her autobiography, one jointly aided by the pen of Ian Kelly, “When I turned around, on the barricades, there was no one there. That was how it felt. They were just pogoing. So I lost interest.” The kids, in other words, just wanted the gear without manifesting any grand idea; this was the confrontation of fashion without any enduring consequences.

    Such a pattern would follow through the decades. The activist and designer were not always seen as one. Instead, Westwood was anointed as a cultural engenderer of daring haute couture rather than activist grenade thrower. But she made it clear that she was in fashion for only one reason: “to destroy the word ‘conformity’.” Far from being a mere designer of fashion, she “wished to confront the rotten status quo” via that medium.

    The official website draws upon a busy life beyond design, speaking about activism over two decades in support of “hundreds of causes, NGOs, grassroot charities and campaigns, including Amnesty International, War Child and Liberty” in addition to launching the campaigning movement Climate Revolution.

    Westwood’s environmental edge impressed PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk. “She was an early adopter of PETA’s fur-free ethos, choosing to donate her brand’s remaining rabbit fur bags to a wildlife sanctuary, and shed exotic things from her collections years ago.”

    In 2013, she told the Daily Mail that she could not talk about fashion. “I’m too preoccupied with using it as a vehicle for talking about climate change, which is an incredible danger. Everybody who’s eco-conscious is fighting the revolution and of course we need to get more people involved, to pressure the governments, to sort this out, because we have to sort this out.”

    In 2018, on receiving the Excellence Award at the Ischia Film & Music Global Fest, Westwood declared that fashion, in her mind, had ceased being as important as the issue of the day. At the very least, she was bored with it. “We have an enormous global problem: our politicians are not listening to our scientists. We have barely 20 years to stop things, otherwise we shall reach a tipping point and we can draw a line across the earth and everywhere below Paris will be uninhabitable. By the end of this century we will be only one billion people.”

    While eco-guerrilla activism was foremost in her mind, Westwood’s activist tent proved capacious. WikiLeaks and Assange can certainly express some gratitude for Westwood’s fire-breathing dedication. After his 40th birthday celebrations, she would make regular cycle visits to the Ecuadorian embassy, where the WikiLeaks founder remained an asylee tenant for seven years. As with her other causes, she managed to combine heavy-accented symbolism with a fashion statement, the catwalk repurposed for radical transparency. In 2012, she created a unisex “I’m Julian Assange” T-shirt, available for purchase for £40.

    As extradition proceedings mounted by the United States became ever more serious for Assange, Westwood was again on the scene. In 2020, during trial proceedings, she spent part of a day suspended in a cage outside the Old Bailey in London, kitted up in a yellow suit to signify the canary in the coalmine. “If the canary died, they all got out. Julian Assange is in a cage and he needs to get out. Don’t extradite to America.”

    Little wonder that Assange is now seeking leave from the authorities in Belmarsh Prison to attend her funeral. Given the practice of UK institutions, specifically regarding Assange, this dispensation is unlikely to be granted.

    Westwood also left a touching tribute to Assange’s wife, Stella: a wedding dress. In of itself, it was a striking statement of fashion and the act of naughty defiance and constant mischief: the publisher’s partner dressed in the activist’s genius.

    The post Vivienne Westwood: Activism and the Godmother of Punk first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Belarusian Human Rights defender Aleh Hulak dies

    Aleh Hulak
    Aleh Hulak © 2022 Belarusian Helsinki Committee

    On 16 December, 2022 Human Rights Watch published “In Memory of Aleh Hulak“, chair of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee (BHC) and a long-time leader of the Belarus human rights movement. Hulak, 55, led the Helsinki Committee with courage and unwavering commitment, including through the country’s recent, vicious crackdown on rights and the entrenchment of President Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s autocracy.

    The BHC, one of the country’s oldest human rights groups, has a broad mandate to advance civil and political, and social and economic rights. Hulak was a strong voice for free speech and the release of political prisoners and also for fair work conditions, and upholding human rights in business, trade union operations and health care.  

    The Belarusian government liquidated the BHC in 2021, along with hundreds of other independent groups. Hulak for years had pursued, against all odds, the group’s accreditation at the United Nations Economic and Social Council. In a bittersweet victory, his efforts succeeded less than two months ago.

    https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/16/belarus-memory-aleh-hulak

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • CAFCA stalwart and prolific reviewer Jeremy Agar dies

    OBITUARY: By Murray Horton in Christchurch

    It is with great sadness that I am reporting that Jeremy Agar was found dead in his Lyttelton home today. He was 80.

    Agar had been a Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) member since 2001 and a very active committee member for nearly all of that time. He was our chairperson for a number of years.

    It is the end of an era for Watchdog (and, to a lesser extent, for Anti-Bases Campaign’s Peace Researcher) — for at least 20 years, Jeremy was the most wonderfully prolific and erudite reviewer.

    And he bought the great majority of those books, and paid for the movie tickets, out of his own pocket, declining all offers of reimbursement. He actively sought books out for every issue (you will find his latest — and last — reviews in the December Watchdog, posted this week).

    He hated former US President Donald Trump, and everything he stands for, with a passion and had been writing about that in Watchdog for the past several years. His latest — and last — article on that subject is in the December Watchdog.

    Agar’s last ever Watchdog reviews and article in the December Watchdog.

    Jeremy Agar was passionate about CAFCA and he put himself and his money into it, big time. To give just one example — in 2014, when I undertook my most recent CAFCA national speaking tour, he insisted on driving me (a non-driver) right around both islands for several weeks, at his own expense.

    Everywhere we went we stayed with people — where necessary he slept on floors. He was then in his 70s, older than I am now.

    Not only did he drive me around, he chaired and spoke at every one of my meetings — including at the Pacific Media Centre. It was the longest and most full-on time I had spent with one other person for years and it was one of the highlights of my life.

    Jeremy Agar was not only a colleague but a very good friend. Over the 20 plus years I knew him, we spent a lot of time together and not just on that speaking tour. We shared interests outside of CAFCA and politics — we went to the rugby together and shared memorable moments in cold Christchurch grandstands.

    I am greatly saddened that I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to a good friend and colleague. But I console myself that my wife Becky and I were among the guests at his 80th birthday lunch in a Lyttelton restaurant just two months ago, in October. It was a very happy occasion and a great get together.

    I will miss Jeremy Agar. He was a unique individual. A full obituary will follow in due course.

    Murray Horton is secretary/organiser of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA). 

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • China Bids Farewell to Jiang Zemin

    This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

    • China bids farewell to Jiang Zemin
    • China expands social welfare
    • New trends in Chinese literature
    • Chinese tea, Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

    The post China Bids Farewell to Jiang Zemin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Vale Victor George Pinkerton, 1953-2022

    The Inner West Sydney community, and many suburbs beyond to Penrith, lost a great activist for social and environmental justice as Adrienne Shilling and Peter Hehir write.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.