radiofree.asia

Category: Opinion

  • Flippant references to Nazis blur the real and present dangers of fascism

    Football presenter Gary Lineker is in hot water for comparing UK government refugee policy to that of German fascism. He was commenting on a Twitter video of home secretary Suella Braverman’s plans to reduce the number of refugees in Britain:

    To Lineker’s credit, he has refused to delete his tweet so far. There’s some truth in what he says. Tory refugee policy is vile, racist, and costs lives. But there needs to be caution here, because saying that which is nasty is fascist is a mistake.

    In the same way that Gary Lineker is just a well-meaning liberal, rather than a raging leftist, the likes of Boris Johnson and Suella Braverman are simply Tories doing what exactly what Tories do.

    Wielding words

    Britain isn’t a fascist regime. These policies have been produced in a liberal democracy. And democracies are perfectly capable of doing terrible things. Violence, racism, colonialism, and exploitation are the bedrock upon which they are built.

    Like most centrists, Lineker doesn’t really understand what fascism is, where it comes from, or why it is distinct. And wielding Nazi and fascist comparisons lightly is a mug’s game, because those words mean something other than just things we don’t like or which are bad.

    Obscuring fascism and its threat by calling policies or people fascist says absolutely nothing about fascism, but a lot about the person making the accusation. To confront fascism, which is certainly alive around the world, we need to be able to distinguish it from plain old racist authoritarian capitalism. And we also need to understand the relationship between them.

    Dodgy analogies

    One of the worst trends going on social media and in political discourse is the half-cocked Nazi comparison. As Historian Edna Friedberg has it:

    Nazis seem to be everywhere these days. I don’t mean self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. I’m talking about folks being labeled as Nazis, Hitler, Gestapo, Goering — take your pick — by their political opponents.

    The practice even has its own name:

    American politicians from across the ideological spectrum, influential media figures, and ordinary people on social media casually use Holocaust terminology to bash anyone or any policy with which they disagree. The takedown is so common that it’s even earned its own term, reductio ad Hitlerum.

    Even worse is when people default to saying things which are absolutely not the Holocaust, are somehow like the Holocaust:

    The Holocaust has become shorthand for good vs. evil; it is the epithet to end all epithets.

    As Friedberg points out:

    This oversimplified approach to complex history is dangerous. When conducted with integrity and rigor, the study of history raises more questions than answers.

    The use of Nazi or Holocaust slurs simply to attack opponents or stir up supporters is cheap and dangerous. It’s a juvenile and lazy practice which reduces an immense crime to a political football.

    Real, existing fascism

    That is not say the Tory Party hasn’t had fascists in it. In the same way, the Labour Party has socialists in it from time to time. For example, in 2022, Tory councillor Andy Weatherhead was forced out of the Conservative Party after it emerged he admired Italian fascist leader Mussolini.

    Weatherhead also had a soft spot for British fascist leader Oswald Mosley. And it’s worth remembering that Mosley served as an MP for both the Labour and Tory parties.

    But fascism today is distinct from what we can call the ‘classical’ fascism of the 1930s. Philosophy professor Santiago Zabala said:

    The main difference between the classical and contemporary incarnations of fascism is that the version we observe today is operating within democratic systems rather than outside them.

    He added:

    Proponents of 20th-century fascism wanted to change everything from above; Mussolini defined it as “revolution against revolution”. But fascism today aims to transform democratic systems from within.

    That is not to say that modern fascism doesn’t still involve boot-boy street violence or a pursuit of an imagined “other”. We saw this recently in Liverpool where fascists organised local people in anti-refugee protests. Certainly, the Tories whip up and weaponise anger against minorities, and use some of the same rhetoric. But this, again, is opportunistic. Fascism is radical and revolutionary. It doesn’t want the status quo, which is what the Tories are trying to shore up with their own attacks on refugees, trade unionists, and minority groups.

    Trump and co

    One of the reasons the term fascism has become so over- and mis-used in recent years is Donald Trump. Again, there are certainly fascists in his base. But the question of whether Trump himself is a fascist is an important one, because we need to be able to see fascism clearly.

    As a 2018 Vox interview with Yale philosopher Jason Stanley argued, different ends of the spectrum throw the word around and attach different meanings to it:

    Liberals see fascism as the culmination of conservative thinking: an authoritarian, nationalist, and racist system of government organized around corporate power. For conservatives, fascism is totalitarianism masquerading as the nanny state.

    But Stanley still calls for a certain amount of nuance around Trump:

    I wouldn’t claim — not yet, at least — that Trump is presiding over a fascist government, but he is very clearly using fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions, and that’s very troubling.

    In light of 2020’s Capitol riots, however, where far-right Trump supporters stormed government buildings in Washington DC, it might be worth reviewing Stanley’s assessment. The main takeaway is that fascism remains a fluid, adaptable creed which defies easy definition. It can accompany conservative or nationalist movements, while still being distinct from them.

    Complexity

    The key point in all this is this that fascism is a complex set of ideas – and those need to be engaged with carefully. Analogies and comparisons can be useful, but they should never be made flippantly. This is because they can obscure fascism where it actually exists.

    In the UK there are fascists, for example, but they are not organised into a powerful movement. Rather, they spend their time trading off fear whipped up about refugees and protesting drag queens in an attempt to influence popular discourse. The fact Tories and even centrists also do this at times does not make them fascists too.

    What we are dealing with is an aggressive racialised capitalism, in a country with a violent imperial past and present, and we need to see that for what it is. Not least, that is, so that we can recognise fascists when they do appear in numbers.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Paul Sableman, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CC BY 2.0.

    By Joe Glenton

  • Anti-fascists explain the importance of anonymity on demonstrations

    Fascist group Patriotic Alternative (PA) has been mobilising around the UK, and anti-fascists are increasingly organising counter demonstrations.

    Campaigners are organising against PA in their local areas, and it’s clear that anti-fascism is strongest when it’s rooted in local communities. It’s also clear that PA are mobilising racists from around the UK to travel to wherever demos are happening. So anti-racists need to be ready to travel too, to back people up.

    Black-bloc

    Ten days ago, PA held a demonstration in Falmouth, targeted at a local hotel, where refugees were being housed. But local group Cornwall Resists got there first, and occupied the space around the hotel for the duration of the day.

    Cornwall anti-fascists organised themselves on the day as a ‘black bloc’.

    Cornwall Resists were serious about the identities of people on the demonstration. The day before the protest, the group tweeted a list of what to bring, and what not to bring – including a mask, and dark unidentifiable clothing:

    A statement from one person who joined the black bloc explained why they felt they needed to protect their identity. The statement came after fellow anti-racists levelled criticism at them for covering their faces. They said:

    there has… been criticism from some… campaigners, who’ve questioned why we wore masks and complained that it made us look threatening. But while the far-right refuse to accept that communities will come together and resist their vile nonsense, it feels important to set out clearly for others why we dressed the way we did and concealed our identities.

    The anti-fascist continued, explaining that wearing a mask is a way to protect yourself from organised racists, who often harass and attack their opponents. They gave the example of the threats made against Cornwall politician Nicole Broadhurst:

    Firstly anti fascism, particularly militant anti-fascism, is dangerous. There are some very nasty violent racists around who spend a lot of time trying to find out our identities. The threat when they do this is very real. In 2021 we saw this locally when Penzance mayor Nicole Broadhurst received racist threats and had to have a panic alarm installed in her house. We live in our communities, some of us have children or live with vulnerable people. We will not, and should not be expected to, put our safety or the safety of our loved ones at risk.

    Surveillance

    The statement explained how wearing a mask is a good way to protect yourself against police surveillance, too. Both as a protection against overt filming by police, and more covert intelligence gathering tactics:

    we hide our identities to resist police surveillance. Police surveillance takes many forms – from obvious police filming, to drones to body worn cameras to the [insidious] tactics of Police Liaison Officers (PLOs) who were out in force on Saturday. PLOs are intelligence gatherers, masquerading as the friendly face of policing (no such thing!)…Clear messaging from Cornwall Resists before and during the protest aimed to alert those attending to their presence.
    The antifascist’s statement went on to argue that masking up is all the more important in the context of the ever-increasing repressive state legislation that targets us when we organise on the streets:
    New protest legislation is criminalising many forms of protest. Anti-fascists are labeled aggravated activists by the police, and you don’t need to have a criminal record to be added to a police database. Simply associating with a known person and going to several protests is enough to justify an entry. This information has, in the past, been used by the police to harass and intimidate campaigners.
    No-one should face police intimidation for standing up to fascists. Meanwhile, when the Public Order Bill comes into force, protesters who haven’t even committed an offence, can be issued with Serious Disruption Prevention Orders. These are essentially banning orders that will prevent people from attending protests, stop them seeing named people, prevent them from organising online and can even be enforced by electronic tags.

    Not organising with the cops ‘is a red line’

    Cornwall Resists also took a stance of not negotiating with the police prior to their counter demonstration. The antifascist said that if the group had liaised with the cops, then their organisers could have been targeted. The Public Order Act allows the police to charge ‘official’ protest organisers who don’t comply with police restrictions. However, if no-one comes forward as organisers, the police can’t do this.

    The campaigner insisted:

    We will not allow the police to set the terms or the boundaries of our resistance – and we will not allow them to target and threaten named organisers as a result. And let’s face it, had [our] protest been organised by a group that had negotiated with the cops, it wouldn’t have happened in the same way.
    They also argued that:
    Not liaising with police is a red line. It keeps every one safe. And it is this collective solidarity that keeps our movements strong

    Solidarity

    Another anti-fascist – who attended the demo in Falmouth – told the Canary how empowering it was to be part of the black bloc:

    I knew I was protected and in a team with people I can trust because of us all in bloc. It made me feel so much safer knowing who was on my side.

    They spoke about the feeling of solidarity that they felt with the people who joined them to protest:

    Solidarity. That’s the biggest thing. Obviously solidarity with people we’re protecting, our fellow humans who deserve love and protection, but also solidarity in black bloc with comrades.

    Finally, they emphasised the importance of getting out on the streets and confronting the fascists in person.

    I needed to tell the fash what’s what, and that we won’t stand for them on our streets . Fuck, there’s more of us than them (fash and state) and we need to prove that in person

    We need to be prepared to defend each other

    This new wave of demonstrations by PA, which is hot on the heels of the group’s bigoted response to the Drag Queen Story Hour tour last year, is a challenge for our anti-racist movements.

    We know from the past that if we don’t protect our identities, then we are vulnerable to being targeted by fascists. In fact, PA even targeted the Canary‘s Steve Topple online for reporting on the counter demonstration in Falmouth.

    Wearing a mask on demonstrations, and refusing police attempts to control us, are just some of the steps we can take, so that we are more prepared to defend ourselves and each other.

    Its important to recognise that not everyone can hide their identities so easily on demonstrations. Its much harder for people of colour to stay anonymous (assuming the crowd is majority white), and it can be very difficult for people who have an easily distinguishable body shape, or physical disabilities too.

    Crucially, people of colour are vulnerable to racism all the time. Not just during fascist demonstrations. And the answer to tackling fascism isn’t just to confront Patriotic Alternative when they mobilise. Its to build a strong permanent left wing and anti-racist presence in all of our communities. One that is rooted at the local level, but with connections across regions. We need to develop networks of solidarity – based on real personal connections –  that can defend themselves should they need to.

    Featured image via Cornwall Resists (with permission)

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • If you think society is less misogynist in 2023, think again

    Content warning: discussion of sexual violence

    8 March is International Women’s Day. Women and allies around the world are joining together in celebration of our strength, and we’ll be commemorating all of us who have died at the hands of men.

    We are, of course, gathering in solidarity against against sexism and misogyny. Over the past few months, I have spoken to a number of people who feel that misogyny isn’t as bad as it used to be; that somehow our UK society is learning to be better. They cite the fact that sexual consent and boundaries are now practiced in many relationships. But let’s face it, a man checking whether his sexual partner consents is the bare minimum of what he should be doing anyway. It’s disturbing that it’s taken us until 2023 to get this far. The bar is very, very low when it comes to how we expect cis men to act.

    If you think this shows that men are somehow better these days, you’d be wrong. The number of women who are being spiked on a night out is alarming, and in 2023, it’s now normal for notices in club toilets to suggest politely that men “stop spiking”.

    On top of this, violence against women during consensual sex is now completely normalised. We are often labelled and shamed as being ‘vanilla’ if we don’t want to be strangled, or if we don’t want to consent to a man’s kink. Strangling during sex is highly gendered, and is now the norm, rather than the exception. Men often strangle us without our permission. In 2019, the BBC wrote:

    more than a third of UK women under the age of 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sex…”

    Four years later, I would argue that not much has changed.

    Are rough sex laws really protecting us?

    The ‘rough sex’ defence has been consistently used by violent men who have murdered women. In 2021, the Domestic Abuse Act did, in theory, rule out this defence. The new law states that:

    Consent to serious harm for sexual gratification [is] not a defence.

    But campaign group We Can’t Consent To This has pointed out that the new laws aren’t working. The group said:

    in November 2021, the Court of Appeal decided Sam Pybus’s sentence of 4 years 8 months should not be increased, after he strangled Sophie Moss until she was dead, and claimed that she had encouraged him to do it. We think there could be no clearer sign the law is not yet working.

    The lead appeal judge argued that Sophie had consented to being strangled; quite how the misogynist judge could know this is a mystery. And how exactly could she consent to being strangled until she was murdered? Pybus had a history of violence against women, and had strangled his previous partner, too. But, of course, Sophie was held accountable, even in her death, because Pybus’s actions were apparently consensual.

    In England and Wales, it has now also become an offence for someone to inflict harm through non-fatal strangulation. But We Can’t Consent To This said:

    With the introduction of a 5 year sentence for Non Fatal Strangulation, shockingly, it’s possible to kill a sexual partner and get a shorter sentence than you would have for not killing her. These short sentences for manslaughter are common – in each case the violence used is shockingly severe.

    Misogyny as the norm

    Of course, misogyny doesn’t just rear its ugly head during sex. It’s so normalised in our society that we don’t even see it for what it is. An obvious example of this is the treatment of famous women when they dare to challenge famous misogynist men. In 2022, the world witnessed Amber Heard and Johnny Depp in court. I felt sick when I heard how Depp had treated Heard. But I felt even more sick when I realised that the world was defending him; that it didn’t matter how disgusting he was towards women – nothing could pull him off his pedestal.

    The misogynist backlash Heard received – surprisingly from all genders – was absolutely sickening. As Canary guest writer Annie Stevens wrote at the time:

    Any man that uses terms like “idiot cow”, “withering cunt”, “worthless hooker”, “slippery whore” or “waste of a cum guzzler” (Depp’s words) to describe women is clearly a misogynist.

    And yet, despairingly, the world still stood by Depp, hero-worshipping him as a cis man who could do no wrong, even when his vile misogyny was shown to the world, plain as day. This case is a prime example of how society excuses and emboldens men to act however they want. Stevens wrote:

    there is no question that it will impact survivors here who have seen friends, family and colleagues back Johnny and claim that Amber is a liar.

    Women have already been pulling out of cases due to the fear of going through what Amber did. Not only that, this case has also emboldened abusive men.

    Prioritising feelings of men

    Since then, the case of another cis man, footballer Benjamin Mendy, has been in the public spotlight. He, along with his friend Louis Saha Matturie, was accused of multiple sexual offences, including rape, by 13 different women. It will, no doubt, have taken the women all of the courage they could muster to be involved in this prosecution, particularly after they witnessed how Heard was treated by the world.

    Unsurprisingly, the majority-male jury found Mendy not guilty of six counts of rape and one count of sexual assault. A retrial is due to take place after the jury couldn’t reach a verdict about one count of rape and one of attempted rape.

    Instead of focusing on whether a majority-male jury should even be allowed in such cases, the mainstream media commented on how Mendy’s life had been shaken up by the accusations. Rather than talking about how the women will have been traumatised by such a man, the BBC wrote that:

    The allegations and trial had been “absolute hell” for Mr Mendy.

    ‘Not all men’

    Of course, you might be a man reading this, thinking to yourself that “not all men” are misogynists, “not all men” are predators, and that “not all men” are sexist. But this is a tiresome argument, used by many of you around the world to excuse yourselves from doing any work on your own patriarchal behaviour. By saying “not all men”, you’re refusing to self-reflect. And this refusal is insulting to the very women who you claim to care about, and who you say you would never harm.

    The “not all men” argument is useless to us. It doesn’t make me or my friends any safer in our homes. It doesn’t prevent us from being harassed, or spiked in a club, or murdered by people who claim to love us. 1,425 women have been killed by men in the UK over a decade, between 2009 and 2018. 62% of women are killed by their current or former partner. Others are murdered by relatives. In 92% of the cases, the women knew their killer.

    Men, it’s time that you step up

    I have previously written about how UK society likes to victim-blame women for the misogyny we encounter. I said:

    As women, we are sick and tired of being told to moderate our behaviour. “Follow the rules”, they say. “Don’t walk alone in the dark”. “Don’t be drunk”. “Don’t dress a certain way”. How, exactly, does moderating our behaviour in any way address the root issue: the misogyny entrenched in our society?

    It is not, in any way, a woman’s responsibility to change how we act. The time has come for men to step up. Look at yourselves, your own behaviour, and the behaviour of your male friends. Look at how patriarchy is entrenched in all of you, and how you all need to do the work to unpick it. Call out your friends who have misogynist or sexist opinions, and challenge them. Don’t shy away from difficult conversations.

    And if women call you out for being sexist, don’t get defensive, and don’t let your male fragility rear its ugly head. Instead, take the time to reflect. When you want to open your mouth and protest, “but not all men”, think twice. After all, you can never, ever know what it’s like to live in a misogynist world.

    We need your understanding. But more than that, we need you to be actively willing to fight sexism and misogyny within yourselves and in society, wherever it manifests.

    Featured image via Eliza Egret

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Want to support companies that support women? Look at your investments through a ‘gender lens’

    ANALYSIS: By Ayesha Scott, Auckland University of Technology; Aaron Gilbert, Auckland University of Technology, and Candice Harris, Auckland University of Technology

    Gender equity continues to be a significant problem in business globally. We all know the story: the gender pay gap is a persistent issue and female-dominated industries tend to be lower paid.

    Female representation in senior leadership and board positions remains low in many countries, particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand. Women comprise only 28.5 percent of director positions across all NZX-listed companies and just 23.7 percent at companies outside of the NZX’s top 50.

    Change is slow despite the well-established evidence showing the merits of improving gender equity for businesses — including better firm performance — and excellent initiatives such as Mind The Gap.

    But there is a way to support companies that have made the change towards greater gender equity — and encourage others to do the same: we can invest with a “gender lens”.

    The aim of investing with a gender lens is not only to make a financial return but also to improve the lives of women by providing capital to those companies doing well on gender issues.

    Gender lens investing goes beyond counting female representation at board level. It encompasses the number of female managers, leaders and employees as well as the existence of policies or products provided by a company to address the gender pay gap and other inequities faced by their female employees.

    It also encourages investing in women-owned enterprises.

    In essence, investing with a gender lens means identifying and investing in those companies that are empowering their female employees and embracing diversity.

    This might seem simple. But there are no investment portfolios or funds investing in companies that do right by women.

    One explanation for this gap is that identifying gender-friendly companies is not easy. And this is where rating agencies have a role to play.

    The role and power of rating agencies
    Over the past three decades there has been a fundamental shift towards investing for not only financial returns but also for social outcomes — so called Responsible Investing (RI).

    The growth in RI has spawned an industry dedicated to defining and measuring a company’s non-financial contributions across a range of areas, specifically across the environmental, social and governance (ESG) pillars.

    The rating agencies build scores by collecting data on issues within each of the ESG pillars — for instance, the environmental pillar comprises data on carbon emissions, land use and water, among other measures — and then converts this into an overall score.

    Fund managers, especially those managing RI funds, use these scores to inform investment decisions. What, then, are the comparable measures for gender lens investing?

    While some rating agencies have created measures to identify companies suitable for a gender lens portfolio — for example, Sustainalytics has a gender equality index — others have very little on gender at all.

    Some rating agencies seem to base gender equity performance on the number of women on a company’s board or its in-house policies on diversity and discrimination.

    In short, there is little-to-no substantive information available to allow investing with a gender lens. And why is that?

    Well, rating agency MSCI states it collects information on “financially relevant ESG risks and opportunities”. Sustainalytics requires an issue to have a “substantial impact on the economic value of a company”. These agencies require an issue to affect financial performance.

    Under its “social” pillar, for example, MSCI considers water usage, arguing companies in high-water-use industries face operation disruptions, higher regulation and higher costs for water, which can reduce returns and increase risk.

    The absence of data related to gender implies women-friendly policies are not viewed as affecting the performance or risk of companies.

    A gender lens to the rescue?
    But with a bit of a push, rating agencies can help make gender equity transparent. They have the research capability and access to company data that everyday investors do not. This can help investors make informed decisions about what to invest in.

    Pressure from investors can also force companies to address equity issues. When that happens, the public metrics of company performance on gender issues become a lever around which companies can be encouraged to change.

    Investors themselves may also find great personal satisfaction in being able to make gender-aware decisions if they could easily apply a gender lens when deciding where to invest.

    It is time for potential investors to start demanding data be collected. Once that happens, rating agencies will send a message to companies that gender equity matters. As long as investors stay silent, progress will remain slow.The Conversation

    Dr Ayesha Scott, senior lecturer – finance, Auckland University of Technology; Aaron Gilbert, associate professor in finance, Auckland University of Technology, and Candice Harris, professor of management, Auckland University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Days are numbered for iconic Filipino jeepneys – ‘kings of the road’

    COMMENTARY: By Jhoanna Ballaran in Manila

    My father has been losing sleep the past weeks over the thought of his jeepneys being forced off the road as the Philippines government implements its controversial “jeepney modernisation” programme.

    He has been a jeepney operator for the past 32 years, sustaining our family’s needs. We have relied on these iconic utility vehicles to provide food on the table, even up to now when us siblings have long graduated and found decent jobs.

    At age 69, Papa believes he can still manage his four jeeps with the help of my mom. “Kahit papaano, nakakatulong pa rin ito sa pang-araw-araw natin,” (“Somehow, it still helps us in our daily life),” he would often tell us.

    But the past weeks have been uncertain for our family with the looming government plan to phase out jeepneys, which were once touted as the Philippines’ “Kings of the Road”.

    Iconic and colourful jeepneys in a Manila street
    Iconic and colourful jeepneys in a Manila street. Image: The Philippine Daily Inquirer

    We never thought that such a day would arrive, or why a “jeep-less” Philippine society was even considered in the first place.

    Buying a P2.4 million (NZ$70,000) minibus is definitely not an option for Papa; his jeeps’ income are just enough to sustain the family’s daily needs.

    “Saan ako kukuha ng pera? Uutang? Maintenance pa lang niyan, lugi na ako” (Where do I get the money? Debt? That’s just maintenance, I’m at a loss), he says. Even so, no bank would provide him such loan at his age.

    Selling his beloved workhorses is not ideal, too. The modernisation programme has driven down the prices of jeepneys, with some selling it as junk for a measly P20,000 (NZ$600).

    Letting go of them is essentially killing his livelihood, and that of the six drivers who work with him.

    • US military jeeps left over from the Second World War were the basis for the modern jeepney — a cheap and popular mode of transport — and they became an iconic global symbol of the Philippines. The name itself is an adaptation of “jeep”.

    Jhoanna Ballaran is a Philippine journalist. This commentary was first published on her Instagram page @jhoannaballaran


    Al Jazeera’s report on Monday’s protest jeepney strike.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • A Republican talking head called for the ‘elimination of transgenderism’ – but the UK beat him to it

    On 4 March, American commentator and media host Michael Knowles called for the elimination of “transgenderism” at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Knowles hosts a podcast for the right-wing media outlet Daily Wire. His comments rightfully drew intense scrutiny and pushback from commentators and publications on the internet.

    In particular, Knowles called Rolling Stone’s chosen headline “libelous” and demanded a retraction:

    CPAC Speaker Calls for Transgender People to be ‘Eradicated’

    Knowles said:

    For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.

    He called for the eradication of “transgenderism”, as if this is not synonymous with the eradication of trans people. However, the problem from a UK standpoint is that transphobic ‘gender critical’ activists have used similar rhetoric here for years. You might have heard it on our national broadcaster or in the halls of our government.

    What’s more, it hasn’t received anywhere near enough pushback.

    Eliminationist rhetoric

    The argument from Knowles and his ilk is that trans people do not exist. We are merely confused people afflicted by ‘gender ideology’ or ‘transgenderism’. Our detractors frame this ‘ideology’ as a set of beliefs and practices, rather than a state of being.

    Knowles has made statements similar to his CPAC speech on his podcast. In 28 February’s installment of the Daily Wire‘s The Michael Knowles Show, he said:

    I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology. And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology.

    He went on:

    But furthermore, nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category. It’s not a legitimate category of being.

    It is easy to recognise this wording as fascist. Stating that being trans is not “a legitimate category of being” is dehumanisation. This is one of the hallmarks of fascism. A genocide cannot take place against trans people because there aren’t any trans people, he says. Exactly how Knowles intends to eliminate ‘transgenderism’ is left to the listener’s imagination.

    What does elimination look like?

    The most obvious course of action would be to make trans people cis. However, so-called ‘conversion therapy’ – the attempt to convince a trans person that they are not trans – doesn’t work. What’s more, it is actively dangerous to the people it is inflicted upon – it doubles the rate of suicide in recipients.

    So if a trans person cannot be made cis, what does our eradication look like?

    You might try to convert me anyway, and damn the fact that it might kill me. After numerous u-turns, the UK government only saw fit to outlaw this two months ago.

    Alternatively, you could take away my healthcare. The British public, at least, believes that trans healthcare should be the purview of the rich, who can afford private access. Just 33% think that the NHS should provide hormone replacement therapy.

    Failing this, you might simply try to make trans lives unlivable. Just removing equalities protections would be enough to enable bigots to freely abuse trans people. PM Rishi Sunak has already indicated that he wishes to remove trans protections from the equality act, which would enable this abuse.

    Eliminationism in the UK

    Of course, there is always the option of outlawing ‘being trans’ altogether. Even if you can’t stop a trans person being trans, you could stop them from saying that they are trans, from participating in public life as a trans person. The UK already treats the recognition of our gender as a reward for compliance; our genders are recognised until that becomes inconvenient, until we become inconvenient. But some transphobes want to go even further.

    Back in 2021, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC) submitted a response to a government inquiry into the Gender Recognition Act. Referring to a UN convention on discrimination against women, the WHRC declaration said:

    The convention calls for the ‘elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women’ (Article 5).

    We can all get behind that, right? The elimination of prejudice and stereotypes based on sex – sign me up. However, the document continued:

    We consider that the practice of transgenderism clearly falls under this article because it is based on stereotyped roles for men and women.

    If this sounds familiar, it should. The reference to “transgenderism”, its framing as a “practice”, the call for its “elimination” – all of it beat Knowles to the post two years ago. UK transphobia recycled in the US: who’d have thought it?

     …And the condemnation?

    As reported by Pink News, the signatories to the declaration include the LGB Alliance, Transgender Trend, Labour Women’s Declaration, WoLF (Women’s Liberation Front), Standing For Women, Safe Schools Alliance UK, and For Women Scotland.

    However, rather than being widely recognised as calling for trans elimination, supporters of the WHRC have been granted media attention and government influence. The Tory Party conference has hosted the LGB Alliance two years in a row. Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, was awarded the British Empire Medal in the Queen’s birthday honours. For Women Scotland appeared before Scottish parliament to argue that new hate crime laws might do too much to stop it from being transphobic.

    The eliminationism supported by these groups is the same as that spat out by Knowles to Republican applause. Both work towards the destruction of my way of life, and that of my trans siblings.

    I am trans. We are trans. We cannot be stopped from being trans. However, without something fundamental changing in the UK’s attitude to trans people, we can and will be stopped from being.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0, resized to 770*403

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Just when you thought Britain couldn’t get any more racist, the Tories bring the Illegal Migration Bill

    Rishi Sunak has announced that refugees arriving into the UK by small boats will be permanently banned from re-entering the country. Ahead of Tuesday’s unveiling of the racist Illegal Migration Bill, the government told the Daily Mail:

    This new Bill, if passed by Parliament, will mean that if you come here illegally, not only will you be swiftly removed from the UK, but you will never be able to come back.

    The measures will ensure that anyone who has risked their lives in the Channel’s perilous waters, and has made it to England, will be deported. However, the home secretary could also send them to Rwanda, or a “”safe” third country”, as soon as possible. Refugees will also be unable to apply for British citizenship. Nor will they be able to come to the country as a visitor in the future. In summary, if someone has arrived in the UK in a small boat, their asylum claim will be inadmissible.

    Refugees and people seeking asylum in the UK currently have the right to apply for protection. This is under the UN’s Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. However, as the Mail reported:

    New laws will also restrict Channel migrants from using human rights laws to avoid removal from Britain, it is understood. The Bill is likely to severely limit the way claims under Labour’s Human Rights Act can be used by asylum seekers who arrive by irregular routes.

    Yes, that’s right: our government is so desperate to stop brown and Black people from living in the UK that it’s seeking to circumvent human rights laws.

    Racist, ransacking Britain

    The government official told the Daily Mail:

    It is bad enough that illegal migrants currently abuse our asylum system to frustrate their removal. But it is far worse that they can currently settle here permanently and apply to become a citizen. The ability to settle in this country and become a British citizen is not a human right, it is a privilege – which is why we will ban illegal migrants from ever coming back to the UK after we have removed them.

    Of course, the government doesn’t actually say how refugees are abusing the system to “frustrate their removal”. Rather, it assumes that the public will swallow these baseless racist statements without questioning them. And it’s probably a fair assumption, judging from the recent uptick in far-right activity against refugees.

    The deluded Tories still cling to the idea of Britain as a world-dominating empire. To them, it is the greatest of countries: a place where brown or Black people should be “privileged” to be granted space. Meanwhile, just like in the time of the Empire, the government believes it’s Britain’s given right to continue to ransack other countries.

    Let’s not forget that it is this country which was instrumental in wrecking Afghanistan. It is our government – albeit under Labour’s Tony Blair – that lied about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in order to begin an illegal war. And it is this country that has bombed Syria, as well as causing carnage in Libya. Meanwhile, our arms companies – which have links to government officials – are laughing, cashing in on the billions made in profits from never-ending war. Britain’s role has been essential for destablising the Middle East and northern Africa. Yet our government washes its hands of any responsibility. Worse than this, it treats the very people whose lives it has ravaged as sub-human.

    Scapegoating refugees

    It is a time-tested method for governments to find scapegoats to blame for their own terrible messes. The government hopes that if it blames ‘outsiders’, this will distract people from the real facts. As Sunak harps on about “illegal migration” not being “fair on British taxpayers”, he hopes we won’t notice that it’s his government that is to blame for soaring inflation, the cost of living crisis, and a failing NHS. Meanwhile, energy giants such as Shell reap billions in profits while we literally die in our homes.

    As for Sunak, he’s one of the richest people in the whole country. He’s likely the wealthiest person ever to have graced the halls of Number 10. He features on the Sunday Times Rich List with a net worth of £730 million. The Sunaks’ main home (yes, they have three) in Kensington is worth £7 million alone. With their obscene wealth, they look down on those who want a life without war and poverty.

    It’s likely that if Sunak found himself aboard a packed dinghy on a choppy English Channel, he wouldn’t last five minutes. And if he fell overboard, I’m not too sure I would save him.

    Featured image via YouTube/screenshot

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • All US Presidents are War Criminals

    This is a US war on Russia. Period.

    We have to be very clear, even to the point of being blunt. By ‘we’ I mean those of us involved who are conscious of being part of an Information War–the propaganda war that we are recipients of—on the receiving end of this tsunami of crap. We have to say things flat without fear and without compromise. This is a US war on Russia. Period. Now why do we have to say this? Why should we say it so bluntly?

    The propaganda matrix is so powerful that people, especially within the bubble–that is, within what people call NATOstan. This is the ‘civilized’ world, 15% of the human population. The West. People are so confused and so propagandized that it’s almost as if they have no sense of pattern recognition, or have never read a chapter book. This is a war, a US war against Russia. Why? Because the US is NATO. What is NATO? NATO is a Horribles Parade costume, it’s a Halloween mask. It’s just the US–the extension of the US military around the world by another name. Pure and simple.

    Now when you find all of these things that they’re finding, all the material, all of the connections and the proof that NATO is much more involved than they claim. This is to say that the US is involved. This is the extension of the US. Again: why? Because the US is at war with everybody. The US is involved in its forever war against every*body* and every*thing.* Sometimes the mask slips and people see it. But they hide behind proxies, they hide behind local conflicts, they make it seems like they are doing something else. But they are involved.

    Anglo-US Empire struggling to keep things as they are

    The United States Empire, the inheritors of the UK Empire–so the Anglo-US Empire is involved in a struggle to keep things as they are. They are in the very last throes the death throes I think–of a 500-year history of slaughter and plunder that has kept all of the wealth in the world funneling upwards to them. And the question is not it can they do it, but rather why can’t they see that it’s a completely impossible thing.

    US to send $100 million in additional military aid to Ukraine

    The US announced on 5 April that it would send up to $100 million in additional military aid to Ukraine.

    This is a war against time, against history. Think of the unimaginable arrogance it takes to think that you can freeze time. Why are they going to fail? Because no Empire has succeeded in freezing time. You’re done! It’s over–leave the stage politely, with a gracious bow and support what’s coming next. But no. The unspeakable hubris it takes not only to try to shape the development of life, but to stop it. and this is how you know that they are at work. They’re at work in Ukraine; but that’s not enough: while they’re doing that, they have to try to overthrow Imran Khan in Pakistan. They have to go and threaten Modi in India not to pay too much in Rubles with Russia. Not to have too much Rupee-Ruble shenanigans because we don’t like that, right?

    They try to threaten Orban in Hungary by having the EU accuse them of erosion of democracy. Orban’s great crime is to say he’s going to be closer to Russia. Same with Vuccic in Serbia. You know, these are people who are our increasingly not going to be cowed.

    I don’t know exactly why–within the bubble–why people are so malleable. I mean it’s really incredible how susceptible people are in the Western so-called democracies, where the news is so censored and so filtered that it’s a wonder that they know anything at all. They have this farce–they are pumping up support for this chapter of the Forever War (which they call the Ukraine War) by advertising it in an award show. They have Zelensky prost…ing himself by appearing at the Grammy’s! The National Gallery changes the title of Degas’ work to say Ukrainian Dancers instead of Russian Dancers. Then all the stuff I’ve talked about before, the boycott on Russian vodka, what have you. Whatever. And they are so deep in this–this is inside the bubble–that you cannot talk about any of the real things that are happening.

    Yes, there are Nazis! How do we know? Because the US has been working with them since the 1940s. And with their parents and their grandparents. There’s no secret about this. Even these liberal intellectuals and so-called politically conscious and aware types would have admitted this. This was not controversial even a year or two ago. There were articles everywhere about the Nazi problem in Ukraine, about using the Nazis. Again we come back the notion of pattern recognition. Why are they so surprised? Why is it such a shock?

    Somoza was a Nazi. In Chile Pinochet was a Nazi. They always use these people as their proxies. Why would Ukraine be any different? Maybe it’s because de-Nazification was never really finished in Germany to begin with. They didn’t really like it too much the first time around because defeating communism became more important. Meh. Nazi, schmazi. We took Werner Von Braun, which Tom Lehrer even wrote a song about. De-Nazification, say in Bavaria: 75% of the Nazis identified were rehabilitated. Then they formed the CSU which was part of the basis for Adenauer’s first government.

    Why the US attempted to topple Pakistan’s government

    The US attempted to topple the government of Pakistani PM Imran Khan because “he would not allow US military bases there and because he will not toe the line on Russia.”

    It was never taken seriously and there were always greater threats. Communism was a greater threat. Why is there a Red Scare in the US but the German Bund was allowed to have its Nazis twenty-five thousand strong at Madison Square Garden? We’ve always known which side they were on. They were never serious about it and they’re not serious now. So what is interesting is how the rest of the world thinks. Because they have never been stupid about any of this.

    The American Empire is in a war against humanity

    Europeans love to talk about the Cold War. Well, it wasn’t that cold—ask the people in Vietnam whether it was cold or hot. Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar. Or Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador? Argentina–the Dirty War. Chile—the disappeared. Algeria, Uganda, Rwanda with the divisions that were sown by the Empire. Angola, Mozambique, South Africa itself. The Congo with King Leopold’s murderous reign and NATO’s role in the killing of Lumumba. Palestine? I mean seriously? Are these people serious? The US president gets to call the Russian president a thug and a war criminal? All US presidents are war criminals! This is why when people asked why are we so confident not only when we say it’s a US war against Russia, US war against the world. Why then are we all so sanguine that they will lose, these forces that are trying to stop time?

    It comes back to all the same philosophers is that Dr. King quoted: William Cullen Bryant, the truth crushed to earth will rise again or Thomas Carlyle no lie can live forever. All these things are still true. Ukraine is NATO is the US. The Africans know it, the Indians know it, the Chinese know it, the South Americans and Central Americans know it. This is 85% of humanity. The American Empire is in a war against humanity.

    So how are we so sure, when I hear about the particulars–you have to zoom in every once in awhile. The Maternity Hospital in Mariupol being bombed? Well I don’t know how; I’ll wait and see. Then the model appears in an interview and says it was Ukrainians. The ghost of Kiev? Hmmm, I’m not sure…turns out to be a video game. The Snake Island Heroes who died so heroically yet wound up being videotaped later on having surrendered. The Russian bombing of the Zaporozhie power plant story which Russians were guarding turned out to be too risible to be true. Now this current massacre where bodies are sitting up and waving at the camera. You know, you have to wait because they’ve always use these tricks. It’s not new–pattern recognition! The next chapter–look ahead and sneak a peek at the cliff notes, if you want to stay sane and stay alive.

    And then you have the people involved who want us to feel guilty: the pressure! The pressure to be anti-Russia on the people inside the West… Now, outside people are a little bit freer, so it’s a push back against that that hubris, having been NATO’s victims. Having been subjects of the hot side of the Cold War, they will just tell NATO and the US, as my father said, to take a long walk off a short pier. It is absolutely clear, and we have to present it as such. Or, to quote an Afro-Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin: Для меня/ Так это ясно, как простая гамма. this is as clear to me as a simple sum. And we have to stay strong, and keep our eyes on the fight of our lives, the lives of humanity and the life of the whole world. History is on our side.

    The post All US Presidents are War Criminals first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Rob Campbell: Public service bosses of ‘Pyongponeke’ forget who they’re supposed to serve

    COMMENTARY: By Rob Campbell

    In Pyongyang there is a public service which would appeal to our own Public Service Commissioner in Aotearoa New Zealand. It never makes any dissenting or controversial view known.

    Rather it readies itself for any potential change in the face of the Kim family leadership. Ever ready to resume the daily grind of boot-licking and box-ticking of a docile public service.

    It is, as I like to say, neutered rather than neutral, but from above it can be very hard to tell the difference.

    In the ideal world that seems to be preferred in “PyongPoneke”, there is no room for open debate and each word means what the Public Service Commissioner says it means.

    It is rather like the world described by Lewis Carroll: “When I use a word”, Humpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all”. Thank you Commissioner Humpty for your work taking the word “impartiality” out of the dictionary and into the public service world.

    Imperial and colonial past
    I am not against the public service. I am strongly for an excellent, efficient, equitable and effective public service. But you do not get that in a modern and complex society from a model of public service derived from a monocultural, inequitable and dare I say it (yes I do) imperial and colonial past.

    In the real world what they like to call our public service is in fact a politically subservient service, far removed from the public it is supposed to serve.

    This comment is not directed at the many thousands of public servants working closely with those they serve.

    These people, the real public service, are often underpaid and overworked. They spend much time battling with the rules and processes and prejudices imposed on them by those at the top of the tree. Many are scared to speak up, so they leave or stay quiet.

    I understand why, they need the job too much to risk being branded difficult. Not a few of them write to me, call me, or stop me in the street. And it is not to say “get back in line”.

    They and the mandarins themselves know what the problem is. There is a square mile or so around the Beehive in Wellington, which is like the Vatican in Italy. A different country within a country. The world looks totally different from there.

    Those there are mainly there for the same reason, and they are faced inwards, mentally at least, towards what they see as power and away from the people, the public they are supposed to serve.

    They cannot understand Ōtara, or Cannons Creek . . .
    They cannot see, hear or understand those in Ōtara, in Te Tai Tokerau, in Tairāwhiti, in Cannons Creek, on the West Coast or rural Southland.

    Alongside the big consultancy firms that share their buildings, their CVs and their views, senior advisers draw up plans for the rest of us on whiteboards.

    These are parsed by the “tier one” people who over coffee, wine, or whisky cosily massage these into an acceptable form for politicians. Just enough choices to create an illusion of political control, but not so much as to upset the system.

    Are these people impartial or neutral ? No, they do not need to be. They have strong views which reflect the caste they belong to. Some of them even jokingly refer to this as “Poneketanga”.

    They engage rafts of “communications” people to sell the story — often poorly as in Te Whatu Ora, where there are more than 200 such people and where despite that overload PR firms are often called in to sell better.

    Back to basics
    This is not a way to create an efficient, effective, excellent and equitable public service. To do that we will have to go back to some basics about the purpose of public service today and in the future.

    To my mind this would include:

    • Opening up jobs to a much wider range of people with real world experience, be that commercial or social, in forms that are not all for a lifetime, but which enable free and ongoing interchange;
    • Opening up policy-making to start from the “bottom up”, and which are not based on “top down”, carefully framed, bogus consultations;
    • Allowing people to speak their minds and debate difficult issues without having to assume that future political winners are not so prejudiced and narrow-minded as to refuse to work with anyone with a different opinion to theirs; and
    • Paying real attention, not playing pretend attention, to the professional bodies and unions which represent staff, who mostly will prefer rightly to get on with their jobs.

    None of that seems hard or dangerous to me. After all, it is only changing a public service model which has produced or failed to prevent all of the many crises we can observe around us.

    Rob Campbell is former chairperson of Te Whatu Ora (Health New Zealand) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This article was first published by Stuff and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Ron DeSantis: Dogmatist Extraordinaire

    Certainty closes the minds of those possessing the Truth from on High. These darlings of the gods may even feel sorry for those benighted Unfortunates with the temerity of disagreeing with them and try to persuade them to see reason to save them from themselves. 

    As the blood-stained pages of history amply attest, dogmatists may try to convert, persecute, torture, or even burn their victims at the stake for their own good.  Dogmatic certainty can be a very dangerous thing and turn the powerful of this world into monsters about a difference of opinion.

    It is an odd quirk of fate that some dogmatists will try to convert unbelievers not to convince them but rather themselves, since converts strengthen the dogmatists’ faith in themselves.

    Some who adopt such sinister measures of persuasion like burning at the stake may even be prompted not by certainty, but an inner doubt so alarming that they must silence it by projecting it onto their victims to find inner peace to rid the world of these “heretics” and their own doubts.

    Such persecution, torture, and murder have always been the stock-in-trade of dogmatists in dealing with dissent, and especially when they are also demagogues who ascend to power to impose their will on their people, so that dissent becomes treason.

    Democracies, on the other hand, know that dissent isn’t treason, but the lifeblood of democracies.  A government which oppresses a democratic people is no longer morally legitimate because it has lost the consent of the governed and rules only by force, at times with a fig leaf of legitimacy called the “Divine Right of Kings.”

    Let us consider such a dogmatist-as-tyrant as the very embodiment of this closed-minded certainty:

    He is not someone of humility who realizes his own past errors, with the confident expectation that he will doubtless err again; nor someone who modestly affirms his perception of truth and refuses to call it “Divine Revelation.”

    Nor someone who is aware that when several answers are possible, his alone need not be true and allows himself to be counseled by seasoned advisors about which answer is best.

    Nor is he someone who realizes that various factors may predispose him to think as he does — his upbringing, temperament, age, race, social class, religion, nationality, profession, or an uncontrollable lust for power.

    Nor someone who realizes that these conditioning factors may be not merely influencing him, but doing his thinking for him, and so he adopts a healthy live-and-let-live attitude toward those who disagree with him.

    No, he is none of these, but the Omniscient One, who through some mysterious dispensation has been vouchsafed from above the divine prerogative “to know” what is right and wrong, true and false, wise and foolish for all men and all women in all times and places. Nay, he is the Enlightened One Himself who, sitting enthroned in Olympian splendor, demands that all submit to his sovereign will,

    Not only has this Dogmatist stopped thinking, but is entombed in his closed-minded rectitude.  He is the eternal Narcissus, so enamored of himself as he so admiringly gazes in his mirror on the wall that he cannot see his view of the world as self-serving delusion but as an unshakeable conviction of his own Omniscience.

    However, we mustn’t think that this Dogmatist appears only as an individual over the centuries. His spirit animates entire groups and movements, institutions and ideologies like Social Darwinism that condescendingly looks down on his subjects who exist only to be ignored and who cannot perish soon enough since this world belongs only to the Survival of the Richest.

    This tyrant who disdainfully dismisses the wretched of this earth is not the only offender of such delirious hubris. One has but to survey the sundry creeds of modernity which offer their own toxic certainties —Behaviorism, Marxism, Positivism, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and MAGA-Republicanism that call themselves the Inexorable Laws of the Universe, when they are simply old-fashioned exploitation and plunder. They all come to liberate humanity only to enslave it with a neoliberal metaphysics all their own.

    But no matter in what form he appears, the Dogmatist and his reincarnations have a curious power over the credulous with a compulsive need to believe in someone like him whose threats awaken terror unless they submit to his Svengalian will while driving them, lemming-like, over the edge.

    Doubt and uncertainty, on the other hand, keep the mind open and is even be part of the answer. One doesn’t suppress but invites, encourages, and welcomes these doubts, listens to and converses with them to keep oneself free of the delusion that one alone has the Truth.

    But how does all this relate to our Dogmatist-in-Residence, Governor Ron DeSantis, and his claim that he alone has the truth?

    Critics: How do you know that your truth isn’t delusion? If you were deluded, would it feel any different from your possessing the truth? And if there were no difference between these two states of mind, then how would you know that you weren’t deluded? Inner conviction, since that too could be delusion?”

    Dogmatist: “If what you say is true, then your truth, too, could be delusion!”

    Critics: “Indeed, it could and so we don’t dogmatize!  Doesn’t the possibility of your being wrong concern you? Or are you more concerned about losing face by admitting your error and bowing to the people’s will? And what of all the needless suffering you inflict upon millions?”

    Dogmatist: “Ah, but I see the Big Picture and have the good of our nation’s future at heart. You see but the moment and live only in the short-term, whereas I consider the long-term as well. If there is pain today, we are working toward a better tomorrow!”

    Critics: “But people live in the short-term!  Why is this cold abstraction of ‘the long-term’ of more value than the flesh-and-blood human beings you are oppressing today? Don’t you realize that a leader exists for his people, not the people for him?”

    Dogmatist: “You don’t understand. For the sake of the future, you sometimes must sacrifice a generation or two!”

    Critics: “But why is the present any less important than the future, since the present is all anyone has? Humanity isn’t a plaything to serve your Will to Power!

    Dogmatist: “I steer the ship of state by a different compass, and that is the burden of leadership!”

    Critics: “Leadership? Devastating the lives of millions; trashing education at every level; outlawing freedom of thought and speech; preaching racism and hatred of Black citizens and other people of color, and the LGBTQ community while turning the State of Florida into a barbed-wire Gestapo Concentration Camp, and all for your 2024 Presidential run?

    You are an anachronism from the Middle Ages, a national embarrassment, a reincarnation of Hitler, despite your degrees from Harvard and Yale, now cringing at your very name. You and your kind have no place in an America that fought a Revolutionary War and two World Wars at the loss of over 500,000 lives to rid this world of tyrants like you.

    This is America, not a totalitarian gulag that grovels before some jacked-up wannabe dictator who would drag us back to your nightmare world.

    The post Ron DeSantis: Dogmatist Extraordinaire first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 Was Legal

    Under international law, “aggression” (or “aggressive war”) has never yet been defined so as to separate it clearly from “defensive war” (or “defense”), and this murkiness is the U.N.’s most fundamental failure to-date, because the U.N. was supposed to have been formed in order to prevent a World War Three (WW III), which is impossible to do unless the meaning of “defense” is clear and defense is clearly legal, and the meaning of “aggression” is clear and aggression is clearly illegal; but, a definition is here employed in which “aggression” is anything that endangers a country’s existence or sovereignty over its legal territory, and “defense” is anything that is provoked by (i.e., in response to) “aggression” and that consequently has been forced upon a country as the only reasonable alternative to allowing itself to be taken over by an “aggressor” country. In this definition (a reasonable and practical definition — as opposed to the U.N.’s absence of any definition), “aggression” can be perpetrated by any means, not ONLY military, but also by such means as a coup, or international subversion, or illegal international sanctions — any means whatsoever that can be used in order to seize control over another country (i.e., over a different sovereign nation’s Government). The U.S. Government has always opposed any definition of “aggression” and has always refused even to consider any proposed definition of it that would include anything else than military aggression because America routinely uses non-military forms of aggression (such as coups, and sanctions) and demands to be always able to continue to do so without being called an “aggressor.” This is simply a fact and is the reason why the U.N. is nothing more than a talking-forum and a sump for refugees and any other problems that powerful countries intend to give only lip-service to addressing — it has no significant international power at all. (NOTE: Anyone who doubts that the U.N. has utterly failed to define “aggression” will see in the final paragraph here — which will be entirely in parentheses — a discussion of the U.N.’s absurd, even outright circular, latest formal proposal to deal with that matter.)

    The war in Ukraine is further complicated in international law because clearly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 constitutes a danger to Ukraine’s sovereignty; but the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis established a fundamental case-law precedent thereafter, by means of which any major international power — in that instance the United States — has a right in international law to prevent any nearby nation from being able to be used by another major international power — in that instance the Soviet Union — to position military forces there that endanger the national security or sovereignty of a major power (in that instance of the United States); and, consequently, the U.S. Government was behaving defensively (against the Soviet Union), instead of aggressively (against Cuba), when it restricted Cuba’s Government from enabling the Soviet Government to position its forces (specifically its nuclear forces) on that island.

    What will be argued here is that that international legal precedent applies universally in international law and that the war in Ukraine was started by the U.S. Government by means of its coup in Ukraine, which replaced an authentically neutral Government there by a rabidly anti-Russian government there (that possessed and possesses no legitimacy even under Ukraine’s Constitution at that time), and that Russia’s Government consequently has an international-law right to take control over Ukraine’s Government in order for Russia to be able to protect itself against America’s Government — which is the aggressor here. Russia is the defender of its own sovereign territory; and Ukraine is merely the battlefield upon which this war between the aggressor America and the defender Russia is being waged.

    Since the topic here is international law, not any national law, only national Governments are involved; and this means that a civil war, or war within a country, is NOT even possibly a matter that the U.N. can reasonably become involved in or have any authority to make pronouncements about. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who invented the U.N., did it with that aim — clear separation of international law from national law — in mind, but his immediate successor, who designed the U.N., nullified that and some other aspects of FDR’s plan for the U.N. This is the reason why the U.N. fails. Truman was determined that the U.S. Government itself will ultimately take control over the entire world.)

    The documentation of each step in this case is immediately accessible to the reader simply by clicking onto the links in it at any point where the reader wants to see what the evidence for the given allegation there is:

    On 8 February 2010, Britain’s Guardian headlined “Yanukovych set to become president as observers say Ukraine election was fair.”

    On 12 April 2010 was reported in Ukraine that,

    The president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych met in Washington with the American counterpart Barack Obama.

    On the Ukrainian side, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Konstantin Grishchenko, Minister for fuel and Energy Yurii Boyko, head of the presidential administration Serhiy Lovochkin, deputies head of the administration Hanna Herman and Yuri Lacnyy were also taking part in the meeting.

    The American side represents Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, national security advisor to the U.S. President James Jones, senior director of the U.S. National Security Council on non-proliferation Laura Holgate.

    On 2 July 2010, Clinton again met privately with Yanukovych, this time in Kiev; and, on this occasion, spoke publicly about the meeting, and said that while the United States supported Ukraine’s independence, “the United States welcomes Ukrainian parliament’s decision to approve foreign military exercises on Ukrainian territory in 2010 and we thank Ukraine and the Ukrainian people for your important contributions to NATO and other international security operations.” This means that the U.S. Government actually did not support Ukraine’s independence but instead wanted Ukraine to join its NATO military alliance that had repeatedly rejected Russia’s requests to apply to join it. The U.S. wanted Russia’s bordering nations in NATO, but not Russia itself. Apparently, Yanukovych again said no. That doomed him.

    By no later than June 2011, the United States Government commenced its planning for the coup that occurred in Ukraine in February 2014.

    By no later than 1 March 2013, the U.S. Government in its Embassy in Ukraine, started training members of the far-right Svoboda and Right Sector political organizations in Ukraine how to use the internet in order to raise a crowd to demonstrate against Ukraine’s President, Viktor Yanukovych, to demand his removal from office.

    On 14 April 2014, an article was published in the Polish NIE investigative-journalism magazine saying that in the months prior to Yanukovych’s overthrow, especially during the spring of 2013, paramilitaries of Ukraine’s Right Sector organization were training secretly in Poland, under the direction of America’s CIA, and Poland’s Government.

    By no later than June 2013, the U.S. Government began soliciting for Pentagon-authorized U.S. contractors to convert a school in Sevastopol Crimea, in Ukraine, near Russia’s largest naval base, which is there. This was while Yanukovych was still in office, when the U.S. had no business in Crimea.

    On 19 November 2013, Yanukovych was informed the results by Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences, of its analysis which he had requested, of the EU’s offer to Ukraine to join the EU, which found that it required an up-front expenditure by Ukraine of $160 billion, which Ukraine did not have and the EU refused to supply. So, whomever designed the EU’s proposal knew, in advance, that Yanukovych would turn it down. That was to become the pretext for overthrowing him. It had been set up in advance.

    On 20 November 2013, the Maidan square anti-Yanukovych public demonstrations began. They were led by Andrei Parubiy (“the Commandant of Maidan”), one of the two co-founders of the Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine, which the CIA had advised to change its name from that Nazi-inspired one, to the “Freedom” or Svoboda Party — which they did. Parubiy’s 2nd-in-command was the founder of the Right Sector Party, Dmitriy Yarosh, who organized the U.S.-backed paramilitaries there that had been trained in Ukraine and in Poland.

    The coup itself occurred during 20-27 February 2014; and here (and its transcript is here) is its smoking-gun evidence that it was a U.S. coup; and there is proof that even the EU’s Foreign Affairs Minister at the time, Catherine Ashton, did not know that it had been any coup at all until her investigator in Kiev reported back to her on 26 February 2014 that it had been. (Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript.) So: Obama had kept the operation secret even from her. (In fact, Obama’s designer of the coup, Victoria Nuland, in that smoking-gun phone-call, said “Fuck the EU”: the EU were vassal-nations of the U.S. empire, and so didn’t need to understand what was happening.)

    At that time, and throughout the post-Soviet history of polling of Ukrainians regarding their attitudes toward the EU and especially toward NATO, that attitude was around two-to-one that NATO was an enemy of Ukrainians, and economic relations east of Ukraine were more important to Ukraine than economic relations west of Ukraine (the EU) were; but this situation reversed itself virtually overnight after America’s 20-27 February 2014 coup. Still, in Crimea and Ukraine’s southeast, NATO and the U.S. were viewed overwhelmingly as enemies, not friends — and the U.S. Government itself knew this because it had commissioned some of those polls. Nonetheless: the U.S. Government insisted that Ukraine must treat as “terrorists” and ethnically cleanse away any residents in those increasingly breakaway regions who refused to accept the U.S.-imposed rulers as being their rulers. And this was done, starting on 15 April 2014. The war against the breakaway-supporters was officially labeled, by the new coup-government, an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” or “ATO” for short. The voters for Yanukovich had to be cleared out, killed and/or escaped into adjoining Russia, so that anti-Russian politicians would win future Ukrainian elections, and the U.S. Government will continue to control Ukraine.

    The United States and its ‘allies’ (colonies, vassal-nations) insist upon having the right to place any weapons onto Russia’s borders especially in Ukraine, because ONLY Ukraine borders less than 800 miles from The Kremlin; it borders only 300 miles from it, and is therefore by far the best place for the U.S. Government ultimately to place its missiles, because that would be only five minutes of missile-flying-time away and would therefore constitute its checkmate of Russia’s Government — far too little time in which for The Kremlin to be certain that America had launched them and for the Kremlin thence to launch its retaliatory weapons. This is the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse and on steroids.

    On 17 December 2021, Russia submitted separately to the U.S. and to NATO extremely reasonable, even necessary, national-security proposals to discuss and negotiate with them, but instead got from both on 7 January 2022 resounding and contemptuous rejections of all of Russia’s national-security concerns. Since what were now clearly Russia’s mortal enemies were not approachable any other way than by means of Russia invading and taking control of Ukraine itself, that is what they did, on 24 February 2023. It was a self-protective act that America and its vassal nations had forced upon Russia, and which was done. This was, and is, essential self-defense, by Russia, against a long and consistent history of U.S.-and-allied aggression.

    The reason why the U.N., as presently constituted, is unable to define “aggression” (not only the military forms of it but also and especially the non-military forms, which precede the military forms) is that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who invented and originally planned a U.N. that would have succeeded, died on 12 April 1945, and the U.N. that we have was instead designed by his immediate successor, Harry Truman, who despised him and wanted the U.S. Government itself to become the ultimate imperial Government — a global dictator — over the entire world, which was a direct contradiction of what FDR had so carefully planned and intended: the U.N. as a federal global democracy of nations, a democratic federal republic of nations, replacing all empires, and in possession of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial powers to do that.

    So: whereas we now have (as a direct result of what Truman did) no existing definition of “aggression” and of “defense,” and instead have a chaos in international laws of war, Russia is at least as much in the right, as America would have been in the Cuban Missile Crisis to launch an all-out invasion against Cuba and/or the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union had refused to remove its missiles from Cuba. Russia didn’t launch nuclear war against the U.S., but did launch a conventional war against Ukraine, which was forced upon Russia by the U.S. and NATO decisions to reject on 7 January 2022 Russia’s essential national security demands.

    (CLOSING NOTE: The U.N.’s latest formal proposal to address its lack of a definition of “aggression” was on 11 June 2010, and can be seen here. It pertains to the Rome Statute that controls the International Criminal Court (ICC) — a body to which the U.S. Government never joined, so it is immune to. It says: “Crime of aggression: 1. For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations. 2. For the purpose of paragraph 1, “act of aggression” means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. Any of the following acts, regardless of a declaration of war, shall, in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, qualify as an act of aggression.” Number 1 there entails the phrase “an act of aggression,” and therefore this ‘defintion is circular: it defines “aggression” by relying upon a presumably already defined usage of the word “aggression,” and is therefore blatantly stupid. Number 2 there uses the phrase “inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations,” but the purpose here was supposed to be to give meaning to that term in the Charter. The U.N.’s Charter employs the word “aggression” 3 times: Articles Numbered 1, 39, and 53, but never defines it. That’s the problem here — not a solution to it. However, this definition of “aggression” does pertain to the U.N.-authorized ICC. And this definition does include as examples of “aggression”: Article 8, #2, paragraphs e and f: “(e) The use of armed forces of one State which are within the territory of another State with the agreement of the receiving State, in contravention of the conditions provided for in the agreement or any extension of their presence in such territory beyond the termination of the agreement; (f) The action of a State in allowing its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State for perpetrating an act of aggression against a third State.” Notice that (f) uses the word “aggression” in ‘defining’ “aggression” — yet again that shocking stupidity. However, ignoring that for a moment: (f) clearly describes “aggression” by Ukraine against Russia; (e) describes “aggression” that’s “The use of the armed forces of America which are within the territory of Ukraine with the agreement of Ukraine, in contravention of the conditions provided for in the agreement or any extension of their presence in Ukraine beyond the termination of the agreement” — except that no such “agreement” exists or is known to exist — and if it does exist, then who, precisely, are the “aggressor(s)” supposed to be? It doesn’t say. So: (e) is also stupid. But (f) describes Ukraine’s aggression against Russia (but entails circularity in doing so). Whether (f) also would be categorizing America as being an “aggressor” against Russia is unknown. However, beyond those problems: Nothing in that ICC ‘definition’ of “aggression” would have bearing upon America’s coup against Ukraine in 2014, which was the actual and precipitating initial act of aggression directly against Ukraine and indirectly (but also very powerfully) against Russia (and to which Russia then ultimately responded on 24 February 2022 by its invasion). Furthermore: None of the three nations — America, Russia, and Ukraine — have ratified the Rome Statute that authorizes the ICC; so, none of the three can be prosecuted by the ICC; so, there can be, under the sole entity that the U.N. has authorized to try cases in international criminal law, no prosecution of any of these three.

    In conclusion: It is clear that anyone who alleges that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an international war crime or in any other way a violation of international law is a mere anti-Russia propagandist; and, moreover, even if all three of these nations had ratified the Rome Statute, the only one that could be prosecuted for having committed an international war-crime, the crime of “aggression,” would be Ukraine, though the ambiguity of (e) might possibly then allow prosecution of America too; but no prosecution could be allowed against Russia, because even then there would be no rational way to interpret anything that Russia has done in this matter as constituting “aggression.” In the U.S.-and-allied countries, it’s all propaganda; and, unfortunately, publics are stupid enough to believe it, so it’s effective.)

    The post Why Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 Was Legal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • An important book exposing problems immigrants – especially Muslims – face in New Zealand

    REVIEW: By Adam Brown

    How to be a Bad Muslim is a collection of 19 short essays by Mohamed Hassan, an award-winning poet and an international journalist. He was born in Cairo, but moved to Auckland at the age of eight.

    This personal history underlies much of his writing: his fond memories of Egypt and its collectivist society and extended families, versus his adolescence as a migrant with a clearly identifiable Muslim name in individualist New Zealand. After 9/11, suspicions deepened and Muslims were subject to collective guilt and racial profiling, despite that fact that Muslims around the world condemned the attacks.

    “To be granted citizenry and promised equality but to always be held at arm’s length. To be accused of plotting disharmony when all we have ever fought for was integration, acceptance, peace.” In other words, to be “welcome, but not welcome”.

    This is all documented in chapter 11: “How to be a bad Muslim.”

    Memories from his youth include spooky childhood memories from Cairo (chapter 2, “The witch of El Agouza”), followed by real-life memories and standing up to being bullied in school in New Zealand by someone who later became an All Black (chapter 3, “Showdown in the Kowhai Room”).

    As a Muslim, the author’s refusal to enter the binge drinking culture of New Zealand, while entering the local poetry scene, shows that it is possible to enjoy oneself without alcohol (chapter 4, “The last sober driver”).

    The author is well acquainted with IT, the internet, YouTube, social media, etc. An important chapter is the first, entitled “Subscribe to PewDiePie”, being the last words of the Christchurch shooter before entering Al-Noor Mosque. The chapter documents the seemingly innocent growth of YouTube and social media over a decade, all leading ultimately to the Christchurch massacre.

    Many passages in the chapters touch on the misrepresentation of Muslims and Islam, as the author reports from first-hand experience. He was bullied at school, given the cold shoulder at work, passed over for promotion, regularly subjected to “random” searches at airports, etc. His brother no longer goes with his two young sons to Friday prayers in Manukau, because he does not feel they are safe.

    How to be a Bad Muslim and other essays
    How to be a Bad Muslim and other essays, by Mohamed Hassan.

    “The growing mistrust was fuelled by grotesque and irresponsible media narratives that portrayed Muslim immigrants as an existential threat, and the public believed it” despite the fact that the public knew little about Islam and Muslims, and failed to find out about it.

    “A Sikh man studying at a café outside his medical school had police called to interrogate him after a woman spotted wires hanging out of his bag. They were headphone cables.”

    In chapter 10 “Ode to Elliott Alderson”, he catalogues the misrepresentation of Muslims in film, involving famous actors such as Rami Malek, Omid Djalili, Hank Azaria, Sacha Baron Cohen, Christian Bale, and Sigourney Weaver.

    Throughout the chapters, the author reports his memories and experiences, but often with a sense of humour, and with a poet’s turn of phrase. He describes his baby sister sleeping “as only an infant can, her fingers curled into themselves and her breath like a moth dancing around a faint sun”.

    As an Egyptian Muslim growing up in New Zealand, he was “a kid who wore the question of belonging like an ankle monitor everywhere I went.” As a keen observer of the effect of IT, the internet and social media, he wonders, “Will our greatest of grandchildren unearth our metadata and try and decipher what our selfies said about our civilisation?”

    This is an important book for anyone wanting to understand the problems immigrants — especially Muslims — face in New Zealand.

    Dr Adam Brown is an Auckland academic, author and the editor of a New Zealand Muslim publication. This review is published in collaboration with Pacific Journalism Review.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • People with ME are dying while politicians do nothing and the NHS stands idly by. Enough.

    The author of this article is a co-founder of the chronic illness campaign group discussed.

    A protest is taking place on Wednesday 8 March at parliament. It is for people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) – a chronic systemic neuroimmune disease not dissimilar to long Covid. You can read more about ME and its symptoms here. Medical professionals generally claim there is no known cure for ME. However, currently there are also some high-profile cases of the NHS severely neglecting seriously ill people living with ME. Worse still, three people have already died in recent months. So, with fear and anger among the ME community growing, a campaign group is taking action. We need your support with it.

    The Chronic Collaboration

    Myself and my chronically ill and disabled partner Nicola Jeffery launched the Chronic Collaboration in 2021. It’s a campaign group – check out its Twitter here. As we stated on Twitter, it aims to be:

    A new resistance movement for chronically ill & disabled people. Joining the dots between conditions. Resisting psychologisation. Fighting for justice & equality.

    It’s early days yet. But through lived experience of chronic illness and learned approaches from other types of activism, we aim to change the way our community fights for its rights. First in our sights was the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) delaying the new guidelines on ME.

    In September 2021 we held a protest outside its HQ. NICE eventually backed down, and published the guidelines. They are by no-means perfect – but it was a better result than it could have been. Since then, Nicola has had a prolonged period of severe ill health. However, recent events in the ME and chronic illness communities compelled us to act again.

    Sami and Alice: severe ME

    As I previously reported, Sami Berry is currently dying in an NHS hospital. She lives with severe ME, as well as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) and epilepsy. Campaign group ME Action UK said:

    Sami is very concerned she is going into intestinal failure as severe ME and EDS has made her body unable to digest nutrients even through a feeding tube. NHS doctors are refusing to provide her with drugs that previously helped her regain nutritional levels, or refer her to a specialist. She is vomiting repeatedly, and cannot even keep 4ml down. It has been 26 days [at the time of writing] without food. Her blood sugar levels are dangerously low. Sami and her family are requesting that the hospital transfer her care to specialists who understand how to treat severe ME and EDS.

    At the time of writing (Thursday 2 March), I was told that the hospital Sami was at had tried a percutaneous endoscopic jejunostomy (PEJ): a feeding tube inserted directly into the small intestine. However, this had reportedly not worked properly and Sami was still struggling. Her husband Craig said:

    I am slowly watching my wife die in front of my eyes. The doctors at the hospital are refusing to provide her with drugs that previously helped her regain nutritional levels… Her consultant has said that he will not necessarily take the advice of the specialists

    Sadly, Sami is not the only one in this awful situation. As the Times reported:

    Alice Barrett, 25, has severe myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and is being cared for by Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.

    Her father, Mark, said that doctors were ignoring advice from family and ME experts on how best to treat her. “Alice will die. And we haven’t got much time at all,” he warned.

    Barrett is being treated at the same hospital as Maeve Boothby-O’Neill, the daughter of the Times journalist Sean O’Neill, who died of ME two years ago.

    Barrett needs to be fed via a tube, and the hospital has said it is NHS policy that she must be inclined at 30 degrees for this to happen. However, her family say her condition means she cannot tolerate being anything other than horizontal.

    On Wednesday 1 March, I was told the hospital had reportedly agreed to tube-feed Alice at an angle of five degrees. It was unclear at the time of publication whether this had worked. There is a petition in relation to Alice’s situation you can sign here.

    Sami and Alice both being in life-threatening conditions in the NHS at the same time is bad enough. However, their stories emerged against a backdrop of three people with ME having died since Christmas 2022: Anna Fitzgerald-Clark, Kara Jane Spencer, and Sarah Louise Mclure.

    Three demands for ME

    All these women’s stories point to systemic failings within the NHS, which you can read more about here. For example, as I previously wrote, the new NICE guidelines say:

    doctors should refer patients to ME specialist teams. While these do exist in England, they are all varied. Some are led by psychologists like Surrey and Hull; others like the Yorkshire Fatigue Clinic involve immunologists. Moreover, others like in Suffolk have been stopped. So, the idea that people can see specialists is a postcode lottery.

    With people dying, others seriously ill in hospital, and anecdotal reports of the NICE guidelines not being properly followed – as a person with ME, and as the carer of that person, Nicola and I cannot stand by and do nothing. So, the Chronic Collaboration will mobilise again:

    We’ll meet at Old Palace Yard at 12:30pm on 8 March with three demands. At 1pm we’ll hand them to parliament, to be given to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on ME and the health and social care select committee. Then, at 1:30pm, we’ll walk to the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) and hand our three demands in there, too. These three demands aim to address the underlying issues with NHS care and support for people living with ME. They are:

    #DontLetMEDie: THREE URGENT DEMANDS: THAT THE APPG ON ME URGENTLY CONVENE A MEETING TO DRAW-UP ADVICE TO MPs ON HOW TO INTERVENE ON BEHALF OF SEVERE ME PATIENTS. THAT THE HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE SELECT COMMITTEE URGENTLY CONDUCTS AN INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT BY THE NHS OF ALL POST-VIRAL ILLNESSES (INCLUDING LONG COVID AND ME/CFS) AND THEIR ASSOCIATED CONDITIONS (FOR EXAMPLE, POTS, GASTROPARESIS, CRANIOCERVICAL INSTABILITY). THAT THE DEPARTMENT FOR HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE URGENTLY CONDUCTS A REVIEW INTO NHS ENGLAND, HEALTH EDUCATION ENGLAND AND THE GENERAL MEDICAL COUNCIL'S IMPLEMENTATION OF THE NICE GUIDELINES ON ME/CFS - PARTICULARLY REGARDING SEVERE ME.

    We’ll be using #DontLetMEDie on the day. Moreover, what I wrote about the Chronic Collaboration’s NICE protest in September 2021 also applies to its 8 March demo:

    people living with ME and other chronic illnesses often can’t protest in person. If you can’t attend, and someone can’t attend on your behalf, we still want to see you there. Email a picture of yourself to hello(at)thechroniccollaboration.com and we’ll make sure… [parliament] sees your face.

    The community needs allies. This is why we want as many people to support this as possible: from NHS workers to other chronically ill and disabled people via non-disabled campaign groups, MPs, and well-wishers. Chronic illness doesn’t discriminate (even if the system does). With the emergence of long Covid, more and more people are affected. It could be you next – or someone you know and love.

    For this to be effective, it’s crucial that there’s a large social media presence also. We’re asking people to use the three demands poster above and tweet @NHSEngland @DHSHgovuk @gmcuk using #DontLetMEDie (note the capitalisation, it’s crucial) – saying why these organisations need to act. People need to do this from 12:30pm on 8 March. We’ll also be livestreaming the protest on the Chronic Collaboration’s Twitter.

    #DontLetMEDie

    It might seem inexplicable to some that, after NICE’s new guidelines, the NHS would still dangerously neglect people living with ME. However, that is the reality – and from where I’m viewing it, the situation actually seems to have worsened. There needs to be targeted action to bring this to the attention of people who may make change: politicians, civil servants and government. The community needs to look to those that can fight and allies that can support it. So, join us in person or online on Wednesday 8 March. We owe it to each other.

    Featured image via the Chronic Collaboration

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • PNG Post-Courier: Let’s talk first on media policy and transparency

    EDITORIAL: PNG Post-Courier

    The discussions on Papua New Guinea’s new draft media development policy will come to the fore today when the media industry presents its response to the government.

    It is expected the PNG Media Council, which we are a member of, will present the position of the industry in response to the draft policy and members of the media fraternity, and other concerned institutions will also present their views to the Department of Information that is handling this exercise.

    The policy paper outlines the government’s strategies to use the media as a tool for development, however the consultation progresses amidst a growing fear in the industry that legislation is ready to go before Parliament and the consultation process is only an academic exercise.

    PNG Post-Courier
    PNG POST-COURIER

    Included in the proposed policy is the proposal to legislate the PNG Media Council and laws to impose penalties against journalists and media houses that are accused [of] bad reporting.

    The industry is of the view that the proposed changes will erode the independence of the media and the journalists and ultimately the freedoms relating to free speech that are enshrined in the national constitution.

    One cannot blame the industry and its practitioners for their concern considering the latest version to the policy document 2.1 contains 31 mentions of the word “regulation” in various instances among other things.

    In the entire document its transparency on penalties also goes as far as 6 words alone without any more being uttered in its delivery mechanisms.

    The PNG Media Council, for the record, is not a journalist organisation. It is an industry body and it functions to protect the interest of the industry.

    Today the council is in existence, with its executive members operating from their homes, while the media industry is operating with its newsroom managers dealing daily with challenges like the growing concerns of a country with many issues on top of the self-regulation of unethical journalism, poor presentation and story selections and accountability, among many that are a daily task at hand.

    On the other side, the government and its agencies are working in isolation, with no clear, honest and transparent media and communication strategies and allocate a budget to work with the mainstream media.

    At Independence, PNG inherited an information and communication apparatus that comprised the Office of Information, the National Broadcasting Commission, the Public Library, the National Archives and the National Museum, all with networks spread throughout the provinces.

    These institutions coordinate and disseminate government information to the masses, most of them illiterate at that time.

    Today a new generation of people live in PNG, the Department of Communication replaces the Office of Information, the NBC had moved into television, competing with more radio and TV networks, but the public libraries, archives and museums are either run down or closed.

    And the communication landscape has changed drastically with the advancement in information technology, including social media.

    All state agencies have media and communication units that are operating on ad hoc basis, sending invitations out only for groundbreaking ceremonies, report presentations and a few random press releases, hoping that the mainstream media will “educate, inform and communicate” to the masses and mobilise their support behind the state.

    Communication and stakeholder engagement is the least funded activity in government. This is a fact, and yet the government expects the mainstream media to be proactive and promote its work.

    How can the media, as an independent industry do that when its role is not encompassed into the entire government planning?

    The media is an important pillar of our democracy and is a useful tool for development. We just have to build an honest, transparent and workable partnership for the mutual benefit of everyone. This must happen.

    But it cannot work with a stick, sword, or even a gun to the head of any pillar of our governance and society.

    We look forward to the discussions today with the proponents of this policy document, and we hope to see more transparency on what is the end game that is mutually beneficial where we have to plot a new course in media-government relationship.

  • We the People: Screwed, Blued and Tattooed!

    I just got back from the Lincoln County courthouse. Supporting a victim of BWS, battered wife syndrome, also called domestic abuse, spousal abuse. The punk was arrested Nov. 12, 2022, and he is still in county jail, on $750K bail.

    “Waldport man in jail on second-degree attempted murder, 9 other charges” Nov. 14, 2022

    All cases of women who are in a relationship — my friend was in this abusive marriage almost 5 years — who return to the abuser (in his case, verbally and economically abusive, to the point of triple woman hating and keeping bank accounts in his name, including keeping the vehicles and house in his name) are different on many nuanced levels, but they all have that case of Stockholm Syndrome, that case of once being full of chutzpah, but something inside them has caused them to not see the destruction of a killing inside their boyfriend or husband.

    The case is meandering in the judicial system. The public defender (my money, tax payers’ money) can get extensions on this case. More discovery. The grand jury indicted the guy three days after the attempted suffocation and other charges. He’s not out, and the DA forwarded a 5 year prison plea (down from a lot more time if convicted by 12 member of a jury and the book thrown at him). However, this guy is such a narcissist and know-it-all, he is probably conjuring up all sorts of machinations.

    In the end, the victim, my friend, is in hyper-vigilance even though both of them have no family or friends or any roots at all in Oregon. He’s in jail, and while his mother hired a private investigator to go fishing for character witness statements, the bottom line is what happened Nov. 12 is on the criminal justice record.

    Yet, today, more crap, more bogged down systems. Over 26 cases heard by one judge from 9 to 11 am. Many have been given extensions for more time to have paperwork and evidence forwarded. It is a bogged down system of judicial inertia and lawyer lagging.

    She’s divorcing him, so that is a separate case, again, heard today, but forwaded on for more extension, and because this guy is in jail, things get slowed down.

    She got a restraining order approved with a measley $1000 payment to keep the hous in order, but the previous judge failed to initial that section of the Protection Order, and so she is back filing another one. He did not contest the first one, but now he is contesting this exact same one, under the orders of his mother, or someone. The judge warned that if he gave any statements in this protective order that it could have some bearing on his criminal case.

    That’s messed up, this judge giving this fellow legal advice. Told him to plea the Fifth.

    So, here we have a divorce, civil protection order and criminal trial.

    She’s got her green card, and she finally has a counselor working with her on domestic violence with C-PTSD as the main issue. Her father from Canada visited and so too did her sister. For years my friend did not tell them about the full extent of this guy’s abuse.

    I know the judicial system, but each new year, the system gets further bogged down, and the public defenders as a group are in crisis — not enough money made and absolute triple the caseload which should be allowed.

    Broken broken broken. Remember Ross Perot, and NAFTA and that famous (among other things) statement during the 1992 presidential campaign that if NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was not a two-way street, it would create a “ giant sucking sound ” of jobs going south to the cheap labor markets of Mexico?

    Think of Capitalism as that broken broken broken sound. As in broken down to our bones broken by over policing, over taxing, over burdened, over worked, and under represented to include that tearing sound of social services safety nets frayed and almost immolated. Broken!

    So here we are, no, with May 3 set for a settlement conference? This is something initiated some 26 years ago, since the court systems are broken and clogged, so now, this guy did not accept the plea, and so the judge stated that she will schedule the criminal case for trial, but a settlement conference is possible, so the ADA and the PD agreed to meet. The courtroom would be a neutral one (sic) and a judge would hear the strengths and weaknesses in both the prosecution’s and the defense’s cases. The defendent would be there in orange jumpsuit and shackles, and my friend would be there too.

    A bargaining game, a sort of please settle (plea dice throwing) theater between the DA’s office and his Public Defender. Imagine that. All this time, all the time deputies came out, served a warrant on him, all the jail paperwork, the court paperwork, all the money paid for judges, clerks, ADAs, support staff, all the cops and all the infrastructure keeping this dance going.

    Very hard indeed for someone, my friend, who is getting counseling now, after having one counselor who just stopped answering phone calls (that’s medical abandonment, but that’s a civil matter, yet another labyrith to course through).

    Healing is a singularly tough thing in Capitalism when money buys power, representation, creates all the bells and whistles, etc., for the rich.

    Ahh, broken criminal justice system 101.

    Here, from Cindy Sheehan, an example of the criminal injustice system and the medical injustice system killing an elderly woman who was having a stroke. This is what needs defending, this broken, corrupt, polluted society? If you do not hate the thought of Zelensky in yet another photo op, yet more trillions to that country, then you are subhuman, like the Ukrainian leadership and Nazified military. Here, read this an weep:

    I really don’t have too many words for this horrid event.

    This poor lady apparently had a stroke and broke her ankle, and she was asked to leave the hospital, but she couldn’t.

    So, what happened then? The compassionate (Nazis) workers at the hospital took pity and decided to treat her? Nope, they called the gestapo, I mean police, and she died in their custody.

    Wait, I do have words—-remember during the past three years when we, the ones who rejected the Devil Juice, or rejected the dirty face nappies—were told that we were going to “kill Meemaw,” even if we were those Meemaws?

    Remember when we were told that we could not go see our loved ones in hospital, or nursing facilities, so they had to die alone to prevent us from killing them? Or, grandparents and grandchildren were separated, not by miles, but by government diktat?

    We live in Garbage Land where the Garbage People’s hospitals don’t heal, they kill, and where law enforcement doesn’t protect us, it protects the killers!

    Don’t go to the hospital? We know that thousands of people were killed by stasi-protocol during the “pandemic” and counted as Covid deaths.

    What if we lived somewhere other than Garbage Land and this poor woman could have been the one to call law enforcement and they would have come to help her and force the ER to treat her? Fuck.

    I am distraught over this, but how many times does something like this happen off-camera? (Sheehan)

    Oh heck, I can end this short diatribe with the end of the English Major. Sure, I got a couple of those degrees. Sure, not all in these humanities departments are stalwarts, but compared to STEM folk, who will do any Eichmann thing to make bucks, to have job stability, to keep in the slipstream of the American Dream, they are not bad. Drugs, chemicals, applications, drones, rockets, surveillence tools, missiles, propaganda, all those amazing things that have intended and unintended consequences, so making bank means keeping silent, so STEM are the quiet ones, the scientists and technologists and engineers who for the most part keep their mouths shut — for a price, a Bargain, Faustian Bargain!

    According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils. (source)

    “Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened? by Nathan Heller

    Imagine, forever chemicals in all living things. Science. STEM!

    A new analysis finds that more than 330 species of animals across the globe – from polar bears to squirrels – carry in their bodies a class of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also called PFAS.

    Known as “forever chemicals,” because they do not break down as many others do, the substances have been linked in humans to risks for cancer, low birthweights, weakened childhood immunity, thyroid disease and other health problems.

    Research has already shown that 99% of Americans have PFAS in their bodies. But this report released Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group shows more than 120 different forever chemicals were found in the blood serum or bodies of birds, tigers, monkeys, pandas, horses, cats, otters and other mammals.

    Over 12,000 products have this shit in them. And the diseases? Studies have linked PFOA to kidney and testicular cancers, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, and other serious ailments in highly contaminated communities such as Parkersburg, West Virginia. Very low doses of PFAS in drinking water have been linked to immune system suppression including reduced vaccine efficacy and an increased risk of certain cancers, studies have found. PFAS are linked with reproductive and developmental problems as well as increased cholesterol and other health issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    You will not see some efficient, for-by-with-because of We the People judicial system holding to account these monster companies, again, companies that depend on, well, S.T.E.M. students. The humanities? Well, it is more than “just” English lit majors. In fact, if done right, the entire college and K12 systems would be integrating languages, arts, history, writing, literature, anthropology, and of course music, dance, theater and philosophy and ethics and so much more into an across the curriculum template, but instead, we have this sickness for more more more to keep the engines of capitalism going, a predatory and casino capitalism which is now bio-security, security, surveillance capitalism going. Until we have this disjointed and bizarre religion of science and engineering and technology as some panacea for the crumbling American empire.

    Without the “A” in STEAM, all we have are Eichmanns from a different mother. Arts.

    And it all comes down to those in STEM who don’t give a shit about discourse, debate, history, knowledge outside their fucking field of intended and unintended dirty consequences. I have said this a hundred times in hundreds of articles, it all comes down, now, to that Freudian slip, that dirty man, Edward Bernays:

    It’s not like they even hide their intent. The notorious World Economic Forum has been forthcoming about their plans for the rest of us. The forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, even wrote a book about it, titled “Covid-19: The Great Reset.”

    Within his vision of how society should be engineered going forward, Schwab’s stand on “stakeholder capitalism” sounds altruistic at face value. But what he doesn’t mention is that his vision includes the same group of elites controlling even more aspects of our lives. Envisioning themselves as “trustees of society” they will continue to profit from the results of that expanded control. He recently publicly stated at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs:

    “What the fourth industrial revolution will lead to is a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity” explaining how upcoming technology will allow authorities to “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior.”

    This concept does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling…

    These elite decision makers don’t hide their hypocrisy either. When these elite groups meet to discuss (our) future, they often talk about how we (the Masses) need to reduce our carbon footprints. No mention that they arrived to their mountaintop retreat meetings individually, in their own private jets, (no jet-pooling for them!) wasting more resources in one event than the average person ever could or would in their day to day lives..

    Like it or not, or believe it or not, social engineering is not new. For those who don’t believe in or understand the concept of social engineering, I suggest watching the 2002 BBC Documentary “The Century of the Self” about the life of Edward Louis Bernays (1891-1995).

    It’s fascinating, enlightening and to be honest, more than just a bit creepy.

    Bernays, the Austrian-American nephew of Sigmund Freud, was almost single-handedly responsible for re-purposing the concept of “propaganda” in America into “Pubic Relations.” Sounds much more innocent, doesn’t it?

    In his first campaign, he was recruited by President Woodrow Wilson to Wilson’s Committee on Public Information created in 1917. Wilson tasked Bernays with intentionally using propaganda to influence the American population to willingly engage in World War I. (source)

    Until we are here, where judges still wear black robes, and where the systems deem us as children, or as sheep. This courtroom was with a judge who treated the people on the other end of the phone line (it gets phoned in now, injustice) like imbeciles or children. Bernays is the monster of the century. That 2002 documentary is rough and out of favor now, but telling.

    Students have neither the wisdom nor the experience to know what they need to know.

    — Gregory Petsko.

    STEM will do shit for humanity. Truly. Listen to my interview of Gregory Petsko, “Science and the Arts/Humanities: A Marriage Made in Heaven” — scroll down:

    https://paulhaeder.com/podcast/podcast-2/

    We talked about this essay, “Save university arts from the bean counters” by Gregory Petsko Nature volume 468, page1003 (2010) Scientists must reach across the divide and speak up for campus colleagues in arts and humanities departments, says Gregory Petsko.

    The post We the People: Screwed, Blued and Tattooed! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Once again, Eurovision shows the hypocrisy of racist Britain

    The UK is gearing up to host the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of 2022 winner Ukraine. On 25 February, the UK announced that it will allocate 3,000 tickets to displaced Ukrainians, as well as ensuring that the event “truly showcases Ukrainian culture” with millions of pounds in funding.

    Culture secretary Liz Frazer said:

    Today’s announcement means that thousands of tickets will be offered to those displaced by war, so that they can take part in a show honouring their homeland, their culture and their music.

    As always, we stand together with the Ukrainian people and their fight for freedom.

    Hypocrisy and racism

    The UK government is adept at gaslighting the British public. It tries to persuade us that it stands for “freedom” and supports those “displaced by war”. However, this is while the UK is instrumental in curtailing freedoms around the world and displacing millions through its support of multiple wars.

    It suits the Tories to show their allegiance to those escaping Russia’s bombs. After all, it can then rally the British population to unite in hatred against a common enemy – Russia – which is always good for a government’s popularity which might otherwise be waning. It’s also very convenient that Russia’s victims are mostly white. After all, racist Britain won’t just open its doors to anyone. If you’re Black or brown, the government will leave you to die – either in our very own English Channel or in our detention centres. And if those things don’t kill you, you’ll be faced with racist attacks from white supremacists.

    Of course, it isn’t just the UK that will be flying its racist flag on Eurovision night. In fact, other European nations – which are just as culpable – will be taking part in the entire, hypocritical charade.

    Europe’s blood-stained policies

    Europe has blood on its hands, whether at its land borders or its sea borders.

    Let’s take the Poland-Belarus border, for example. Millions of Ukrainians have crossed the border into Poland. The EU has freely welcomed them into the Schengen area, as has the UK government into our country. Thousands of other refugees, from countries such as Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iran, have also tried to cross the border to Poland. However, they have experienced the most appalling conditions, and Europe has treated them with contempt.

    People hate these refugees so much that Poland even completed its own sinister border wall to keep them out. Security forces have raped, beaten, stolen from, extorted, and suffered inhuman treatment upon refugees on the Poland/Belarus border, while a number of them have died.

    Now, let’s take Europe’s Mediterranean sea borders. Since 2014, more than 25,000 people have died after trying to reach Europe in dinghies unfit for the perilous journey. And what has the EU done? Pushed back refugees and actively strengthened laws to ensure that people drown.

    And in the wake of the Turkey earthquake which killed thousands, Greece has fortified both its sea and land borders to prevent Turkish, Kurdish and Syrian refugees from crossing into Europe. Greece, too, has its own racist border wall to prevent people from seeking refuge, which it seeks to enlarge.

    We’re to blame

    Of course, it’s vital to remind ourselves just who is to blame for the largest ever worldwide displacement of people. No, it’s not just Russia. The UK was an instrumental force in the military coalition which wrecked Afghanistan. The Canary‘s Joe Glenton has previously reported on:

    the legacy of human rights abuses carried out in Afghanistan by the West and its allies… the bombings, the night raids, the drone attacks or the Western-trained death squads…

    It was also our government that lied about so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to begin an illegal war. Ex-prime minister Tony Blair should be tried for war crimes, yet he received a knighthood instead. He remains untouched and unaccountable for the untold number of Iraqi deaths he’s caused and the trauma and deaths of the British soldiers who were forced to fight.

    Then there’s Yemen. The UK has been a crucial ally for the Saudi-led coalition in its annihilation of the country. The war has killed hundreds of thousands, while millions are suffering from extreme poverty, hunger and malnutrition. A United Nations (UN) 2021 report stated that 1.3 million people would die by 2030.

    Meanwhile, British arms companies have made billions in profits as the government grants them export licences to sell arms to Saudi Arabia. The UK – and the private arms companies around the country creating the weapons – are complicit in every Yemeni death since.

    Israel and Eurovision

    Finally, let’s talk about the people of Palestine. Their lives have been torn apart by the UK’s staunch ally, Israel, since Zionist forces ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their land in 1948. Eurovision fans across Europe showed either their apathy or their contempt for Palestinian lives when they voted for Israel to win the contest in 2018. Palestinians and their supporters called for an international boycott of Eurovision when Israel hosted it in 2019. However, Palestinian lives were not deemed worthy enough by white Europeans, of course.

    I previously wrote:

    Since 1973 – the year that Israel joined the contest – there has never been an all-out ban on the country participating. Not even after Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008, in which it murdered around 1,400 Palestinians. And not after 2012’s Operation Pillar of Defense, which saw tens of thousands fleeing their homes. In fact, Israel hosted Eurovision 2019 at the same time as its depraved snipers were gunning down Palestinians who were protesting in the Great March of Return.

    Once again, it’s British arms companies that are profiting from the never-ending cruelty that Israel inflicts on Palestinian people.

    Time to self-reflect

    So if, like me, you’re white, and you’re planning to enjoy Eurovision, please take some time to reflect on the possible racism inside of you. Why, as the British public, do we see nothing wrong with locking up Black and brown people, yet condone war when it displaces white people? Let’s ask ourselves: what is the difference between Ukrainian refugees and the people left to rot on the Poland-Belarus border, or in our own Manston detention centre? Why do we show our compassion for people fleeing from one country, yet show contempt for others? The answer is, of course, because of the skin colour and religion of those we’re choosing to either support or leave to die.

    The Canary‘s Maryam Jameela previously summed up the mentality of people in Britain when she wrote:

    It’s almost as though people in the UK don’t value and respect the lives of Black and brown people. They merely tolerate us. They don’t value us as human beings; they see us as cockroaches to keep out of the way. Ukrainian people are considered as a whole – their culture, their traditions, their communities. Black and brown people don’t get that luxury. This is because white people only consider fellow white people to have inalienable rights.

    Of course, the Canary isn’t against the housing of Ukrainian refugees, nor are we against the celebration of Ukrainian culture. But these levels of hypocrisy among the British public can’t go on. If we stand with the Ukrainian people, then we need to stand with every single person who is displaced by war – no matter what their skin colour or religion.

    Featured image via YouTube

    By Eliza Egret

  • Why America Demonizes its Public-School Teachers

    Evaluating teachers on their students’ performance is an issue that has elicited much comment over more than a decade. In essence, this view assumes that if students aren’t learning, the fault lies squarely with their teachers alone. While the logic of this view seems compelling at first, a moment’s reflection shows that it ignores several factors over which teachers have no control, factors that have an enormous influence on students’ ability or willingness to learn, or if they are able and willing, a multiplicity of distractions get in the way.

    These factors include: the home life of children; the poverty and segregation of the inner cities; America’s Gospel of Instant Gratification; commercial TV; school sports; the restlessness of American society itself; its ingrained anti-intellectualism and ambivalence toward knowledge; youth’s distrust of the adult world and the school; youth culture and its rejection of tradition; technology’s negative impact on learning; Facebook; the eclipse of reading; youth’s literal-mindedness; its lack of intellectual curiosity; its inability to ask significant questions; its disinclination to develop a critical mind; the system of American education itself.

    To repeat, these are factors over which teachers have no control, but which have an enormous impact upon student learning or not learning. The issue of teacher responsibility for student performance must be placed within this broader social context of what has been happening outside the American classroom for the last 40 years. Only in this way will the discussion about student learning become more realistic, and honest, and why singling out teachers alone distorts the true nature of both the problem and its solution.

    When there are too few teachers in a school, and those few are overwhelmed by large classes and have no time to provide individualized attention for students — many of whom come to school deeply troubled and alienated with any number of emotional and psychological problems having nothing to do with the school — is it any wonder that students find it hard to focus and learn?

    The emotional, familial, and social problems of many inner-city students are often so deeply embedded and, in many cases, treatable only by professional help that the paltry resources of the school cannot begin to address them. These underfunded schools often lack even the essential services of counselors, social workers, and nurses because of draconian budget cuts.

    What makes matters still worse is that these same schools are now set up for additional failure by being annually denied billions in vitally needed tax dollars diverted to charter schools, with no accountability as part of a right-wing political agenda. This is nothing less than the nationwide destruction of public schools by privatizing them for personal gain and rewarding charter-friendly legislators and governors with campaign contributions taken from that same taxpayer funding that should be going to support public-school students. And if that weren’t enough, insult is then added to injury when these cash-strapped schools are then routinely accused of “failing their students,” when they should rather be praised for carrying on in the face of impossible odds.

    Rather than blaming these woefully underfunded public schools for “failing” their children, one should consider the war zone within which many of these schools are located: decaying neighborhoods, virtual armed camps where students must live amidst gang wars, homicide, drugs, alcoholism, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, sickness, lack of health care, poverty, despair and hopelessness. How can one realistically expect children to be motivated to learn amidst such conditions? These students are defeated even before setting foot in the school.

    The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names. There is no “failed schools” problem in America, but only government’s failed policy of “benign neglect” that has blighted inner cities and their schools for generations. One has only to consider the historical reason that caused this urban blight: the decades-old urban planning of sustained and systemic neglect that simply wrote off the inner cities to die on the vine, as state and federal funding was diverted to facilitate “white flight” to the suburbs.

    It is for this reason that blaming the “failure of schools,” as suggested by the film Waiting for Superman, is a willful distortion of what inner-city schools are up against thanks to this entrenched policy of government neglect, which the mainstream media refuse to acknowledge, let alone examine. This polemic against America’s inner-city public schools is a bare-faced lie that conceals the real reason for the “failure” of these schools: the deep and ingrained class and racial divisions in our nation’s history as borne out by city riots over the past 50 years. What is happening in the seething cauldron of our inner cities is hardly conducive to students learning.

    How much easier to wax moralistic and blame public schools as the villains, the helpless victims of these racist policies of social injustice, rather than these policies themselves — or even to change them! But what politician would dare take this on! That would mean real moral leadership and honest reform, not the crowd-pleasing posturing of pseudo-reform that demonizes teachers and blames them for the responsibility that government abdicated decades ago. It is the systemic culture of poverty and segregation that accounts for the lack of student progress within our inner cities, not teachers who can do only so much given government’s washing its hands of the inner city.

    The solution to these appalling conditions of inner-city poverty is not moral exhortation to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, but one that has always been an open secret in Washington and state capitals — a new Marshall Plan. Those who sit at the Table of the Mighty have always known that this is the only answer to these seemingly intractable problems of our inner cities. What is wanting, as always, is the political will. Instead of hectoring teachers to do more and more with less and less, genuine reform will only begin when government redirects its resources to rebuild our nation’s inner cities and support the public schools within them.

    If we can find billions to bail out big banks and billions more for dubious military adventures abroad, we certainly can find billions to invest in our own people and children! If we really cared about our children and their chances for a good education, we would move heaven and earth to ensure that this happens. Children are our only real immortality, and if we don’t care about them, whom do we care for? What are we about as a nation? What are we about as human beings?

    But, then, it’s always more profitable to Haliburtonize the cities abroad we destroy in war only to later rebuild them than to turn our own cities into environments worthy of the dignity of the human beings who live there, and where schools and schoolchildren can flourish. Until that happens, talk of reform will be dismissed by teachers as empty, self-serving political bombast, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but sound bites for the six o’clock news, launching pads for those with aspirations to higher office or the White House.

    Short-term, what is needed is a massive infusion of funding into these inner-city schools to hire more teachers to teach children in smaller classes, and offer rich and diversified programs that will challenge and help them to grow as students and persons. Preaching self-help rhetoric of feel-good uplift to spin golden tomorrows from the straw of today smacks of imposing guilt trips on these victims of government inaction.

    Until those in power dare to show true leadership by helping the poor rather than protecting the rich, until they live up to their oath of office by caring for all our citizens and not just the few; until they use their power to effect positive change rather than undermining teachers who work against hopeless odds to do the impossible, until this happens, we won’t be Waiting for Superman, but Waiting for Godot.

    The silence of public officials about these decades of government neglect — the true cause of the plight of our inner cities and their public schools — is only all-too-understandable, because they would be indicting the very system they represent. Instead, they condemn the first responders — teachers — who daily must pick their way through the smoldering debris of past inaction. In their attempt to appease a public clamoring for quick-fix solutions to longstanding problems, politicians cast about for scapegoats, a measure always more convenient, and popular, and cheaper, than addressing root causes, which would mean real reform.

    It is the perennial stock-in-trade tactic of those who would rather demagogue the burning issues of the day by deflecting public attention from underlying structural causes, because they lack the moral courage of facing the truth, the mark of true statesmen and women.

    It is a strange sort of paradox that a nation which demands improved public schools is unwilling to pay for them. Indeed, it even remains silent when governors and legislators annually cut billions from public-school budgets and give this funding to charter schools, which refuse to have their books audited, are not public schools, and cherry-pick every child who applies to them.

    For too long, the teaching profession in America has been dismissed as an intellectual proletarian class, much as the Romans viewed their educated Greek prisoners of war, whom they enslaved and brought back to Rome as tutors for their children. Teachers are routinely reviled for the important work they perform as unworthy of a professional salary, despite years of experience and advanced degrees. And, yet, they continue to educate on behalf of a nation that begrudges what it pays them. No wonder students doubt the value of learning, when they see that many in the trades earn more than their teachers. Perhaps this is the biggest lesson students learn in our schools.

    Yet teachers continue to educate while politicians break down their authority with sustained public criticism and then wonder why teachers command little respect. Nowhere in the world are teachers held in such low esteem as in America, an eloquent testimony to our national character. Yet teachers continue to educate those whom past centuries never dreamt capable of being educated — everyone, and then these teachers, beset on all sides by misunderstanding, budget cuts, public vilification, and lack of parental support, are routinely condemned when they don’t succeed!

    And, finally, teachers must now endure the crowning indignity of a punitive evaluation, a weapon wielded by politicians who have the temerity to claim, after decades of government inaction, that teachers themselves are the problem, and, depending on their students’ test scores, they’ll be one step closer to losing their jobs!

    Children should be tested by their teachers on material taught by their teachers, and teachers should be evaluated by their school administrators as they always have been in the past. To do otherwise is sheer lunacy since standardized testing, as is well known, doesn’t measure teacher effectiveness, but the parental income and home environment of students as research clearly shows.

    The school is the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, heroically trying to hold back the sea. Teachers alone are expected to overcome the effects of poverty, segregation, and racism upon students who live within the demoralized world of the inner cities.

    In desperate holding actions, hoping against hope for government to come to the rescue, teachers never imagined that they, too, would be abandoned by that same government, which, rather than thanking them for their heroic efforts against impossible odds, now turns on them for “failing their students.”

    The post Why America Demonizes its Public-School Teachers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Two countries, two kidnappings – but Jakarta and Port Moresby responses different with 3 PNG hostages freed

    ANALYSIS: By David Robie

    Two countries. A common border. Two hostage crises. But the responses of both Asia-Pacific nations have been like chalk and cheese.

    On February 7, a militant cell of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB), the armed wing of the Free Papua Organisation (OPM) — a fragmented organisation that been fighting for freedom for their Melanesian homeland from Indonesian rule for more than half a century — seized a Susi Air plane at the remote highlands airstrip of Paro, torched it and kidnapped the New Zealand pilot.

    It was a desperate ploy by the rebels to attract attention to their struggle, ignored by the world, especially by their South Pacific near neighbours Australia and New Zealand.

    Many critics deplore the hypocrisy of the region which reacts with concern over the Russian invasion and war against Ukraine a year ago at the weekend and also a perceived threat from China, while closing a blind eye to the plight of the West Papuans – the only actual war happening in the Pacific.

    Phillip Mehrtens
    Phillip Mehrtens, the New Zealand pilot taken hostage at Paro, and his torched aircraft. Image: Jubi News

    The rebels’ initial demand for releasing pilot Phillip Merhtens is for Australia and New Zealand to be a party to negotiations with Indonesia to “free Papua”.

    But they also want the United Nations involved and they reject the “sham referendum” conducted with 1025 handpicked voters that endorsed Indonesian annexation in 1969.

    Twelve days later, a group of armed men in the neighbouring country of Papua New Guinea seized a research party of four led by an Australian-based New Zealand archaeology professor Bryce Barker of the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) — along with three Papua New Guinean women, programme coordinator Cathy Alex, Jemina Haro and PhD student Teppsy Beni — as hostages in the Mount Bosavi mountains on the Southern Highlands-Hela provincial border.

    The good news is that the professor, Haro and Beni have now been freed safely after a complex operation involving negotiations, a big security deployment involving both police and military, and with the backing of Australian and New Zealand officials. Programme coordinator Cathy Alex had been freed earlier on Wednesday.

    PNG Prime Minister James Marape shared this photo on Facebook of Professor Bryce Barker and one of his research colleagues
    PNG Prime Minister James Marape shared this photo on Facebook of Professor Bryce Barker and one of his research colleagues after their release. Image: PM James Marape/FB

    Prime Minister James Marape announced their release on his Facebook page, thanking Police Commissioner David Manning, the police force, military, leaders and community involved.

    “We apologise to the families of those taken as hostages for ransom. It took us a while but the last three [captives] has [sic] been successfully returned through covert operations with no $K3.5m paid.

    “To criminals, there is no profit in crime. We thank God that life was protected.”

    How the PNG Post-Courier reported the kidnap 210223
    How the PNG Post-Courier reported the kidnap on Tuesday’s front page. Image: Jim Marbrook/APR/PC screenshot

    Ransom demanded
    The kidnappers had demanded a ransom, as much as K3.5 million (NZ$1.6 million), according to one of PNG’s two daily newspapers, the Post-Courier, and Police Commissioner David Manning declared: “At the end of the day, we’re dealing with a criminal gang with no other established motive but greed.”

    ABC News reports that it understood a ransom payment was discussed as part of the negotiations, although it was significantly smaller than the original amount demanded.

    A "colonisation" map of Papua New Guinea and West Papua
    A “colonisation” map of Papua New Guinea and West Papua. Image: File

    It was a coincidence that these hostage dramas were happening in Papua New Guinea and West Papua in the same time frame, but the contrast between how the Indonesian and PNG authorities have tackled the crises is salutary.

    Jakarta was immediately poised to mount a special forces operation to “rescue” the 37-year-old pilot, which undoubtedly would have triggered a bloody outcome as happened in 1996 with another West Papuan hostage emergency at Mapenduma in the Highlands.

    That year nine hostages were eventually freed, but two Indonesian students were killed in crossfire, and eight OPM guerrillas were killed and two captured. Six days earlier another rescue bid had ended in disaster when an Indonesian military helicopter crashed killing all five soldiers on board.

    Reprisals were also taken against Papuan villagers suspected of assisting the rebels.

    This month, only intervention by New Zealand diplomats, according to the ABC quoting Indonesian Security Minister Mahfud Mahmodin, prevented a bloody rescue bid by Indonesian special forces because they requested that there be no acts of violence to free its NZ citizen.

    Mahmodin said Indonesian authorities would instead negotiate with the rebels to free the pilot. There is still hope that there will be a peaceful resolution, as in Papua New Guinea.

    PNG sought negotiation
    In the PNG hostage case, police and authorities had sought to de-escalate the crisis from the start and to negotiate the freedom of the hostages in the traditional “Melanesian way” with local villager go-betweens while buying time to set up their security operation.

    The gang of between 13 and 21 armed men released one of the women researchers — Cathy Alex on Wednesday, reportedly to carry demands from the kidnappers.

    PNG's Police Commissioner David Manning
    PNG’s Police Commissioner David Manning .. . “We are working to negotiate an outcome, it is our intent to ensure the safe release of all and their safe return to their families.” Image: Jim Marbrook/Post-Courier screenshot APR

    But the Papua New Guinean police were under no illusions about the tough action needed if negotiation failed with the gang which had terrorised the region for some months.

    While Commissioner Manning made it clear that police had a special operations unit ready in reserve to use “lethal force” if necessary, he warned the gunmen they “can release their captives and they will be treated fairly through the criminal justice system, but failure to comply and resisting arrest could cost these criminals their lives”.

    Now after the release of the hostages Commissioner Manning says: “We still have some unfinished business and we hope to resolve that within a reasonable timeframe.”

    Earlier in the week, while Prime Minister Marape was in Fiji for the Pacific Islands Forum “unity” summit, he appealed to the hostage takers to free their captives, saying the identities of 13 captors were known — and “you have no place to hide”.

    Deputy Opposition Leader Douglas Tomuriesa flagged a wider problem in Papua New Guinea by highlighting the fact that warlords and armed bandits posed a threat to the country’s national security.

    “Warlords and armed bandits are very dangerous and . . . must be destroyed,” he said. “Police and the military are simply outgunned and outnumbered.”

    ‘Open’ media in PNG
    Another major difference between the Indonesian and Papua New Guinea responses to the hostage dramas was the relatively “open” news media and extensive coverage in Port Moresby while the reporting across the border was mostly in Jakarta media with the narrative carefully managed to minimise the “independence” issue and the demands of the freedom fighters.

    Media coverage in Jayapura was limited but with local news groups such as Jubi TV making their reportage far more nuanced.

    West Papuan kidnap rebel leader Egianus Kogoya
    West Papuan kidnap rebel leader Egianus Kogoya . . . “There are those who regard him as a Papuan hero and there are those who view him as a criminal.” Image: TPNPB

    An Asia Pacific Report correspondent, Yamin Kogoya, has highlighted the pilot kidnapping from a West Papuan perspective and with background on the rebel leader Egianus Kogoya. (Note: Yamin’s last name represents the extended Kogoya clan across the Highlands – the largest clan group in West Papua, but it is not the family of the rebel leader).

    “There are those who regard Egianus Kogoya as a Papuan hero and there are those who view him as a criminal,” he wrote.

    “It is essential that we understand how concepts of morality, justice, and peace function in a world where one group oppresses another.

    “A good person is not necessarily right, and a person who is right is not necessarily good. A hero’s journey is often filled with betrayal, rejection, error, tragedy, and compassion.

    “Whenever a figure such as Egianus Kogoya emerges, people tend to make moral judgments without necessarily understanding the larger story.

    ‘Heroic figures’
    “And heroic figures themselves have their own notions of morality and virtue, which are not always accepted by societal moralities.”

    He also points out that there are “no happy monks or saints, nor are there happy revolutionary leaders”.

    “Patrice Émery Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Malcom X, Ho Chi Minh, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Arnold Aap and the many others are all deeply unfortunate on a human level.”

    Indonesian security forces on patrol guarding roads around Sinakma, Wamena
    Indonesian security forces on patrol guarding roads around Sinakma, Wamena District, after last week’s rioting. Image: Jubi News

    Last week, a riot in Wamena in the mountainous Highlands erupted over rumours about the abduction of a preschool child who was taken to a police station along with the alleged kidnapper. When protesters began throwing stones at the police station, Indonesian security forces shot dead nine people and wounded 14.

    More than 200 extra security forces – military and police – were deployed to the Papuan town as part of a familiar story of repression and human rights violations, claimed by critics as part of a pattern of “genocide”.

    West Papua breakthrough
    Meanwhile, headlines over the pilot kidnapping and the Wamena riot have overshadowed a remarkable diplomatic breakthrough in Fiji by Benny Wenda, president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a group that is waging a peaceful and diplomatic struggle for self-determination and justice for Papuans.

    West Papua leader Benny Wenda (left) shaking hands with Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka
    West Papua leader Benny Wenda (left) shaking hands with Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . a remarkable diplomatic breakthrough. Image: @slrabuka

    Wenda met new Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, the original 1987 coup leader, who was narrowly elected the country’s leader last December and is ushering in a host of more open policies after 16 years of authoritarian rule.

    The West Papuan leader won a pledge from Rabuka that he would support the independence campaigners to become full members of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), while also warning that they needed to be careful about “sovereignty issues”.

    Under the FijiFirst government led by Voreqe Bainimarama, Fiji had been one of the countries that blocked the West Papuans in their previous bids in 2015 and 2019.

    The MSG bloc includes Fiji, the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) representing New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, traditionally the strongest supporter of the Papuans.

    Indonesia surprisingly became an associate member in 2015, a move that a former Vanuatu prime minister, Joe Natuman, has admitted was “a mistake”.

    An elated Wenda, who strongly distanced his peaceful diplomacy movement from the hostage crisis, declared after his meeting with Rabuka, “Melanesia is changing”.

    However, many West Papuan supporters and commentators long for the day when Australia and New Zealand also shed their hypocrisy and step up to back self-determination for the Indonesian-ruled Melanesian region.

  • Four Kill the Bill defendants have been sentenced to nearly eleven years between them this week

    This week, Bristol Crown Court sentenced four defendants to nearly 11 years in prison between them. Police arrested all four for their role in Bristol’s 21 March 2021 Kill the Bill demonstration.

    Judge Patrick – who has become infamous in Bristol for handing out brutal sentences to the Bristol ‘riot’ defendants – sentenced Dominic Gillett to four years and eight months in prison. Dominic had pled guilty to ‘riot’. Joe Paxton and Indigo Bond received sentences of 27 months and 20 months respectively. Indigo and Joe were both found not guilty of riot in 2022 by juries, but had offered guilty pleas to the lesser charge of violent disorder.

    Charlie Milton received 26 months for violent disorder.

    On Friday 24 February, a demonstration in solidarity with the defendants was held outside Bristol Crown Court. Demonstrators chanted:

    Our passion for freedom is stronger than your prisons!

    From a demonstration to an uprising

    On 21 March 2021, officers from Avon and Somerset police attacked demonstrators with batons, and deployed horses and dogs against the protest. In footage from the night police officers can be seen repeatedly hitting people over the head with their riot shields

    The protest was against the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill, now enacted into law. It took place just after the brutal rape and murder of Sarah Everard by serving police officer Wayne Couzens, and the mood was both angry and defiant. The police’s brutality toward the crowd was the final straw, and the demonstration became an anti-police uprising. When the police attacked, the crowd fought back.

    By the end of the evening protesters had smashed the windows of Bridewell Police Station, and several police vehicles were in flames.

    Massive sentences

    The Crown Court has so far imprisoned at least 32 people for their role that night, and in the demonstrations that followed. On top of that, one person is currently on remand. Their combined sentences total over 96 years in prison. Ryan Roberts was given the longest stretch so far – a massive 14 years.

    These 32 Kill the Bill prisoners are among an increasing number of people imprisoned in relation to political demonstrations. At least 54 people are reportedly serving time in the UK for their roles in protests and direct action.

    Almost all of the defendants were initially charged with riot, the most serious charge in English public order law. Riot carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison, and has historically been used fairly rarely outside of Northern Ireland. The riot charge – for example – was not used against most of those arrested in the UK’s 2011 uprisings in London and elsewhere. On that occasion, the state opted to prosecute the majority of people for the lesser charge of violent disorder.

    But in recent years, riot has been increasingly used by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). For example, last year 18 people were imprisoned for riot after a confrontation with police broke out at a wake in Swansea.

    Protecting a way of life

    Many of the people now in prison went out to demonstrate against the PCSC Act because it would threaten their way of life. The Act targets the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community by allowing police to arrest people for residing in a vehicle  without the landowner’s permission, and even to confiscate their homes.

    Dominic Gillett – who was sentenced to over 4 years this week – had previously lived in a vehicle. Indigo Bond comes from a Traveller background too.

    Both Dominic and Indigo had joined the protest partly because of how the law would affect people living in vehicles.

    Dominic’s barrister told Bristol Crown Court on Tuesday that:

    He’d been living in a caravan before, and felt threatened by the Bill.

    Indigo told the court last year that she “didn’t agree with the bill because of its effects” on Travellers:

    I come from a travelling background, my grandad was a Traveller and my dad too.

    The PCSC Act is a direct threat to GRT livelihoods, it’s not surprising that people took to the streets to fight back.

    Protecting each other

    All of the people imprisoned this week were defending themselves – and others – from the violence of the police.

    On Tuesday, the court heard how Joe Paxton had carried Fleur Moody out of the crowd to safety. Fleur had been hit on the head by an overarm baton strike from an officer, in clear breach of police guidelines.

    The charges against Joe included the accusation that he tried to wrestle a police riot shield away from an officer. However, his defence barrister argued that he was trying to protect his partner – who the had already been badly beaten by officers.

    Indigo told the jury at her previous trial that she had stayed at the demonstration because:

    I thought it was important to help people who were being hit worse than me.

    She also said that she had kicked at the officers:

    to get them back, because I had seen them brutally hitting people next to me.

    Dominic Gillett’s defence barrister explained how he had kicked out after police officers hit a person standing next to him. She added that he had tried to give first aid to people who had been pepper sprayed by the police.

    The court also heard how Charlie Milton had shouted at an officer to put his baton down.

    ‘Our children should be released’

    Members of Justice for Bristol Protesters – a group of parents, friends, and supporters of the defendants – told the Canary that they are outraged and devastated by the harsh sentences still being handed out to their loved ones. One parent said:

    Our children are being sent to prison for reacting to the violence of some police on that day. Protesters were beaten black and blue yet not a single officer has been exposed, questioned or called to account. The convictions have a political motive and our children are political prisoners.

    The group statement continued:

    The police brutality experienced by the majority of the protesters, the drip, drip, drip approach to prosecutions and the long delays in sentencing is leaving these young people traumatised and vulnerable. Most of the young women prosecuted are being sent to HMP Eastwood Park, which has recently been heavily criticised by prison inspectors as ‘fundamentally unequipped to support the women in its care’ with cells ‘appalling, dilapidated and covered in graffiti’, one blood-splattered and some with extensive scratches on the walls.

    Another parent commented:

    The charges should be dropped and our children released.

    Brutal sentences becoming dangerously normalised

    I was there on 21 March 2021, and witnessed the events unfold. Since then, I have watched dozens of people receive prison sentences for their part in the uprising outside Bridewell. Like many other people in Bristol, I am full of sadness, anger and rage that they are being sentenced to years in prison for resisting against a brutal onslaught by Avon and Somerset police.

    I am proud of all the people who stood up against the police that night. And I am glad to live in a community where people aren’t scared to fight back. But it is terrifying that these sentences are becoming more and more normal.

    We must never let go of our rage and defiance at a system that imprisons our comrades. Further, we must always insist on fighting against injustice. We must remember the rebels of Bridewell, and support them through their sentences. Most of all, we need to continue to struggle against the system that put them there, and never let the fire of resistance – that burned so brightly that night at Bridewell – be extinguished.

    People in Bristol have set up a fund to support the Kill the Bill defendants through their sentences. You can donate here.

    Featured image via Bristol Anti Repression Campaign – with permission

    By Tom Anderson

  • Ukraine: One Year of War on Top of 30 Years of Conflict Escalation

    Ukraine: 1 year of war on top of 30 years of conflict escalation: The only re-armament needed is intellectual and moral – on all sides

    Introduction: 1 year of violence on top of 30 years of conflict: Too much wrong thinking

    The world’s focus is on the war. On February 24, it is one year since Russia launched its so-called special military operation. Much more important is to focus on the underlying conflicts – because there exists no war or other violence without root causes.

    The focus on war, by definition, won’t lead to a solution or wider, sustainable peace – like feeling the pain in a patient without diagnosing where it comes from can never lead to healing.

    Unless you ask: What is the problem, the conflict, that stands between the conflicting parties – NATO and Russia – it will end with escalation until one of the sides feel that the nuclear button is the only way out.

    International politics is still so immature that the simple distinction between the violence and the conflict seem too intellectually demanding for the decision-makers, the media and most researchers.

    However, understanding it would help save humanity’s future.

    But the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, of course, thrives on the focus on war, weapons and ever more – blind – militarist thinking.

    The conflict is about 30 years old, and the war is one year.

    Whatever the reader may think about Putin, Russia, the invasion, Ukraine etc., the infantile blaming, demonisation and the projection of all guilt on one side in such a complex, multi-party and history-based conflict should stop. It’s emotionalist and stands in the way of rational and prudent policy-making.

    Moreover, it is dangerous in its consequences. Therefore, it’s time for the West – US/NATO and the EU – to do some soul-searching and stop living in denial about its complicity in the conflict and this terrible war.

    The overarching fallacy is to think and believe that because Russia did something wrong, everything NATO/EU did and do is right.

    Contrary to good academic practice and my other writings, this article merely states points and conclusions, while my arguments can be found in the 200-300 pages of analyses I have written since 2014. Much of it can be found here and here.

    I focus here on NATO/EU policies and why they are wrong and won’t succeed; that does not mean that I find Russia’s policies right and successful. But before you accuse others, take a look at yourself. The day after the invasion, I distanced myself from it and also made six – correct, as it turned out – predictions.

    The basic psycho-political elements of the West’s policy vis-a-vis Russia

    The building blocks of the West’s – NATO/EU – policies vis-a-vis Russia can be characterised by the following psycho-political concepts:

    Immaturity and banalisation – in blaming everything on Russia in general and Putin in particular (it can be said that Putin also blames everything on the West, but that won’t help the EU and NATO – just make ‘us’ as stupid as ‘we’ think he is).

    Psycho-political projections – what Russia does, NATO/EU countries have done themselves and in some respects much worse; and Putin is hysteric when he feels threatened by us, whereas we are justified – always were – that Russia is a huge threat and that Ukraine is only the first of a series of future aggressions. In other words, comparative studies and media mention of NATO countries’ aggression and violations of international law are prohibited.

    Just one example: President Joe Biden, the leader of today’s only global empire with over 600 bases in more than 130 countries and the most war-fighting and mass-killing country since 1945, stated on February 24, 2022, that “This was … always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary.”

    Untruthful innocence – NATO, by constitution, never did and doesn’t do anything wrong; it is innocent. NATO’s S-G Stoltenberg has repeatedly stated that ‘NATO is not a party to the conflict’ (but also, inconsequently, that Putin must not win because, then, ‘we’ shall have lost). The homepages of NATO and the EU state untruthfully that the extremely well-documented promises made to Gorbachev about not expanding NATO ‘one inch’ were never given.

    The same untruthful innocence produces the lie that it all began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and that it was ‘unprovoked.’ The word reveals with abundant clarity that NATO knows it behaved in a provocative way. The only relevant history is the history of the conflict – which began at the end of the First Cold War in 1989-90. The rest is make-believe, opportunistic ignorance and pure propaganda.

    An example of symbol politics and “sending messages”

    European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivers a speech during a debate on ‘The State of the European Union’ at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, 14 September 2022. EPA/CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON

    Groupthink – which implies that a group of elite decision-makers constantly and over time confirm each other in being fundamentally right and cannot be on the wrong track; they meet (latest in Munich) and confirm each other; their ministries, presumed analytical institutions and think tanks as well as the mainstream media hardly ever raise questions or criticise; every interpretation and information not identical with this groupthink is repelled, the world is interpreted selectively to fit the group’s worldview – and eventually, it is totally convinced that it cannot be wrong and that it’s decisions are smart and productive and will lead to the goal.

    In this case, the US/NATO stated goal is to weaken Russia militarily and damage its economy to such an extent that it can never do such a thing again – a punishment for what it has done. Groupthink is dangerous because it defies reality checks, leads to hubris, to fatally wrong decisions, and invariably ends up as lemmings running to doom.

    Hubris – or arrogance: In reality, ‘we’ are omnipotent. As former NATO S-G, Anders Fogh-Rasmussen has stated: Putin knows that “NATO spends ten times more on the military than he does and that we can beat the crap out of him.” Yet, paradoxically, no Western leader seems to be even thinking of aligning the idea that NATO shall win this war with NATO’s consistent propaganda to its citizens that Russia was a formidable threat which NATO had to defend itself against.

    That was done by NATO having actually 12 times higher military expenditures before the war happened, and its ‘deterrence’ failed. And NATO has moved into the largest-ever re-armament to ‘defend’ with goals like 2-4% of the GNP spent/wasted on ‘warfare planning, ‘security’ and ‘defence.’ (As if that was a serious way to determine thow to meet perceived threats).

    Militarism – every’ solution’ mentioned is about military actions. We shall win on the battlefield. Nobody in NATO/EU circles knows how to pronounce words such as peace, conflict-resolution, mediation, peacemaking, peace-keeping, reconciliation, dialogue, talks…

    Of course, it is implicitly understood that President Putin is at such a low intellectual and moral level that the only thing he understands is that we – the bigger boys in the schoolyard – beat that crap out of him.

    Sadly, the only thing that today keeps the Western world together is militarism, winning over Russia together. No other or more positive cause has had the same solidifying function. Militarism has become a religion, NATO its church – and only infidels question that faith and God’s existence. And they know that God is always on’ our’ side.

    With warfare, people come together and, in enigmatic ways, their lives may acquire a new meaning that replaces a sense of meaninglessness, and fills an existential void.

    Omnipotence – the EU/NATO world has no sense of limitations. It can fight economic crises, recover after the Corona years, handle refugees, solve climate change, alleviate poverty – you name it – and it can re-arm for billions upon billions of dollars. It – the US in particular – can wage a Cold War on everything China – an industry of non-documented accusations – and it can print any amount of greenbacks and repay debts, fix all the infrastructure and other problems of the US society, compete and win in the fields of advanced technology.

    The EU – which hasn’t gotten its acts together and built a modern transport infrastructure based on an all-Europe high-speed train network – believes it can always do that later.

    All these countries can install sanctions ad libitum – the disease I call ‘sanctionitis’ – believing that they will not be hurt themselves by them. And we shall, of course, re-build Ukraine after we have contributed to destroying it, now it has fought so nobly for ‘our’ values.

    We are second to none, and we can do everything simultaneously. No need to prioritise. Significantly, all decisions are made knee-jerk: Sanctions, cancelling of Russia in all other fields, Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO member decisions without analyses of the short, mid-and long-term consequences.

    All major decision-makers will be retired or dead, leaving it our children and grandchildren to pay the price by living in a Cold War-impoverished, de-developed and unhappy Europe and US – the more so, the longer the war lasts.

    Lacking world awareness – 80-85% of humanity lives in countries whose governments do not side with the NATO/EU world. If the NATO/EU world thought about global attitudes before they made their decisions in response to Russia’s invasion, they made a Himalayan miscalculation – or thought they could later bully everybody into lining up behind them.

    This is interesting also because NATO does not only have 30 members, it has 42 partners – some on all continents – and it tries very clearly to move towards becoming a global rather than transatlantic organisation.

    This dimension is brilliantly summarised by the High Rep of the EU Foreign and Security Policy (and Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party member), Josef Borell’s racist statement from late 2022: “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build – the three things together. The rest of the world,” he went on, “is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” (Stated when opening the European Diplomatic (!) Academy in Bruges).

    Interesting too?  At the 50th nuke-ban turning point

    This leads to:

    Intellectual poverty – EU/NATO policies now operate on simplifying Twitter-like statements, assertions, non-documented accusations, self-legitimising marketing language, slogans, empty promises and symbolic blue-yellow emblems, ties, dresses – instead of on analyses, arguments and complex understanding.

    Following these things every day is utterly boring, predictable and – filled with repetition. Mr Stoltenberg could easily Guiness World Records in Banality Repetition. The awareness or focus of politics, media and research is on weapons, war reporting, media war, more weapons fast into Ukraine – and ‘we shall win’ and ‘Russia must not win.’

    The obvious questions never asked are: And then what? At what cost to whom? And what will Europe and the world look like afterwards – if it exists? These groupthinkers don’t seem to bother. The idea of asking: If war, what are the underlying conflicts? What are the real, tangible problems – a conflict is an unsolved problem – that stand between NATO and Russia and seriously contributed to the latter blowing up – is prohibited.

    The intellectual poverty also comes through in believing, as it seems, that the word ‘Putin’ explains everything. So, this enormously complex conflict accumulating and deepening since the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, is reduced to Mr Putin – The (D)Evil – his personality, childhood, or his being physically or mentally ill, a man you shall not listen to who runs a country whose people we punish collectively (against international law, but who cares?).

    Furthermore, it comes through in cancelling all critical voices and calling people who ar capable of seeing two sides in a conflict ‘Putinists’ or ‘Putin Versteher’ – the poor trick of framing, of attacking the messenger instead of saying something intellectually qualified.

    So, nine psycho-political building blocks in synergy.

    Reality checks are very unlikely – at least until the crisis is on the verge of complete breakdown. These building blocks alone guarantee, in my view, that this is not going to go well, and that the NATO/EU leaders are likely to make ever larger miscalculations and live on delusions. Wars tend to narrow down people’s minds. There is no space or time for reflection, for stopping to think.

    Ukraine in NATO? Rather NATO in Ukraine the last 30 years. And peace?

    2. What does it mean to win?

    The usual, again intellectually deficient, argument is that’ we’ must and will, therefore, win, ‘they’ shall lose. And, implicitly, we win because they lose, we win over them. That could turn out to be wrong because ‘they’ might win and ‘we’ might lose.

    But it is actually a fourfold table; apart from these two outcomes, both could somehow win, and both could lose.

    But even this is a fallacy – because there are not two but many parties: Russia (government and people), Ukraine (government and people), NATO with 30 member states (governments and people) and the US as the leader (government and people). And there is the rest of the world and how the conflict and war impact the global system as time passes.

    But let’s stick to the winning idea. What does it mean? Winning militarily, of course – but also winning politically, morally, economically and culturally? Who will be stronger in which respects when the war ends?

    The most likely scenario I see on this first anniversary of the war, is a long struggle rather than a quick end to it. The longer it lasts, the more difficult it will be to solve the underlying conflicts – because of the immense accumulated hatred, traumas, devastations, death and wounded, the destroyed economies, etc.

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    Although the human and material destruction in Ukraine is, so far, rather limited in comparison with, say, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen etc. – it is already as huge as it is heartbreaking. Therefore, the slogan “This war must stop now!” – is the most powerful and truthful – but it is unlikely that the parties will listen anytime soon. They are all in a blind chicken game.

    Apart from arms-producing companies and major energy corporations, I see none among the many conflict parties mentioned above who will be better off after this war than before 2014 (the US-instigated and financed regime change in Kyiv and the Russian annexation afterwards of Crimea) or before February 24, 2022.

    Instead, everyone – you and me, too – will pay various types of prices. This applies to the immediate after, but also to decades ahead. Healing this conflict and the wounds of this war, building trust as well as a new security system, will take several decades.

    In summary, this war cannot be won in any reasonable sense of the word. The ad nauseam repeated NATO/EU slogan “We shall win, stand with Ukraine as long as it takes,” is ill-considered, intellectually poor and delusional.

    And it is dangerously irresponsible also because it means killing even more Ukrainian citizens who – in any thinkable scenario – will be the main losers.

    Regrettably, this does not prevent those who say it from believing their own words. It’s just that they have never thought through what they mean – because of the 9 psycho-political points above.

    3. All basic NATO/EU assumptions are either plain wrong, unrealistic or unsustainable.

    1 • Putin wanted to split NATO, but we stand united.

    The first is plain wrong. If NATO is not a party to the conflict, why is Russia’s invasion of a non-NATO country an attempt to split the alliance? Ten former Warsaw Pact countries have become members of NATO despite the well-documented promises all important Western leaders gave Gorbachev over 30 years ago that, if they got united Germany into NATO, the alliance would not expand “one inch” to the East? Why did Russia not split that expanded NATO earlier – and why did it intervene in the case of Ukraine?

    It is true, however, that the only thing the West stands united around is hatred, demonisation and re-armament – winning the war on Ukraine’s territory. Western cohesion has much to thank Putin for – for as long as it lasts.

    2 • Putin is out to conquer one country after the other.

    Well, so far, it’s not gone that well in Ukraine, and why did he not do that over the last 20 years during which he has been president? Does Russia – with 8% of NATO’s military expenditures and falling – really have the capacity to invade one country after the other, occupy and administer a series of NATO members? Some people say, look at the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. Well again, that was not what it really was – but the repeated propaganda works.

    3 • Russia/Putin threatens Finland and Sweden and may even make an isolated attack on the Swedish island of Gotland – therefore, Sweden must join NATO.

    Well, what about a shred of evidence of such an intention? Any assessment of the ‘correlation of forces’? Goodhearted people seem to believe that Sweden would have to fight it alone but – no – the US would come to its rescue even if Sweden wasn’t a member of NATO. That was already agreed upon and planned.

    Sweden will instead now be drawn early into warfare and have to accept US and perhaps other bases/weapons prepositioning on its territory and thereby ensure that Russian missiles will target Sweden. It has said goodbye to 200 years of beneficial non-alignment, an independent foreign policy, options of being a mediator and an advocate of common security and the UN goal of general and complete disarmament.

    The Swedish PM Kristersson has – without any mandate – promised full loyalty even with NATO’s nuclear doctrine. The Swedes will now live much more dangerously – with sharp, confrontational borderlines instead of neutral buffers. And with much less diversity and freely stated opinions in a more militarist security debate.

    4 • Russia will fall apart economically.

    Yes, of course, there are economic problems and they may likely increase year by year – but Russia is far from falling apart – for at least four reasons. Furthermore, the Russians know how to suffer – 27 million dead in WW2 – whereas Westerners don’t know much about suffering for their principles and stated ideals.

    Ukraine is an existential issue for Russia and many Russians, but absolutely not for the US/NATO – except for the fact that NATO’s only raison d’etre is expansion for the sake of expansion and to keep the conflict with Russia as a-symmetrical as possible and weaken Russia.

    Moreover, Russia has the world’s by far largest territory and deposits of natural resources – it is certainly able to slowly but surely turn its back on the EU and NATO countries and cooperate, instead, much more closely with China, India, Iran, the Middle East and the rest of the world, also in the China-driven Belt And Road Initiative, BRI.

    Out there, they may not love Russia, but they unite with it because they are sick and tired of the West in general and the US Empire’s operations in particular. And because the Global South has been hard hit by both global economic crisis, the fallout from the Corona and now the West’s response to the invasion.

    Supporting Ukraine militarily for as long as it takes

    We shall win this war. At what cost? What peace after?

    No ceasefire, no talks, no mediation, no UN or OSCE, no China, no peacekeepers, no demilitarisation, no brainstorming on possible solutions – in short, no-brainer and therefore no peace

    5 • We can win this war by letting the Ukrainians fight it for us.

    We’ve all heard it repeatedly: Ukraine’s cause is our cause. Ukraine is fighting for our liberal values, for us, for Europe. Ukraine struggles impressively for freedom, democracy, human rights – and therefore, we have a duty to support it with weapons and humanitarian aid.

    This idealised, or glossy, Western media image of ‘our’ Ukraine has a political purpose and should be discussed. Understandably, a country fighting for its survival may have to compromise on some of those fine values; the relevant question is what Ukraine might look like – given parts of its history and the de-moralising effects of multi-year warfighting.

    Additionally, do the Ukrainians have the military, political, economic and psychological strength to do carry the West’s burden on its shoulders, fight for years against NATO’s allegedly formidable nuclear enemy? For a time, yes, but hardly for much longer.

    We should not be surprised if more and more Ukrainians begin to wonder: How much of our country and our future must be destroyed to – perhaps – become a NATO member? Is our president doing what is best for Ukraine or is he actually more loyal to the US/NATO than to his citizens? What about internal conflicts, power struggles, coup d’etat attempts and war fatique if this war drags on and, for years, doesn’t lead to anything that can be called victory?

    And will Europe take more millions of Ukrainian refugees who have to run away or see no future there?

    What we see is the tyranny of the small steps – incremental NATO de facto involvement “for as long as it takes.” It means both fighter aircraft, long-range missiles, and substantial depletion of NATO’s military arsenals. It won’t be for Ukraine’s sake – the country could well be pulverised – but because ‘we’ need to win this war.

    6 • The ethics is abominable.

    Is Ukraine really important enough for the US and NATO to risk major war, perhaps nuclear war? Do NATO countries have real ideals, and do they want to show that deeds are more important than words? Does NATO really want to win and pay victory’s price?

    Today’s leaders would say ‘Yes.’ Then the moral dilemma can be formulated in this way: Why not put in 300,000 to 400,000 NATO troops and conduct the war you have developed plans for since decades back – make it your war, not a proxy war in which the Ukrainian people shall pay the price for the – predictable – consequences of NATO’s expansion (Remember that before the invasion, there was only a minority of all Ukrainians who were in favour of NATO membership and 2/3 of the people who wanted the question decided by a referendum – they never got. NATO and President Poroshenko made the decision).

    So, how much are the Ukrainians willing to sacrifice for ‘our’ goals? And for how long?

    7 • Peace will emerge from the victory on the battlefields of Ukraine.

    It won’t. It never has. Militarism and being drunk on weapons exclude every thought of peacemaking – the words mentioned above under militarism. When you allocate all your resources to the arsenals of war, you deplete the arsenals of peace.

    The NATO/EU countries have, in contrast to Putin in 2014, never proposed that the UN come in as a mediator, disarmer and dialogue facilitator. The Minsk process was nothing but a way to buy time for Ukraine to be armed as much as possible before the great battle for ‘our values’ and the killing of 14,000 Russian-leaning Ukrainian citizens. Ukraine is not a country without internal conflicts that may blow up when the present war ends.

    The incredible conflict and peace illiterate assumption seems to be that the NATO/EU countries can be both a fighting party and, later, a mediator. Or that there will be no need for any mediation and reconciliation with Russia: A new Iron Curtain, just tighter, in the making.

    8 • The people of Europe will put up with all this because we tell them it is an existential fight.

    I do not think they will. There are already doubts and demonstrations against the US/NATO/EU media narrative. It will dawn among the EU’s 420 million citizens that the skyrocketing prices are not “Putin’s prices” but of their own politicians’ making.

    It may dawn upon them that Nord Stream’s destruction was an act of economic terrorism against friends and allies, a deep humiliation of Germany and Chancellor Scholz personally – a hitherto unseen US arrogance that will not be forgotten even with the media avoiding it as much as they can – a 9/26 as a European 9/11?

    According to this survey published by Euronews, people’s attention is shifting from Ukraine’s battlefield to the wider-felt impacts, including supply-chain disruption, energy price spikes and rising inflation. Time will exert its influence on what can be done by whom and for how long.

    9 • We can make Ukraine a NATO member and ignore Russia’s concerns, protests and anger.

    Well, not exactly prudent but, rather, a result of the above 9 psycho-political mechanisms. That’s is why NATO’s expansion cannot be discussed and the narrative has it that Putin acted out of the blue.

    Generally, people who feel ignored will, as time passes and their frustration builds, force others to listen to them.

    In my online book, The TFF Abolish NATO Catalogue, I have analysed this expansion process and dealt with essentially important and trustworthy analyses. And Ted Snider writes in his article “We all knew the dangers of NATO expansion” that:

    “In 2008, William Burns, who is now Biden’s director of the CIA but was then ambassador to Russia, warned that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” He warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that “I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Short even of expansion into Ukraine, Burns called NATO expansion into Eastern Europe “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” If it came to Ukraine, Burns warned, “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.”

    This is one of numerous facts that you are prevented systematically by our politicians and media to know and discuss.

    The list of intellectuals – Realpolitik as well as peace experts – who have warned that Ukraine was a No Go place for full NATO membership is long and most mentioned in my book. NATO, the hubristic alliance, did not believe it had to listen or take serious what they – and every Russian president – have stated the last 30 years and CIA’s Burns expressed so well in the same year as NATO decided that Ukraine should become a NATO member (without ever asking the Ukrainian people).

    10 • The West will come out stronger and keep its role as a world leader.

    It won’t, it will be weakened. If it wants to outcompete China, the Belt and Road Initiative as well as other big powers, it would be wiser to sleep out the militarist hangover and get up early in the morning. If anything, this extremely resource-consuming war for a non-important, non-NATO country will weaken the West more than it will weaken Russia, which will join the emerging new multi-polar world order.

    It will instead accelerate the decline of the US global empire and cause it to fall sooner rather than later. Which is what I predict, for instance, in the article “The Occident is now militarising itself to death for a second time.”

    Instead of conclusions

    • We are where we are now for a series of reasons. We did not have to be here. This could all have been avoided.

    • The – superior – NATO/EU world is in denial, and its policies have no chance of succeeding because they are intellectually and morally deficient.

    • This is true irrespective of what you feel about Putin and Russia. If you or the West think he is stupid or evil, don’t believe that anything you do is wise and good. It hasn’t been. And don’t ever reciprocate in kind – tit-for-tat – because that makes you a mirror image of Putin. (Read your Gandhi).

    • Each and every person who says that ‘we’ shall win this war and ‘they’ shall lose should get out of the sandbox and recognise that s/he becomes co-responsible for the limitless suffering of the innocent Ukrainian citizens, perhaps in the millions.

    • This war must stop and stop now. We must begin to think and get out of the emotionalist, self-glorifying autopilot straitjacket.

    • Or we shall all lose.

    • Knowledge-based and intelligent civil conflict resolution is the only road to peace, cooperation and coexistence in the future.

    • Peace is still possible.

    • And peacemaking is the only chance for the US and Europe to play a positive role in tomorrow’s new and very different world.

    The post Ukraine: One Year of War on Top of 30 Years of Conflict Escalation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Western-trained Afghan special forces said to be fighting for Putin’s Wagner Group

    Elite Afghan commandoes trained by the West may already be fighting alongside Russian Wagner Group mercenaries against Ukraine, reports claim. Both the mercenary organization and the Afghan commandos have been linked with war crimes and atrocities in the past.

    This is an example of the unintended consequences of Western imperial tinkering. British and American military expertise are being repurposed and brought to bear against the West – and not for the first time.

    There should be a full, frank and public accounting of Western-trained troops, who in Afghanistan acted as brutal death squads, now working on behalf of official ‘enemies’.

    Indeed, in the wake of the Afghan withdrawal in 2021, Tory MPs even suggested Afghan special forces be formed into a new British Army regiment like the Gurkhas. One even told parliament that their loyalty was proven, but now they appear to be fighting for Russia.

    Zero Units

    In 2020 I returned to Afghanistan after nearly 14 years to make a documentary. I had previously served there as a British soldier in 2006.

    Within two years of my trip, the American-led occupation collapsed and the Taliban were back in power. Since then then we have learned that US allies in government may have accepted bribes to not resist the Taliban. But back in 2020 my focus was the Zero Units: shadowy, CIA-controlled death squads said to have killed numerous innocent civilians. The Zero Units were one key component of Afghan special forces, led by US operators and largely unaccountable.

    When the occupation collapsed in 2021, the Zero Units’ locations became even harder to keep tabs on. What is clear is that some ended up being evacuated to the West. One of the few outlets to cover the story was the Intercept, which reported that Zero Unit veterans would be given a fresh start in the US – despite war crimes allegations. Their new lives in America were even detailed in interviews.

    Others, we are told, were quietly airlifted out to the UK to work with British special forces, by whom they had been trained.

    New regiments?

    After the occupation collapsed, three Tory MPs backed a call to integrate Afghan special forces who had reached the UK into the British military. They were all ex-army officers, and at least two of them served in Afghanistan.

    Tom Tugendhat MP, an Afghanistan veteran and current Tory security minister, told reporters:

    We trained and fought alongside many Afghans who are now in the UK.

    They’ve proved their loyalty a thousand times.

    If they want to serve, we should welcome them, I would love to see a regiment of Afghan scouts.

    Meanwhile, Tobias Elwood – who has served in defence and foreign affairs roles in government – said:

    Given that we’ve helped train these forces, it’s certainly something that needs to be a consideration.

    One avenue is they are kept as a unit, as the Gurkhas have operated.

    The other avenue is they are blended into our own system.

    And Johnny Mercer, an Afghanistan veteran and serving veterans minister, told reporters at the time it would be an “absolute waste not to make use of them”.

    Interestingly, Tugendhat and Ellwood are perhaps best known for their hawkishness on Russia and China. Meanwhile, proposals to place Afghan veterans into British regiments have gone quiet.

    Wagner Group

    The Wagner Group is a private military company closely aligned with Vladimir Putin’s regime. It is been rightly criticised for its operations in Africa, including in Libya and Mali. However, as the Canary has pointed out before, such criticisms are not especially convincing from UK ministers. Indeed, the UK has a thriving mercenary trade itself.

    It is not entirely clear how former Afghan commandos came to be working with the Wagner Group. However, Middle East Monitor reported on Friday 24th February:

    When the US left Afghanistan in 2021, some 20,000-30,000 commandos were out of work and being hunted by the Taliban. According to several reports, these Afghan commandos fled to Iran, where they were recruited by a Russian mercenary outfit called the Wagner Group, who promised them good salaries and help to relocate their families.

    This claim was based on reportage by Radio Free Europe from December 2022 which went into greater depth:

    Lost status and a desperate existence in Iran are driving thousands of former Afghan troops – many of them elite commandos trained by the United States – to consider fighting as mercenaries in Ukraine and other battlefields.

    During the fall of Afghanistan, many Afghans, including military personnel, fled to neighbouring Iran. This aligns with the Radio Free Europe claim that:

    Afghan soldiers in Iran who have said they plan to take Wagner up on its recruitment offers say they were betrayed by the United States and the U.S.-backed Afghan government that they fought for. Many blame them for their current predicament.

    Betrayal and blowback

    Not everyone who wanted to get out of Afghanistan in 2021 could. The scenes of chaos at Kabul airport in late summer 2021 will stick in the mind of anyone who spent time in the country. So they should, despite attempts by the British establishment press at rewriting the legacy of both the 20-year war and the subsequent defeat.

    It may be understandable, then, that those whom the West trained to fight for it and then left destitute and homeless in neighbouring countries might look to Russia as a route out of their predicament.

    With the betrayal, comes the blowback. Western-backed and –trained Ukrainian soldiers may now face Western-trained Afghans on the frontlines of a war in Europe.

    What must follow is a proper account of how this came to be. Without serious reflection and accountability, we will repeat ourselves again.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Rhett Hillard, cropped to 770 x 403.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Ukraine a year on – how the invasion changed NZ foreign policy

    ANALYSIS: By Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato

    One year to the day since Russian tanks ran over the Ukraine border — and over the UN Charter and international law in the process — the world is less certain and more dangerous than ever.

    For New Zealand, the war has also presented a unique foreign policy challenge.

    The current generation of political leaders initially responded to the invasion in much the same way previous generations responded to the First and Second World Wars: if a sustainable peace was to be achieved, international treaties and law were the mechanism of choice.

    But when it was apparent these higher levels of maintaining international order had gridlocked because of the Russian veto at the UN Security Council, New Zealand moved back towards its traditional security relationships.

    Like other Western alliance countries, New Zealand didn’t put boots on the ground, which would have meant becoming active participants in the conflict. But nor did New Zealand plead neutrality.

    It has not remained indifferent to the aggression and atrocities, or their implications for a rule-based world.

    The issue one year on is whether this original position is still viable. And if not, what are the military, humanitarian, diplomatic and legal challenges now?

    Military spending
    While New Zealand has no troops or personnel in Ukraine, it has given direct support.

    Defence force personnel assist with training, intelligence, logistics, liaison, and command and administration support. There has also been funding and supplied equipment worth more than NZ$22 million.

    This has been welcomed, although it is considerably less on a proportional basis than the assistance offered by other like-minded countries. However, the deeper questions involve how the war has affected defence policies and spending overall internationally.

    While New Zealand’s current Defence Policy Review is important at the policy level, the implications affect all citizens and political parties. Specifically, most countries — allies or not — are increasing military spending and collaborating to develop new generations of weapons.

    For New Zealand, this calls into question the longer-term feasibility of its relatively low spending of 1.5 percent of GDP on defence. And Wellington is increasingly being left out of collaborative arrangements (AUKUS being just one example), which in turn reinforce alliances and provide pathways to technology.

    This is tied to the largest question of all: whether New Zealand wishes to relegate itself to becoming a regional “police officer” or wants to carry its fair share of being part of an interlinked modern military deterrent.

    Diplomacy and domestic law
    New Zealand also needs to reconsider its commitment to humanitarian assistance. So far, almost $13 million has been spent and a special visa created allowing New Zealand-Ukrainians to bring family members in for two years. With the war showing no sign of ending, this will likely need to extend.

    But New Zealand’s non-neutral status also means it has other responsibilities, and should consider greater assistance with the Ukrainian refugee emergency. This would require going beyond the current visa scheme, and opening and expanding the refugee quota programme’s current cap of 1500.

    Diplomatically, New Zealand also has to start considering what peace would look like. This raises hard questions about territorial integrity, accountability for war crimes, reparations and what might happen to populations that do not want to be part of Ukraine.

    New Zealand has enacted a stand-alone law to apply sanctions on Russia. But because this now sits outside the broken multilateral UN system, a degree of caution is called for, given the door is now open to sanction other countries, UN mandate or not.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin
    Russian President Vladimir Putin used his state-of-the-nation speech to announce Moscow was suspending participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation

    Preparing for the worst
    Finally, New Zealand needs to prepare for the worst. The war is showing no sign of calming down. Weapons and combatant numbers are escalating unsustainably.

    Nuclear arms control is in freefall, with Russian President Vladimir Putin suspending participation in the New START Treaty, the last remaining agreement between Russia and the United States.

    At the same time, the US has ramped up the rhetoric, suggesting China might supply arms to Russia, and declaring unequivocally that Russia has committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

    Were China to go against Western demands and provide weapons, countries like New Zealand will be in a very difficult position: its leading security ally, the US, may expect penalties to be imposed against its leading trade partner, China.

    While Putin may be able to live with the rising death toll of his own soldiers (already over 100,000), at some point the Russian population won’t be. As the US discovered in Vietnam, it was not the external enemy that ultimately prevailed, it was domestic unrest, as more people turned against an unpopular war.

    How Putin will respond to a war he cannot win conventionally, while risking losing popularity and position at home, is impossible to predict.

    Everyone might hope his nuclear threats are a bluff, but New Zealand’s leaders would be wise to plan for the worst.

    Whether a small, distant, non-neutral South Pacific nation might be a direct target or not is conjecture. What is not speculation, however, is that if the Ukraine war spins out of control, New Zealand would be in an emergency unlike anything it’s witnessed before.The Conversation

    Dr Alexander Gillespie, professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • Shamima Begum losing her appeal proves the UK has conditional citizenship

    Shamima Begum has lost her latest legal battle to reverse the decision that stripped her of her British citizenship. The ruling from Judge Robert Jay of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) means that she can’t return to the UK from her current home in a refugee camp in northern Syria.

    Shamima was 15 when Islamic State (IS) groomed her to leave her East London home for Syria. This was in 2015. While she was there, the group forced her to marry an IS fighter. She had three children, who have all since died. In February 2019, her legal team said the UK government left her stateless. This was after the then-home secretary Sajid Javid revoked her British citizenship. He claimed this was on ‘national security grounds’ after she was found in the Syrian camp.

    A UK tribunal ruled in 2020 that she was not stateless. It claimed this was because she was “a citizen of Bangladesh by descent” at the time the decision was made. This was due to her mother being Bangladeshi. Javid revoked Shamima’s citizenship despite the fact she had never been to Bangladesh. Under the Bangladeshi “blood line” law, nationality and citizenship lapse when a person reaches the age of 21. This is triggered unless they make efforts to retain it. Shamima has not done this, and was aged 19 when the decision was made.

    Shamima Begum’s ‘shades of grey’

    When rejecting her appeal, Jay said:

    under our constitutional settlement these sensitive issues are for the secretary of state to evaluate and not for the commission.

    However, he said there was “considerable force” in Begum’s arguments. Jay also noted that Javid’s conclusion that she had travelled voluntarily to Syria “is as stark as it is unsympathetic”.

    Jay continued:

    Further, there is some merit in the argument that those advising the secretary of state see this as a black and white issue, when many would say that there are shades of grey.

    This presumably refers to Shamima’s account that IS groomed, raped, and abused her. Given that she was 15 when the group trafficked her, she clearly could not consent to any sexual contact. It is evidently the UK government’s position that Shamima was – and remains – a security threat who joined IS and cannot be allowed into the UK. Instead it appears that the “shades of grey” Jay refers to are a sickening euphemism for the abuse and trafficking of a young girl.

    Indeed, lawyer Samantha Knights, representing Shamima, told the SIAC hearing last November that her client had been “influenced” along with her friends by a “determined and effective” IS group “propaganda machine”. She said in written evidence there was “overwhelming” evidence Shamima had been:

    recruited, transported, transferred, harboured and received in Syria for the purposes of ‘sexual exploitation’ and ‘marriage’ to an adult male.

    Gareth Peirce and Daniel Furner, lawyers representing Shamima, said the ruling meant:

    there is now no protection for a British child trafficked out of the UK.

    They confirmed that “every possible avenue to challenge this decision will be urgently pursued”. Shamima can now appeal the decision by the SIAC in the Court of Appeal.

    Reactions to the stripping of citizenship

    Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director Steve Valdez-Symonds said:

    The power to banish a citizen like this simply shouldn’t exist in the modern world.

    Shamima Begum had lived all her life in the UK right up to the point she was lured to Syria as an impressionable 15-year-old.

    Activist and writer Ilyas Nagdee said:

    Co-editor of Red Pepper Magazine Amardeep Dhillon said:

    Academic Gurminder Bhambra pointed out the cost to all of us:

    Grassroots organisers CAGE questioned the government’s claims about security threats:

    Dr Zubaida Haque explained that the decision is likely to have severe implications for British citizens with lineage from other countries:

    MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy also emphasised the two-tier citizenship system:

    Conditional citizenship

    Shamima has been here many times. Each time her legal battles are covered by the mainstream media, racists come crawling out of the woodwork. They deny she was ever trafficked or abused. They use her as an example of the threat of ‘Islamist extremism.’ It’s not at all surprising that the government are doggedly opposing her attempts to avoid statelessness. These are the same people who’ve enacted the Nationality and Borders Act which enshrines the ability to strip people of their citizenship into law.

    Shamima’s treatment at the hands of a hostile government and a craven media says absolutely everything about what kind of country the UK is. This is a place where a child who was trafficked, raped, and abused, whose three children all died, can be left stateless and shoved towards a country she has never known, simply because of where her parents come from. This is what it’s like to not be white in Britain. It doesn’t matter who you are, who you know, how integrated you become, or anything like that. If you’re a person of colour, and Muslim on top of that, your citizenship can and will be stripped away from you.

    Two years ago, when the Canary last covered Shamima’s citizenship battle, we concluded:

    Conditional citizenship for some is conditional citizenship for all.

    Being considered a person with full rights is for some, but not all. This rotting society is only as good as its most vulnerable people. What does that make the UK? A country that has unending sympathy and generosity of spirit for whiteness in all its guises, and a vicious disdain for brown people. To be brown and Muslim in the UK is to feel, on many levels, how much your life and death mean absolutely nothing.

    Featured image via YouTube screenshot/BBC News

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    By Maryam Jameela

  • Rest In Peace, Brianna Ghey: trans teen receives outpouring of love in the form of vigils and tributes

    On 11 February, 16-year-old transgender girl Brianna Ghey was found with fatal stab wounds in Culcheth Linear Park in Warrington. Two 15-year-olds have appeared in Liverpool Crown Court, charged with her murder. Since the attack, the transgender community and its allies up and down the UK have joined together in acts of remembrance and grief.

    Vigils

    Memorial gatherings were held across the country over the past week. Mourners draped in rainbow and trans flags laid flowers and lit candles in expressions of grief and anger. Queer radio stations including Gaydio, Hits Radio Pride, Pride Radio, Gorgeous Radio, Glitterbeam Radio, Trans Radio UK and Juice 1038 held a minute’s silence at 11am on Friday 17 February.

    On the same day, a vigil was held by candlelight on Culcheth Village Green, near the site of the attack. The local choir sang ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. The next day, a similar event in nearby Warrington was attended by hundreds of mourners. Charlotte Nichols, Labour MP for Warrington North, said:

    Brianna Ghey’s murder has left our community reeling and I cannot begin to imagine the agony that her family, her friends and all her loved ones are feeling right now – no parent should ever have to bury a child.

    She also stated that:

    Trans lives matter and trans young people should have the fundamental rights to dignity and safety that should be universal human rights.

    Grassroots organisation Manchester Trans Rise Up organised the city’s vigil on 15 February. It saw a touching turnout of over 2000 attendees.  Group representative Dennis Queen said:

    People have organised the vigil tonight to remember Brianna, to show solidarity with her family and also to give people a chance to come together and support each other.

    And most of all, to show trans young people that they are not alone, and that lots of us support them. I think it’s hopeful to see that so many people are on side with us as trans people, and on side with this lovely young woman who has had her life cut short, but at the same time it’s frightening for everyone as well.

    As if in evidence of this fact, a vigil in Birmingham’s gay village on 17 February was disrupted by shouted, hate-filled abuse – a stark reminder that we cannot even be allowed to mourn in peace.

    Sisterhood

    These acts of collective mourning are not merely gestures. The transgender community in the UK is relatively small, but we are close-knit. Particularly for those of us outside big cities, online spaces often form essential hubs for us to meet other people like ourselves and feel less isolated.

    VICE ran an interview with some of Brianna’s trans friends from the online community. 16-year-old Channah, from Cornwall, shared that:

    We’re both trans women from small villages, so our support network is all internet-based, and people don’t understand how big that network is. We all know and support each other.

    Jade, 19, from West Yorkshire, named Brianna a “fellow trans sister”. Trans people often name each other ‘sister’, or ‘brother’, or ‘sibling’. This small marker of solidarity recognizes our shared struggles and the families that we find in them. Jade also stated that:

    I, and her community, will make sure she is remembered as the strong trans woman she was.

    Several of the individuals interviewed also said that Brianna had helped them navigate their medical care. Tiana, 16, from Nottingham, mentioned that:

    Brianna would constantly look out for the girls in the chat. She helped me find ways to access medical care for my transition safely. She would always make sure that we were in good hands.

    Transgender healthcare is often complex, daunting, and scarcely available, particularly for young people. Moreover, it can also be actively hostile and traumatising.

    A 16-year-old girl should not have had to help her friends access their medical treatment, but this is a sad fact of being trans in the UK. This is the job of our healthcare system and our government, but they are failing in it. Instead, we help one another – which means that the community feels its losses all the more keenly.

    Rising violence

    Brianna’s death comes against a backdrop of increasing violence against queer individuals across Europe and elsewhere. A report released on 20 February by ILGA-Europe (the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) found that:

    2022 was the most violent year for LGBTI people across the region [Europe and Central Asia] in the past decade, both through planned, ferocious attacks and through suicides in the wake of rising and widespread hate speech from politicians, religious leaders, right-wing organisations and media pundits.

    The report also went on to highlight that “antipathy for LGBTI people has been driven and then exploited for political gain”. This cynical hate speech from politicians, campaigners, and the media has meant that:

    attacks on LGBTI people with a conscious and deliberate will to kill and injure have increased to unprecedented levels, including two terror attacks outside LGBTI bars in Norway and Slovakia, which combined killed four people and maimed 22.

    The last year has been a frightening time to be transgender, and LGBT+ more broadly. Our politicians and media seem intent on ensuring that this will remain the case in the coming years too. We should not have to suffer injury or die in increasing numbers before our lives are seen as worthwhile to protect.

    Flowers for Brianna

    I’d like to echo a sentiment I’ve seen in several trans spaces over the past fortnight. One of the more beautiful moments in a trans woman’s life is the first time she receives flowers. This is rare before transition, and it marks a moment of acceptance and recognition. Brianna’s death was three days before Valentine’s Day. She should have received her flowers in life. Instead, flowers were laid in vigils across the country in remembrance of her death.

    Featured image via ARTUR WIDAK/NurPhoto via Agence France-Presse, resized to 770*403

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Republican Attacks on Education and Critical Thinking

    Have you ever been grilled by little kids asking the question, “Why?” Why is the sky blue? Why does Heather have two moms? Why are you going to work? Why do you need money? Before you know it they have you questioning basic social values you never even thought about. That’s why right-wing Americans attack public education from kindergarten through college. They don’t want children turning into adults who have learned how to ask the question “Why?”

    Conservatives have viewed America’s higher education institutions with suspicion for years. Remember Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativity?” But distrust of public education has now become part of the Republican party’s DNA. According to a Pew public opinion poll, for instance, fifty-nine percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country. It’s no surprise, then, to see Florida’s Yale and Harvard educated Governor, Ron DeSantis, beef up his expected run for the presidency by attacking public education across the board.

    DeSantis began by banning books and dictating curricula in K-12. Now he’s feeding red meat to his Republican colleagues by declaring war on Florida’s “woke” colleges and universities. Proclaiming that they teach ideological conformity and prepare students for “leftist” activism, DeSantis promises to restore academic freedom by eliminating courses on race, gender, and sexuality, to name the most obvious. He also wants more courses on Western Civilization, i.e., on Europe and the United States. And to keep faculty in line, DeSantis wants to eliminate tenure, the backbone of academic freedom. You want to teach students how to think and raise questions, Professor? Start looking for a new job. But not here in Florida.

    DeSantis is already implementing this purge by turning the New College of Florida, a public college with about 700 students and a reputation for free thinking, into a bastion of political conservatism. Without concrete evidence, DeSantis blamed the college’s low enrollment on what he dubs its “ideological” filter. Using this accusation as his justification for intervening, he packed the college’s Board with his political loyalists, fired the President and replaced her with a political ally at more than twice the salary. Following his overt political takeover of the New College, the Governor plans to implement his higher education program as described above.

    In the name of ending “woke” brainwashing, Yale and Harvard educated DeSantis and other Republican Governors – see Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, another Harvard grad – are using their political power to squeeze out trained professional educators to impose a right- wing version of reality on a generation of students. But the attack on “woke” culture is merely a smokescreen for DeSantis, Fox News, and their ultra conservative base. They don’t want a population capable of cutting through the baloney of misinformation, “fake news,” and the dense fog of intellectual apathy. For instance, while Fox News hosts blasted lies about election fraud, they privately mocked their sources as nuts. DeSantis knows the country’s real racial history. But his aggressive assault on critical race theory and its proponents assumes that racism can be washed out of reality. The Right never clearly defines the concept, they just want people to see CRT as anti-white propaganda. The attack on CRT is just a straw horse, a shiny object, to keep people from thinking seriously about the history, nature, and direction of American society.


    It’s scary that ivy educated governors like DeSantis and Youngkin demonize higher education. They rely on these McCarthy-like tactics because they fear the consequences of an educated public. As Thomas Jefferson observed, an educated public is essential to a functioning democracy. According to a Pew poll, about a quarter of the adult population hasn’t read a book in the past year, and, worse yet, about half the adult population reads at the sixth-grade level or below. If the likes of DeSantis and Youngkin have their way, schools from kindergarten through college will produce non-thinking automatons, cheerful robots, the passive, non-questioning citizenry essential for authoritarian governments.

    The post Republican Attacks on Education and Critical Thinking first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • New PNG media policy will lead to government control of news groups

    ANALYSIS: By Scott Waide in Port Moresby

    The new media development policy being proposed by the Papua New Guinea Communications Minister, Timothy Masiu, could lead to more government control over the country’s relatively free media.

    The new policy suggests a series of changes including legislative amendments. But media and stakeholders are not being given enough time to examine the details and study the long-term implications of the policy.

    The initial deadline for feedback has been extended by another seven days from today. However, the Media Council of PNG (MCPNG) has requested a consultation forum with the government, as it seeks wider input from research organisations, academia and regional partners.

    The government’s intention to impose greater control over aspects of the media, including the MCPNG, is ringing alarm bells through the region. This is to be done by re-establishing the council through the enactment of legislation.

    The policy envisages the council as a regulatory agency with licensing authority over journalists.

    The MCPNG was established in 1989 as a non-profit organisation representing the interests of media organisations. Apart from a brief period in the earlier part of its existence, it has largely been unfunded.

    Over three decades, its role has shifted to being a representative body for media professionals and a voice for media freedom.

    The president of the council, Neville Choi, says there are aspects of the media that need government support. These include protection and training of journalists. However, the media is best left as a self-regulating industry.

    According to Choi:

    “Media self-regulation is when media professionals set up voluntary editorial guidelines and abide by them in a learning process open to the public. By doing this, independent media accept their share of responsibility for the quality of public discourse in the country, while preserving their editorial autonomy in shaping it. The MCPNG was set up with this sole intent.

    “It is not censorship, and not even self-censorship. It is about establishing minimum principles on ethics, accuracy, personal rights while preserving editorial freedom on what to report, and what opinions to express.

    The regulatory framework proposed for the new media council includes licensing for journalists. Licensing is one of the biggest red flags that screams of government control.

    Communications Minister Timothy Masiu
    Communications Minister Timothy Masiu . . . Licensing is one of the biggest red flags that screams of government control. Image: PNG govt

    While the PNG media has been resilient in the face of many challenges, journalists who have chosen to cover issues of national importance have been targeted with pressure coming directly from within government circles.

    In 2004, the National Broadcasting Corporation’s head of news and current affairs, Joseph Ealedona, was suspended for a series of stories on the military and the government. The managing director of the government broadcaster issued the notice of suspension.

    In 2019, Neville Choi, then head of news for EMTV, was sacked for disobeying orders not to run a story of a military protest outside the Prime Minister’s office in Port Moresby. Choi was later reinstated following intense public pressure and a strike by all EMTV journalists and news production staff.

    Two years later, a similar scenario played out when 24 staff and EMTV’s head of news were sacked for protesting against political interference in the newsroom.

    For many within the industry, licensing just gives the government better tools to penalise journalists who present an unfavourable narrative.

    On paper, the government appears to be trying to remedy the desperately ailing journalism standards in PNG. But the attempt is not convincing enough for many.

    Fraser Liu, an accountant by profession and an outspoken observer of national issues, says the courts provide enough of an avenue for redress if there are grievances and that an additional layer of control is not needed.

    Liu said: “Media agencies and agents must be left alone to their own ends, being free from coercion of any sort, and if media reporting does in fact raise any legal issues like defamation, then the courts are the avenue for resolution. There is no shortage in common law of such case precedent. This is clearly an act by government to control media and effectively free speech.

    “Government cannot self-appoint itself as a referee for free speech. Free speech is covered under our Constitution and the courts protect this basic right. The policy talks about protection of reporters’ rights. Again, what is this? They already have rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

    Coming back to poor journalism standards, Minister Masiu, a former broadcast journalist himself, has been challenged on many occasions to increase investment into PNG’s journalism schools. It is a challenge he has not yet taken up despite the abundant rhetoric about the need for improvement.

    The energy of government should be put into fixing the root problem contributing to the poor quality of the media: poor standards of university education.

    Scott Waide is a journalist based in Lae, Papua New Guinea. He is the former deputy regional head of news for EMTV and has worked in the media for 24 years. This article was first published on the DevPolicy Blog and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

  • Christian Nationalism vs. the Separation of Church and State

    We have a long tradition in Am­erica of Separation of Church and State that prohi­bits government’s promotion of religion on the one hand, and interference with its free exercise on the other. In their refusal to establish a state church or to favor one religion over another, the Founding Fathers didn’t think that religion was bad but that there was something amiss in human nature, a certain tendency, a will to power and a lust for domination, that always bore watching.

    It was a virus that lay dormant until its host came to power, whereupon that person or group became suddenly rabid with a mania that sought to convert, punish or persecute anyone not of their fold or persuasion. Paradoxically, the guise under which this malady manifested itself, as the history of Europe made only too plain, was religion.

    The Founders thought that religion, something good in itself, could be used toward either good or bad ends, and, unless preventive measures were taken, could induce in the susceptible a madness so malignant and vicious as to destroy the very essence of religion itself. By per­secuting whoever refused to accept their religion or whose lives were deemed insufficiently righteous, those in power could impose a religious tyranny so suffocating in its grip, scope and intensity that one involuntarily thinks of barbed wire and concentration camps.

    Various theories have tried to account for this bizarre aberration — the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the ascent of man from beasts, innate human depravity, the Freudian “id,” defective genes, or bad social engineering. But more important than those theories themselves is the lesson to be drawn from those institutions that promise heaven on earth.

    Given the weak human vessels in which this religious feeling resides, even this noble sentiment could become tragically twisted and unleash on the world unspeakable horror. Immanuel Kant’s words come to mind when considering such would-be utopians and their spiritual gulags: “Nothing was ever made straight with the crooked timber of humanity.”

    In government, the need for transparency, accountability and investigative journalists — assuming they haven’t been censored, ban­­ned, imprisoned or shot — is not a casual suggestion, but the sine qua non for maintaining even a pretense of institutional integrity. Human nature is self-contradictory and prone to temptation, especially when the camera’s not running or the press isn’t present. And, no matter the institution, it’s always wise to audit the books — both the official ones and the real ones hidden in the back-office safe.

    Politicians, as the saying goes, campaign in poetry but govern in prose, so that we had better distrust whatever they’re saying and doing by an ironclad system of checks and balances, fact-checking and vigilant oversight. As soon as they pass a law, they’ll invite a lobbyist to insert a loophole, recalling Juvenal’s admonition, “Who shall guard the guards themselves?”

    Even religion can be dragged in the mire by persecuting those of another faith or of no faith at all until, weakened by torture, the unfortunates would end their suffering by conversion or death. So, to prevent these abuses of power as had occurred in Old Europe when Catholics persecuted Protestants, Protestants persecuted Catholics, Protestants persecuted other Protestants, and both Protestants and Catholics persecuted the Jews, the Founders erected a “wall of separation” between Church and State as a safeguard against such outrages.

    They wanted to put an end to intolerance, bigotry and sadism that wore the flattering garb of religion and spoke in the sanctimonious accents of self-promotion. They believed that what they were doing was ushering something new into this world, novus ordo seclorum or “a new order of the ages” (see the back of a one-dollar bill).

    America was to be a radically new experiment in government which, like ancient Athens itself, would show the world that free men had no need of princes and kings, but could govern themselves. No wonder the royal courts of Europe hoped this fledgling experiment wouldn’t succeed lest the contagion of democracy spread to their people.

    The Founders refused to involve government in religion, religious quar­rels or animosities that for centuries had convulsed Europe’s political landscape. Under stressful conditions, similar hostilities might also threaten our newfound nation, already a powder keg of sectarian tensions. Lending the power of the state to favor any one denomination or religion over another could exacerbate those mutual suspicions still further that might suggest the beginning of an established State Church.

    A wall of neutrality would keep government from pitting one church or religion against another, a policy that had fanned the flames of centuries-old hatreds. Every religion must therefore be allowed to worship in its own way with neither interference nor support from the state. Everyone must be protected from “religious enthusiasm,” as that quaint 18th-century phrase understatedly put it. The only service government could render religion was to stay out of its way as long as one religion didn’t interfere with another.

    This was an insight only painfully arrived at after generations of bloodshed, as monarchs imposed their religion on all their subjects (cuius regio, eius religio: whose realm, his religion) to unify and transform their dominions into virtual theocracies to facilitate rule. The Old World was replete with examples of such murderous fury, as competing factions virtuously butchered one another in the conviction that they were “doing God’s will.” Intending to bring their countries together, kings only managed to tear them apart.

    The Founders were only too well acquainted with this blood-drenched chronicle, and they resolved to keep such hatreds far removed from our shores. History had taught them that bringing religion into the public arena was to let loose a monster. Still raw in their memory were the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780 that only 11 years earlier had shocked all of Europe as parts of London were left in flames. It was a vivid reminder, if any were needed, of the deadly contagion of “enthusiasm.”

    If Gordon had prevailed against the British government, there was no telling whether the outcome would have turned back the clock two centuries when Protestants murdered Catholics only to be followed by Bloody Mary’s retaliation upon her Protestant subjects. It would have been the same sad old tale of religion’s debasement by score-settling, persecution, torture and death. Religion was nitroglycerin that had to be contained for everyone’s safety.

    So, the separation clause was added to the Constitution as the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. It was imperative that government stay out of religion, neither encouraging nor impeding its practice. It makes admirable sense since every religion or even non-religion is thereby protected; every faith is of equal value since government plays a neutral role — a neutral role, that is, except when one religion or denomination harasses or persecutes another faith’s members, who refuse to believe as that religion dictates. Government then intervenes to protect the innocent.

    This policy of separation is still on the books, and with good reason: Human nature never changes. There are still groups today whose agenda is converting and persecuting, hating and perhaps even murdering those of other faiths, denominations, or of no faith at all to save them from themselves and the fiery furnace to come — unless these “lost souls” submit and “see the light.”

    Or, more exactly, “the light” by submitting to them who claim to know the innermost secrets of God himself, as if the Almighty were only the God of their particular denomination or faith alone instead of the God of them all under different names!

    What a sorry little God he would be if he weren’t more open-minded than his closed-minded children who insult him by their demeaning image of him and use that caricature as their puppet who “reveals” to them alone what he wants for their country or political party!

    Whether such proselytizing zeal is disguised aggression, megalomania, or repressed self-doubt that feels both threatened and driven to convert others to dispel that doubt, these are very dangerous people and should never be part of government or have their theological views of the Second Coming guide an administration’s foreign policy toward Israel and that tinderbox of the Middle East.

    And yet, unbeknownst to themselves, these individuals render the nation an inestimable service by being a constant reminder of the very reason for upholding this Separation of Church and State. The Founding Fathers believed that religion was, and must always remain, a private affair because bringing the volatility of “religious enthusiasm” into the public arena would only trivialize religion and destabilize a nation. They feared the political effects of interdenominational feuding, the polarization caused by doctrinal differences, the demonization of dissenters and the eruption of religious intolerance and hatred.

    There was also a second reason why the Founders feared religion in politics — the rise of religious opportunists who would inflame political passions to promote themselves. Religion would become in the hands of these charlatans a theatrical performance and political tool to hypocritically showboat their “piety” to manipulate voters for political gain.

    An unscrupulous politician could disguise his lack of convictions by holding his finger to the wind to determine which way the wind was blowing and telling his audience whatever he thought it wanted to hear. This individual well understood the art of inciting “enthusiasm” or hysteria toward some plan of action and call it “the Will of God.”

    The Founders would have blanch­ed at politicians returning to their constituents and pandering to their sincerely held religious convictions to gain a following or court popularity — not that they couldn’t take part in religious services as private citizens, but not as representatives of their government lest people think they were lending the prestige of their office to their particular church or religion.

    These Founders also knew their Bible, as it played such a pivotal role in their 18th-century world. They knew of Christ’s admonition in Mat­thew 6 about not playing the hypocrite by standing on the street corner and making a public display of one’s piety, for one would have already received one’s reward. Instead, one should withdraw to one’s room, close the door, and in privacy pray to God as grandstanding didn’t count as prayer with the Lord! As experienced men of the world, they knew only too well how politicians might cynically abuse religion to seek power and votes.

    They were also highly educated, even erudite, men, especially Thomas Jefferson, whose library contained a Who’s Who of “great authors,” one of whom was the celebrated French playwright Moliere, author of Tartuffe, the embodiment of religious hypocrisy. It is both an uproarious romp into the glacial regions of inner emptiness, as well as a manual for observing the bobbings and weavings of unctuous sanctimony raised to high art.

    In that great patrician school of Parisian sophistication, it was thought that the only way to effect moral change was never by sermons but by ridicule. Many don’t mind being considered a scoundrel, but never a fool! Castigat ridendo mores (“Comedy corrects manners”) was the essence of Moliere’s art that skewered human folly by laughter alone.

    This caustic mockery of his characters and the gales of laughter that broke forth from the audience were much more effective in pillorying vice than sermons delivered from Notre Dame’s pulpit. Moliere, the French Aristophanes, was and always has been a moral institution for the French, who can laugh at themselves in his characters with no loss of face.

    Jefferson and his colleagues well understood that some members of government might be tempted to play Tartuffe on the political stage. One Tartuffe, or a group of them, could do untold harm to a nation by using religion for political ends. To the educated, the 18th century was an age of taste and decorum, moderation and dignity, and everything had its proper place. Religion especially could never be allowed to be vulgarized or cheapened by demagogues toying with people’s religious emotions.

    There would be no limit to their unbridled ambition and religious hypocrisy in saying whatever would ingratiate themselves to the favor and trust of an audience. So profound was their cynical abuse of religion for being elected that they would wax rhapsodic on the metaphysical subtleties of Hottentot theology if they thought it would secure them a “leg-up” over their political rivals at election time.

    Our Founders felt that religion was something sacred and should always remain so by being kept off-limits to political wolves in sheep’s clothing.

    The post Christian Nationalism vs. the Separation of Church and State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The World Wants to Be Deceived

    My title comes from a 19th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him.  It’s an old truth that has not changed a bit over the centuries.  I think, however, it would be more linguistically accurate to say that most people want to be deceived, for the world, the earth doesn’t give a damn, as the French poet Jacques Prévert reminds us in “Song in the Blood”:

    There are great puddles of blood on the world
    where’s it all going all this spilled blood
    is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk
    funny kind of drunkography then
    so wise . . . so monotonous . . .
    No the earth doesn’t get drunk
    the earth doesn’t turn askew
    it pushes its little car regularly its four seasons
    rain . . . snow
    hail . . . fair weather
    never is it drunk
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    It doesn’t give a damn
    The earth

    But people, the thinking reeds as Pascal called us, we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by making so much blood that is inside people get to the outside for the earth to drink.

    I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless.  Why bother?  At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true.  I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.

    For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins.  I write this to try to say something of value about the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media.  And the people who believe them.

    It is not easy.  No matter how obviously absurd the claims about Chinese “spy” balloons, the shooting down of unidentified flying objects, reports of how Russia is losing the war in Ukraine, all the support for presidents and prime ministers who shill for the war industries, etc. – a list that could be extended indefinitely on a daily basis – these media are relentless in presenting government propaganda juxtaposed with trivia.

    When you think they must realize they have gone too far since even a moron could see through their fabrications, they double down.  And I am referring only to what they do report, not what they omit – e.g. how the U.S. has restricted aid to the earthquake victims in Syria or Seymour Hersh’s report on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, two examples of terror by a terrorist state that must be protected at all costs.  This is the protection racket by omission and commission.

    Maybe an anecdote would help. A week ago, I ran into an old friend at a coffee shop.  Hersh’s article, aspects of which I question, had just come out and I asked him if he had seen it.  He said he hadn’t but didn’t know anything about such pipelines being blown up.  I was stunned.  A devout consumer of mainstream media, yet he somehow missed this major September 2022 event in the U.S. war against Russia that was reported widely by the media he relies upon.  Those media went on to suggest that Russia blew up its own pipelines, a claim beyond ridicule but one that was part of its war propaganda narrative.  My friend is a guy who has strong opinions about everything and finds NPR, the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN, etc. to be credible news sources.  How could he have missed one of the major stories of 2022, one that the New York Times,etc. was reporting on into December, still suggesting that Russia did the deed?  How could he have missed the pipeline story whose reverberations spread through all aspects of the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine when it was referenced in so many reports of gas and oil prices, a cold winter for Europe, and so many other issues? Its ramifications are manifold and have been reported as such, but he had never heard of it. I was stunned.

    I wanted to quote him Dylan’s facetious words from “The Ballad of the Thin Man”: “’Cause something is happening/And you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?”  But I did not.

    I have spent a week wondering how it is possible that he didn’t know anything about the pipeline explosions. I am sure he wasn’t lying to me. So how to explain it?

    In the interim, as I have been trying to comprehend these matters, the Super Bowl with its mesmeric half-time spectacle replete with crotch grabbing has come and gone, and I have read an interesting article by Ethan Strauss, a sports journalist, “Why America Needs Football. Even its Brutality” that raises important questions.

    Much has been written about football’s violence and the injuries it causes, the most recent example being the near fatal injury to Damar Hamlin of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills that garnered headlines for weeks (even though why he suffered cardiac arrest has been left unanswered since that would raise the COVID vaccine problem, which is also taboo).  Strauss notes the many arguments calling for the banning of football – the war game – because of its violence.  He notes that it is very true that football is very violent but that this is part of its great appeal.  He writes:

    And the NFL gives Americans that war, as spectacle, week after week.

    Today, at 6:30 p.m., eastern time, begins the biggest spectacle of them all: the Super Bowl, where we channel those ancient animal spirits into a highly commercialized event that ends with fireworks and a shiny trophy.

    We should celebrate that.

    He doesn’t argue for the celebration of war, which he opposes, but for the war-like game of football.  To Malcolm Gladwell’s statement in support of the banning of football as “a moral abomination” – “This is a sport that is living in the past that has no connection to the realities to the game right now and no connection to American society.” – he responds quite rightly that Gladwell is wrong:

    In 2022, 82 of the top 100 TV shows in America were NFL games, and the top 50 most viewed sporting events were football games or events that immediately followed football games. By contrast, in 2016, only 33 of the top 50 were football-related. The country has lost interest in so much else, but football remains a huge draw and, in fact, is gaining relative market share.

    Americans love violence, not just the military propaganda that precedes the Super Bowl game, but the smashing hits that players make and take in the games.  It is hard to deny.  Strauss goes on to show how over ninety percent of former NFL players who suffer from daily lifelong pain say they would do it again.  The violence is intoxicating and Americans get drunk on it.  It is the American Way.

    I don’t agree with all of Strauss’s points or assumptions, especially his imperative that “we have war within us, whether or not there’s one to wage,” but he clearly is right that despite all the rhetoric about how terrible violence is, there is something about it that Americans love.  D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.  It has never yet melted.”

    But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world.  It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about.  Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al.  The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media.  The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy.  Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise.  But essentially it is one massive deception.

    There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind.  To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe.  This is so even as the propagandists’ trial balloons are popped in the society of the comedic spectacle.

    But back to my friend I mentioned earlier. He hates violence in all its forms, is strongly opposed to war, and has a most compassionate heart, yet he remains devoted to the media that have lied us – and continue to do so – into war after war, a media that clearly fronts for the warfare state.  I still can’t explain how he knew nothing about the pipeline explosions.  Nor can I explain his allegiance to the media that lie to him daily.

    Even as his government, led by that very media, leads the world toward nuclear annihilation, he remains true to his media informants.

    I am stunned.

    In the Blood

    Born in a normal time,
    The periodic slaughter of millions
    By the civilized nations of the earth
    I grew to adulthood half-crazed
    With fear and numbed wonder.

    I always wished to believe otherwise,
    That people were good at heart,
    Wanted to live in mutual peace
    And tend the green earth as if
    It were a garden
    As if pity vivified all living things.

    Somehow the blood that was in me
    Said otherwise,
    Spoke truth to the power
    Of my wish,
    While everywhere around me lay the lie.

    But my blood, this blood that became me
    While millions were being butchered
    And Bing Crosby crooned I’m dreaming
    Of a white Christmas,
    This red blood said otherwise.

    Do not accept the way they say
    “Good Morning”
    And the way they nod as they pass,
    As though they didn’t want to kill
    Each other.

    Do not believe their eyes
    And the way they pray to the skies
    To save them.
    Do not believe their beliefs,
    All lies woven to deceive.
    For at heart they truly hate
    The green earth.

    Do not believe the way they say
    “Good Evening”
    For they wish the darkest night
    To descend upon us,
    The nothingness of their knowledge
    To swallow all.

    That is what will release them,
    That is all.

    Thus my blood spoke to me,
    A child of a sanguine century,
    Born in a normal time,
    The periodic slaughter of millions
    By the civilized nations of the earth.

    And despite all appearances,
    I have never believed them.
    Never.  Not at all.

    The post The World Wants to Be Deceived first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • I Hope Egg Prices Never Come Down. Chickens Deserve Better.

    There is something about the egg that is so rich and evocative to the human psyche. With its graceful, efficient, rounded compactness, and the subtle tapering of its form, eggs are so universally iconic that the word “oval” stems from the Latin ovum, or the product of an ovary. But for all its natural elegance and millions of years of slow evolution, today, the egg is at the center of a brutal, fast-moving, mechanized industry that’s anything but beautiful.

    While you’re thinking about eggs, please consider Bean, a one-time prolific producer of them. Now living her best life in Thornton, CO, Bean is a rescued laying hen who was born for the express purpose of producing for the egg industry. But, lucky for her, she is now spending her days in view of the mountains at Broken Shovels Animal Sanctuary. Bean is four years old. She may live for another few months, perhaps a year at most. Bean’s food, medical needs, and quality of life are carefully attended to, but she is living with an early expiration date hardwired through intense genetic engineering and a rough start in life. In other words, Bean is like all other layer hens, except she has found sanctuary to live out the rest of her days. 

    Her short lifespan is something Andrea Davis, founder of Broken Shovels, is mentally prepared for, despite her affection for the hen. “We find that their bodies succumb to a variety of cancers despite reproductive interventions like implants and surgeries like hysterectomies,” Davis says of rescued layer hens like Bean. “They are bred to be frail, and many experience bones that break easily due to having calcium and mineral deficiencies before they were rescued.”

    VegNews.RedJunglefowl.GeorgeEdwardLodge.WikimediaCommonsGeorge Edward Lodge/Wikimedia Commons

    Where did chickens originate?

    Next, consider the red junglefowl. It is likely that when you hear the word “egg,” the red junglefowl is central to what pops into mind next, whether or not you realize it. This bird is a direct ancestor of today’s layer hens.

    A small, forest-dwelling bird of South and Southwest Asia, the red junglefowl was venerated for centuries for their vibrant plumage and unique vocalizations, including the distinctive, confident crowing of the males. The birds, which evolved from the pheasant about 6 million years ago, spread from Asia to Africa, the Mediterranean, and Europe along Silk Road trade routes—and excavated burial sites have unearthed junglefowl cockerels and hens alongside their human companions.

    How did these jungle-dwelling ancestors become the virtual egg-laying machines that are so ubiquitous in the human diet today? Where there is a demand, there is a way. People have been eating the eggs of various species since recorded history, especially those of birds. Beginning in the 19th century, people started becoming very skillful at forcing as many eggs as possible from a laying animal’s body through selective breeding, manipulation, and scientific and technical innovations so that by the time the hen is slaughtered, her depleted body is considered “spent,” an apt phrase for what has been done to her by an industry focused on razor-thin profit margins and productivity. She has been spent and her body is often riddled with chronic, excruciating conditions as a result. 

    “Because of selection for increased egg production, these birds often develop problems of the reproductive tract and skeletal system, which are worsened by their living conditions. They most commonly die of a painful condition called yolk peritonitis, when a portion of the egg escapes the reproductive tract and ends up in the abdominal cavity, which is somewhat similar to ectopic pregnancy,” says Dr. Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, veterinary advisor of the Animal Welfare Institute. “They may also suffer from prolapse of part of their reproductive tract, which can lead to cannibalism by other hens, especially in crowded conditions.” 

    VegNews.Pexels.Djordje-VezilicDjordje Vezilic/Pexels

    The truth about chickens in factory farms

    Red junglefowl are about one-third the size of the hens like Bean who are used in the egg industry today. Unlike their wild forebears, who produce at most 30 eggs per year in the spring and summer months, the domestic layer hen may lay nearly 300 eggs annually, according to United Egg Producers, contributing to the almost 97 billion eggs produced each year in this country. Half of those eggs contain male chicks and, being worthless to the egg industry, they are killed as soon as their sex is roughly determined shortly after hatching. Any method of killing the male chicks—from being ground alive, incinerated, crushed, drowned, or gassed—is legally acceptable.

    The first commercial incubators in the United States were developed in the middle of the 19th century, and these early machines, which allowed for hundreds of eggs to hatch at a time, were further developed into industrial incubators by the end of the century. With that, the backyard chicken scratching in the dirt who laid eggs for a family was already beginning to seem like a relic of the past: incubators that were capable of hatching 20,000 eggs in one setting were part of what paved the path to the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) of today. 

    Starting at a hatchery, where the collected eggs are taken after their mothers lay them, they roll onto conveyor belts, and are then stored in an environment controlled for temperature and humidity for up to seven days before being transferred to an incubator with hundreds or thousands of other eggs. Around the 21st day after incubation, the birds hatch, surrounded by hundreds of newborns, and not a mother hen in sight. 

    If allowed to protect the eggs in her nest, a hen’s dedication to her job is the stuff of legend. The expression “mother hen” is construed today as someone who is overly worried and controlling, but it is borne of the bird’s deep, unwavering protection of her progeny, whether in egg or chick form, against even the most fearsome of predators. The eggs that hatch in incubators never receive this loving protection. This is true of birds who are raised in CAFO settings as well as backyard birds and so-called free range chicks: the vast majority begin their lives in industrial incubators like Bean, not in a nest looked over by a watchful mother hen. 

    When she was just within her first week of life outside of the protection of her shell, Bean would have had her beak cut, which the industry euphemistically refers to as “trimming,” but is actually an amputation of the end of the beak with a hot blade or infrared light. She would have not received numbing agents or follow-up care. At about 18 weeks of age, these birds will be considered mature, and sent to produce eggs for the remainder of their lives, their beaks mutilated. 

    VegNews.Pexels.Thành ĐỗThành Đỗ/Pexels

    “Chicken beaks are complex, highly innervated organs that can sense touch, pain, temperature, and even magnetic fields. Birds use them for manipulating food, exploring, interacting with other birds, and preening,” says Reyes-Illg. “In addition to causing pain, beak trimming is suspected to result in a loss of sensory ability and ability to orient in the environment, since this relies on sensing the earth’s magnetic field. Beak-trimmed birds can’t preen as well, so they develop more problems with ectoparasites.”

    This practice is done routinely by egg and bird-meat industries to reduce the likelihood of aggression and cannibalization between the stressed, crowded chickens. Even when beaks are not cut, Reyes-Illg notes that cannibalism and injurious pecking still happens due to the systemic conditions of the industry, like overcrowding and their inability to express natural habits.

    Despite her early start, Bean is extremely lucky. She was rescued as part of a coordinated effort that took place in May of 2020, when a single egg facility housing 100,000 hens in Iowa “de-populated,” or culled, the birds earlier than expected due to a worker shortage in the early days of the pandemic. Nearly all the hens were killed at the facility, but Bean and 34 other birds were rescued and taken in by Broken Shovels, where they were able to live somewhat of a natural life and express innate habits for the first time. 

    “It felt both tragic and beautiful seeing the first time they could dust bathe, perch, scratch at dirt, peck grass, or eat fruit and vegetables,” Davis of Broken Shovels says. “I can’t count how many times I broke down sobbing while watching these girls experiencing the real world outside of a cage for the first time, and to see their instincts and natural joy pour out of them.”

    VegNews.Peter-Werkman.UnsplashPeter Werkman/Unsplash

    Cracking the egg

    According to the USDA, more than 81 percent of all US layer hens today live in environments with more than 30,000 other birds, and many of these operations hold hundreds of thousands of hens in one football field-sized structure. In Iowa, where Bean lived, the human population is just over 3 million. There are over 45 million hens in Iowa alone, and about 390 million layer hens in the United States at any time. 

    In order to coax more product out of the hens, the industry uses a practice called forced molting, in which food and water are withheld and access to light is diminished for a period of one to two weeks, after which time egg production is accelerated briefly. The hens will go through this experience up to three times before they are considered more valuable dead than alive, and are consequently slaughtered. 

    After about 18 months, a hen is generally considered spent, as she is no longer producing a high volume of eggs. At this point, she and others like her will be collected for transport and slaughter, first by a “catcher,” who grabs up to four hens at a time and carries them upside-down by their fragile legs to be tossed or dropped into transport crates. Speed and efficiency are what matter here, and according to one study, nearly 30 percent of hens had broken bones after transport. Exposed to extreme temperatures of heat and cold on their way to the slaughterhouse, the hens continue to endure the stress of being crowded as well as noise and motion, not to mention aggression from other agitated birds. The small slats of the transport truck are likely to provide the first and last time most will breathe fresh air or feel the sun. Only a small number of slaughterhouses in the country accept spent laying hens, so the birds may be transported many hours, deprived of food and water.

    Birds, which make up more than 98 percent of the animals killed each year for food, are not covered by even the exceedingly low standards of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. Most commonly, though, at the slaughterhouse, workers will unload the crates of hens, then they will be quickly hung upside-down in metal shackles and moved by conveyor through an electrical water-bath designed to stun them. Still upside-down on the line, an automated knife will cut their throats. They will bleed out, until they are dragged through the scalding tank, after which their lifeless bodies are plucked. Even though they were not raised as broiler hens, their bruised and damaged flesh still has some value to the industry, so it is often shredded or diced for the companion animal food industry or used in cheap canned products. The red junglefowl may live to 20 years of age. A rescued bird like Bean may live up to four or five at a sanctuary. 

    VegNews.VeganPoachedEgg.Yo!EggYo! Egg

    What are vegan eggs?

    Does all this suffering and destruction have to be the way to an egg, though? As interest in plant-based foods has grown steadily, so too have innovations to meet that demand. While vegans have replaced eggs in cooking and baking with everything from tofu to applesauce, now there are easy one-for-one replacements on the market that take the guesswork out of cooking and baking without eggs. Ener-G Egg Replacer has been on the scene for decades, but consumers today have more options, like the mung bean-based JUST Egg in liquid and prepared forms as well as powdered VeganEgg by Follow Your Heart for baking or savory applications. This year, Israel-based Yo! Egg wowed the crowd at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago with its sunny-side-up and Hollandaise vegan eggs, complete with gently crisped edges and an actual yolk that runs when pierced. Just as the plant-based dairy and protein categories are bursting at the seams with innovative, delicious options, the egg sector is just beginning to take off, and not a moment too soon. 

    These days, with the loud, crowded facility in Iowa long behind her, Bean has distinguished herself as a self-appointed seeing-eye hen at Broken Shovels. She is wary of people but loves being helpful with her sister hens who have lost some or all of their eyesight and are grouped together. Blindness and vision loss are common with these birds who were once trapped in enclosures with high levels of ammonia. Bean is the only fully-sighted bird with that flock at the sanctuary. She has found her place. 

    “Her pecking noises let them know where to go to eat, and she guides them into their coop at night,” says Davis. “Bean is a very special hen.”

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • Peter Lusk: Reflections on my mahi with peace researcher Owen Wilkes

    The Owen Wilkes book Peacemonger, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby, was due to be launched in Wellington today after earlier launches in Auckland and Christchurch. Here Buller conservationist Peter Lusk reflects on his mahi with Owen.

    COMMENTARY: By Peter Lusk

    I worked closely with peace researcher Owen Wilkes in 1973 and 1974, writing stories for the student newspaper Canta from files of newspaper clippings and hand written jottings that Owen had collected over a period of years.

    These stories covered quite a range of subjects. For example, an American millionaire named Stockton Rush who purchased a beautiful valley near Te Anau from the Crown and built a luxury lodge. There was controversy over this. I can’t remember exactly why, probably the Crown selling the land when it shouldn’t.

    Then a file on Ivan Watkins Dow who were making Agent Orange or similar at their plant in New Plymouth. They were releasing gases at night and the gases would drift over the city wiping out home vegetable gardens.

    The company’s CEO described objectors as “eco-nuts”.

    Owen’s biggest file was on Comalco. I went to the Bluff smelter and Manapouri power station and met activists in the area. Also interviewed Stockton Rush while in the area, namely Southland.

    Peacemonger cover
    Peacemonger . . . the first full-length account of peace researcher Owen Wilkes’ life and work. Image: Raekaihau Press

    Another file was on a self proclaimed millionaire who had been in the media over his proposed housing development in Governors Bay on Lyttelton Harbour, with a new tunnel to be built through Port Hills. This guy turned out to be a conman and we were able to expose him.

    I wrote up the story, we printed it as a centrefold in Canta, then used the centrefold as a leaflet to assist the action group in Governors Bay. This was very successful at exposing the conman whose name I cannot recall.

    There were a few other files of Owen’s that I turned into stories, and the sum of the stories were the basis of a 4 page leaflet we printed off for the South Island Resistance Ride held at end of 1974.

    I never got to write up the files on Stockton Rush and Ivan Watkins Dow which was a personal disappointment. From memory it was due to Owen suddenly getting the peace research job in Norway [at SIPRI – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute].

    “The only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy.”

    I found Owen very good to work with. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy. Far more than me, and I was a full-on activist along with others in our little group like Canta editor Murray Horton and graphics/layout man Ron Currie.

    I worked alongside Owen at Boons bakery for a single night. It came about when one of my flatmates, who regularly worked there, needed a night off and convinced me to cover his shift.

    So I turned up at Boons at 8pm or whenever it was. The foreman was none too pleased, but he showed me the ropes. I was taking cooked bread out of one oven, while Owen was doing the same from a bigger oven beside me.

    The bread was coming out fast, in hot tins, and it was very easy to get burned on the tins, specially for a novice. I got several burns in the course of the shift. Looking over at Owen, I couldn’t help notice how he revelled in the job, he was like a well-oiled machine, banging the bread out of the tins, and oiling them up.

    Very competent, no burns for him because he was a regular at Boons and had everything well worked out.

    Something else. Owen was living at a commune at Oxford at the time. They had two pigs needing to be slaughtered. I’d killed and dressed a few sheep in my farm worker days, so offered to help.

    Owen had never done such “home-kills”, but in typical Owen fashion had got hold of a book on butchering and he took it with him to the pig sty. He’d previously read-up on how to “stick” a pig, stabbing it between the ribs and slicing its heart, all in one motion.

    He accomplished this very successfully. One pig, then two pigs, then haul them over to a bath full of hot water to scald, then scrape. After that we gutted them and hung up the tidy carcasses to cool.

    Yes, I had great admiration for Owen.

    Photo of Owen Wilkes
    About the picture at the start of this article:     This photo is from the 1974 Long March across Australia against US imperialism and the Vietnam War.

    We overnighted in all sorts of places and this was the campground at Mildura in Victoria.

    I like the photo because it typifies Owen with his steel box of files — so heavy and awkward to handle. But it was strong and, from memory, lockable.

    Having the files with him, meant Owen could immediately provide evidence for media if they asked for verification on something he said. Even though the Long March was organised from Australia, Owen was still the onboard authority on what the US was doing over there.