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Category: Opinion

  • Douglas Murray: a pathetic nuisance who’s had a mid-life radicalisation crisis

    Whilst the majority of viewers yelped at the saluting hand of alt-right granddaddy Steve Banon, it was easy to miss the more interesting array of speakers at this month’s conservative conventions, ARC and CPAC. One who has largely gone unnoticed is associate editor of the Spectator, Douglas Murray.

    Once the golden boy of the neoconservative right, he’s taken an odd turn in his output over the last few years. In this, he is a representative of a wider plague amongst once “moderate conservatives” who have taken the plunge into something much more vulgar.

    Murray delighted the crowd with his comments that either implicitly or explicitly slagged off various groups including Palestinians, migrants, and trans people. He pulled out all of the right’s best tools, such as the infamous “what are men and women?” query.

    Ultimately, this residue from the culture war is mostly nonsense. But what is perhaps most striking is this turn in ideology Murray has solidified, namely his more far-right approach on every issue – economic, cultural, and other. The man clearly sees himself to be our generations answer to Bill Buckley, but better resembles a bloated Brownshirt.

    Douglas Murray: part of the intellectual dark web

    Douglas Murray began his, admittedly, quite prominent career as a descendent of the neoconservative political movement, choosing to dedicate his first book on the subject. Emerging from this committee, he modelled his style of oration on his elder contemporaries, embarrassingly being seen to imitate the exact phraseology of famous leftist-turned-neo imperialist Christopher Hitchens.

    He wrote a rather wet eulogy for the old war-monger in a 2011 edition of the Spectator and clearly took a lot from his persona – portraying a bombastic and thick-skinned character. This has obviously aided him in the transition he’s made from neoconservative missionary to podium-thumping far-rightist.

    In 2012, Murray became associate editor of the Spectator which is far more of an important detail than at first it may appear. The Spectator is a large publication from the right in the UK and has a circulation two-fold bigger than the New Statesman, its historic (though desperately turncoat) competitor. It reaches a tremendous audience and had significant links to the annals of authority in the Conservative governments of the last 15 years. Murray’s reach, just in regard to his day job, then, is not to be underestimated at all.

    Sheltered from a storm

    The growing “intellectual dark web” sheltered him from the right-wing storm against neo-conservativism in the mid 2010s and he hasn’t really gone back. Disgraceful figures from this period like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson slowly became fellow travelers on this journey of his.

    This group, for the blessedly unaware, constituted a group of intellectuals and pseudo intellectuals writing and speaking on subjects which had little to do with their field of study or experience. And if one took a critical lens to what they were claiming in their tweets, podcasts, and sad excuses for books, you wouldn’t be stunned to know that they and Murray have taken their flags and driven them far into the ground of the Euro-American Far-right.

    Immigration – as always

    Of course, at this time Douglas Murray was still adjusting his scope to take shot at Europe’s recent immigrant and refugee populations, in light of the contemporary shifts like the Syrian Refugee Crisis. These arguments are one’s he’s devoted serious thought to and uses in almost every slapdash diatribe published under his name.

    Those seemingly coherent lines about how multiethnic migration into “The West” – by which he means the white world – has watered down our culture have become more explicit. This is seen in his recent ARC speech, in which he failed to quite hit the register of humour (even in that sweaty locker room of fascists) as he compared “western culture” to the complexities of vanilla ice-cream. For a man who built his lot on identity politics, he’s more than happy to rile up “Westerners” with their own notions of identity.

    It is on the immigration issue that Murray first seemed to take his more overtly right turn. His casual Islamophobia is clear, yet what he has attempted to shelter under an auspice of “skepticism” is his flirtation with the most right-wing of the British conservative movement.

    The race riots

    In his famous article on the subject of the 2024 race riots, Murray states correctly that one of the causes of the unrest was the unemployment in Northern Towns, inflated by the Conservative government post-2008. He on the one hand slams those who undertook class analysis on the 2011 riots, stating that he was “reluctant” to “assume that unemployment and the resultant hopelessness were factors” in that year’s violence. But he then undertakes the precept as the key factor of analysis in the case of the post-Southport riots.

    In her recent book, Ash Sarkar points out that many journalists, and in this I would include Murray, only deign to care about the working-class when they’re white and can be crow-barred from their black and brown neighbours.

    Douglas Murray: a mid-life radicalisation crisis

    As is to be expected from a right-winger like Douglas Murray, he takes on absolutely no critical class analysis whatsoever, as I’m sure he would claim this as a facet of “cultural Marxism”. He doesn’t blame unemployment on deindustrialisation, or on austerity imposed on the North by Conservative governments, but instead on immigrants.

    The real “uncomfortable truth” is that wages and jobs are not cut by immigrants, but by bosses and boards of directors, incentivised by the financialisation of our economy and by the British government.

    Murray will likely not stop in his swing further and further right. But the story of his trajectory is perhaps an interesting example of what happened to many moderate conservatives. In the late 2010s, those “right-of-centre” commentators were given a wink and a nudge to say what they truly think by powerful far-right political leaders.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By James Horton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • In siding with Russia over Ukraine, Trump is not putting America first. He is hastening its decline

    ANALYSIS: By Matthew Sussex, Australian National University

    Has any nation squandered its diplomatic capital, plundered its own political system, attacked its partners and supplicated itself before its far weaker enemies as rapidly and brazenly as Donald Trump’s America?

    The fiery Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday saw the American leader try to publicly humiliate the democratically elected leader of a nation that had been invaded by a rapacious and imperialistic aggressor.

    And this was all because Zelensky refused to sign an act of capitulation, criticised Putin (who has tried to have Zelensky killed on numerous occasions), and failed to bend the knee to Trump, the country’s self-described king.


    The tense Oval Office meeting.    Video: CNN

    The Oval Office meeting became heated in a way that has rarely been seen between world leaders.

    What is worse is Trump has now been around so long that his oafish behaviour has become normalised. Together with his attack dog, Vice-President JD Vance, Trump has thrown the Overton window — the spectrum of subjects politically acceptable to the public — wide open.

    Previously sensible Republicans are now either cowed or co-opted. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is gutting America’s public service and installing toadies in place of professionals, while his social media company, X, is platforming ads from actual neo-Nazis.

    The FBI is run by Kash Patel, who hawked bogus COVID vaccine reversal therapies and wrote children’s books featuring Trump as a monarch. The agency is already busily investigating Trump’s enemies.

    The Department of Health and Human Services is helmed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine denier, just as Americans have begun dying from measles for the first time in a decade. And America’s health and medical research has been channelled into ideologically “approved” topics.

    At the Pentagon, in a breathtaking act of self-sabotage, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered US Cyber Command to halt all operations targeting Russia.

    And cuts to USAID funding are destroying US soft power, creating a vacuum that will gleefully be filled by China. Other Western aid donors are likely to follow suit so they can spend more on their militaries in response to US unilateralism.

    What is Trump’s strategy?
    Trump’s wrecking ball is already having seismic global effects, mere weeks after he took office.

    The US vote against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia for starting the war against Ukraine placed it in previously unthinkable company — on the side of Russia, Belarus and North Korea. Even China abstained from the vote.

    In the United Kingdom, a YouGov poll of more than 5000 respondents found that 48 percent of Britons thought it was more important to support Ukraine than maintain good relations with the US. Only 20 percent favoured supporting America over Ukraine.

    And Trump’s bizarre suggestion that China, Russia and the US halve their respective defence budgets is certain to be interpreted as a sign of weakness rather than strength.

    The oft-used explanation for his behaviour is that it echoes the isolationism of one of his ideological idols, former US President Andrew Jackson. Trump’s aim seems to be ring-fencing American businesses with high tariffs, while attempting to split Russia away from its relationship with China.

    These arguments are both economically illiterate and geopolitically witless. Even a cursory understanding of tariffs reveals that they drive inflation because they are paid by importers who then pass the costs on to consumers. Over time, they are little more than sugar pills that turn economies diabetic, increasingly reliant on state protections from unending trade wars.

    And the “reverse Kissinger” strategy — a reference to the US role in exacerbating the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War — is wishful thinking to the extreme.

    Putin would have to be utterly incompetent to countenance a move away from Beijing. He has invested significant time and effort to improve this relationship, believing China will be the dominant power of the 21st century.

    Putin would be even more foolish to embrace the US as a full-blown partner. That would turn Russia’s depopulated southern border with China, stretching over 4300 kilometres, into the potential front line of a new Cold War.

    What does this mean for America’s allies?
    While Trump’s moves have undoubtedly strengthened the US’ traditional adversaries, they have also weakened and alarmed its friends.

    Put simply, no American ally — either in Europe or Asia — can now have confidence Washington will honour its security commitments. This was brought starkly home to NATO members at the Munich Security Conference in February, where US representatives informed a stunned audience that America may no longer view itself as the main guarantor of European security.


    Vice-President Vance’s controversial speech to European leaders. Video: DW

    The swiftness of US disengagement means European countries must not only muster the will and means to arm themselves quickly, but also take the lead in collectively providing for Ukraine’s security.

    Whether they can do so remains unclear. Europe’s history of inaction does not bode well.

    US allies also face choices in Asia. Japan and South Korea will now be seriously considering all options – potentially even nuclear weapons – to deter an emboldened China.

    There are worries in Australia, as well. Can it pretend nothing has changed and hope the situation will then normalise after the next US presidential election?

    The future of AUKUS, the deal to purchase (and then co-design) US nuclear-powered submarines, is particularly uncertain.

    Does it make strategic sense to pursue full integration with the US military when the White House could just treat Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul and Canberra with the same indifference it has displayed towards its friends in Europe?

    Ultimately, the chaos Trump 2.0 has unleashed in such a short amount of time is both unprecedented and bewildering. In seeking to put “America First”, Trump is perversely hastening its decline. He is leaving America isolated and untrusted by its closest friends.

    And, in doing so, the world’s most powerful nation has also made the world a more dangerous, uncertain and ultimately an uglier place to be.The Conversation

    Dr Matthew Sussex, is associate professor (adj), Griffith Asia Institute; and research fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. 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.

  • OPINION: Despots face a security rethink in the age of drones

    On Feb. 11, Hun Sen, Cambodia’s de-facto ruler, claimed that the authorities had weeks ago uncovered a plot to kill him at his provincial mansion using drones.

    One person was apparently arrested, Hun Sen said, but others may still be at large.

    Who knows whether it is true or not?

    Some people suspect it’s a conceit by Hun Sen, the former prime minister who handed power to his eldest son in 2023, to justify his incoming law that will brandish political opponents as “terrorists”, in an attempt to deter foreigners from aiding the exiled opposition movement.

    Cambodia's Senate President Hun Sen at a ceremony marking the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, in Phnom Penh on Jan. 7, 2025.
    Cambodia’s Senate President Hun Sen at a ceremony marking the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, in Phnom Penh on Jan. 7, 2025.
    (Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP)

    Speaking about the alleged plot on his life, Hun Sen connected the two: “This is an act of terrorism, and I’d like to urge foreigners to be cautious, refraining from supporting terrorist activities.”

    Such skepticism led one commentator, in an interview with Radio Free Asia, to claim that “ordinary citizens do not have the ability” to hit his heavily guarded Takhmao home.

    In fact, they do.

    Cheap drones for Myanmar opposition

    Myanmar’s four-year-old civil war has shown just how much drones have revolutionized not just warfare but the balance of power between the state and the individual.

    A long-range modified and armed drone costs Myanmar’s rebels around US$1,500.

    By comparison, the International Crisis Group reckons second-hand AK-47s or M-16s cost US$3,000 each.

    Myanmar’s military recently took delivery of six Su-30SMEs fighter jets from Russia, for which it paid $400 million — excluding the weaponry.

    As one commentator put it last year: “In an asymmetric conflict, the drone is helping to equalize the battlescape.”

    Members of the Mandalay People's Defense Force prepare to release a drone amid clashes with Myanmar's military in northern Shan state, Dec. 11, 2023.
    Members of the Mandalay People’s Defense Force prepare to release a drone amid clashes with Myanmar’s military in northern Shan state, Dec. 11, 2023.
    (AFP)

    Junta forces are catching up, for sure. AFP reported a few weeks ago that “the military is adopting the equipment of the anti-coup fighters, using drones to drop mortars or guide artillery strikes and bombing runs by its Chinese and Russian-built air force.”

    However, the revolutionary importance of drones isn’t that a superior force will never adopt the same technology. It’s that drones — now an irreplaceable weapon in modern warfare — cannot be monopolized by a state.

    Not for almost two centuries has there been such a technological leap in the balance of power. Not for at least the past 100 years has a dominant weapon been as cheap and available to the masses.

    ‘History of weapons’

    In October 1945, George Orwell published a short essay that’s best known for popularizing the term “Cold War”.

    “You And The Atom Bomb” also offered a take on the weapons that’s rarely reflected on these days.

    Had the nuclear bomb been as cheap and easy as a bicycle to produce, Orwell reasoned, it might have “plunged us back into barbarism.”

    But because the bomb is a rare and costly thing to make, it might “complete the process [of] robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt.”

    Mutually Assured Destruction would keep the peace between the nuclear states, but it meant that existing dictatorship could become permanent, Orwell feared.

    How would a band of rag-tag rebels fair against a despot or imperialist prepared to quell any rebellion with a nuclear explosion?

    Would the dictator who happily drops biological weapons on their own people not as easily reach for tactical nuclear bombs if they could?

    A cruise missile that North Korea has implied has nuclear capabilities nears its target during a test flight off the coast of the Korean peninsula, Feb. 26, 2025.
    A cruise missile that North Korea has implied has nuclear capabilities nears its target during a test flight off the coast of the Korean peninsula, Feb. 26, 2025.
    (KCNA via Reuters)

    Would the North Korean regime not prefer to go down in a nuclear blaze if the masses were ever to rise up?

    Orwell noted that “the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons.”

    Students of history are taught that gunpowder made possible a proper rebellion against feudal power; that the musket, cheap and easy to use, replaced the cannon and made possible the American and French revolutions.

    Its successor, the breech-loading rifle, was slightly more complex, yet “even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another,” Orwell noted.

    State arsenals only

    The early 20th century, however, saw the invention of weapons only available to the state and only the most industrialized states—the tank, the aircraft, the submarine and, foremost, the nuclear bomb.

    Vietnamese communists, by some accounts, were peasant volunteers who battled with nothing but smuggled guns, punji traps and a clear sense of what they were fighting for, but they were able to defeat the industrialized armies of France and the United States.

    In reality, the communists were well supplied with non-rudimentary weaponry by Beijing and Moscow.

    East Timorese pro-independence FALINTIL rebels set off on patrol Oct. 3, 1999.
    East Timorese pro-independence FALINTIL rebels set off on patrol Oct. 3, 1999.
    (John Feder/News Ltd. via AFP)

    More representative of rag-tag guerrilla success were the East Timorese rebels, who had no patrons and only the most basic weapons to battle against Indonesian imperialism and its vastly superior forces.

    Their stunning achievement was simply keeping their struggle alive for so long.

    But the East Timorese were never going to secure independence in the jungles and hills; their victory depended on staying in the fight until international opinion turned in their favor.

    Had it not, Timor-Leste would still be a province of Indonesia, as West Papuans know all too well.

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    Perhaps drone warfare won’t bring victory to Myanmar’s revolutionaries.

    Fighting alone doesn’t win wars. Alliances, superior industrial production, international opinion and quite a bit of luck — all are as important.

    Yet without drone warfare, the junta would arguably have won this battle a lot sooner.

    It probably hasn’t been lost on the Thai military that another coup might not be accepted as meekly as in earlier military takeovers by a populace which has closely observed events in neighboring Myanmar.

    Cambodian soldiers attend celebrations marking the 65th anniversary of the country's independence, in Phnom Penh, Nov. 9, 2018.
    Cambodian soldiers attend celebrations marking the 65th anniversary of the country’s independence, in Phnom Penh, Nov. 9, 2018.
    (Samrang Pring/Reuters)

    Intentional or not, Hun Sen’s revelation that someone apparently tried to kill him using drones has imbued him and his impregnable regime with a rare sense of vulnerability.

    His family rules over a 100,000-strong military that he has instructed to “destroy… revolutions that attempt to topple” his regime, plus a loyal National Police and an elite private bodyguard unit.

    One son is head of military intelligence. Another son, Prime Minister Hun Manet, was previously the army chief.

    But, as despots are now realizing, all that now means a lot less in the age of the drone.

    David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by commentator David Hutt.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: fascist-charmer-meets-Starmer part one – a horrendous spectacle

    Does any rational individual honestly think it’s a sensible idea to cut the money we spend on supporting victims of brutal conflicts around the world – the foreign aid budget – so this Labour Party government and Keir Starmer have a bit more money to spend on brutal conflicts around the world?

    Notice I said “rational individual”, so this immediately rules out any Reform UK charity-begins-at-home loyalists that might’ve accidentally stumbled across my weekly column in the Canary.

    Let’s be honest. The foreign aid budget is an easy target. It’s more a case of juicy apples, conveniently scattered across the ground than low-hanging fruit.

    Foreign aid: the easiest of targets for Starmer

    Foreign aid is used for lifesaving medicines, food, clean water, assistance for farmers, keeping women and girls safe, promoting peace, and has been used for so much more over the decades.

    Are we really supposed to believe sabre-rattling Starmer’s abandonment of our global responsibilities is anything other than an act of utter desperation, designed to appease the racist warmongers, both home and abroad?

    I’m genuinely surprised that right-wing Rachel from accounts didn’t suggest squeezing a few more quid out of Britain’s disabled people. We’ve always been a fantastic source of income down the years, regardless of the party that has been in power.

    The cynic in me might just think that Starmer’s commitment to increase military spending will only be used to serve as the perfect excuse as to why honest Keir felt the need to break nearly every single promise that he ever made throughout his time as opposition leader.

    How easy will it be for one cabinet minister after another to declare they would love to spend money on poor people, or public services, but someone has to make those “difficult decisions”, which in this case is a decision to prioritise arms over aid?

    As if Keir Starmer’s pledges aren’t worthless enough already.

    Promises, promises

    On one hand, he will make entirely undeliverable promises in the hope of catching a few favourable headlines in his favourite right-wing tabloids, and then he will take it away with the other, all in the name of national security.

    Do you remember when Keir Starmer promised to “cut bills by £300 on average and deliver real energy security”?

    What about the promise of a “windfall tax on big oil and gas companies making £44,000 profit, in one minute, so we can put up to £400 back in people’s pockets”?

    These promises from Keir Starmer have been met with huge increases in energy bills, council tax, and water bills, and that’s before we’ve even got on to the military welfare for Ukraine and a wholly unnecessary increase in defence spending.

    It frustrates the hell out of me.

    It wasn’t that long ago we had a Tory government finding temporary accommodation for thousands of people who were sleeping rough off the streets, and they did this in a matter of days.

    Where there is political will, there is a way.

    When a government wants to do something for the good of its people, it can. But governments of all persuasions choose not to look after its most vulnerable people because there’s more votes to be had in warmongering than there is to be had in providing an adequate level of social security.

    The Starmer-Trump bromance: a flash in the pan

    Despite what the corporate media say, Keir Starmer’s trip to see the tangerine tantrum at the White House wasn’t anything particularly special, unless you enjoy being reminded of the fact that Britain could fight its way out of a wet paper bag.

    Murdoch’s Times would have you think the prime minister swam across the Atlantic wearing no more than his finest budgie smugglers, with a neatly laminated list of demands and another state visit for Trump, tightly gripped between his butt cheeks. Vom.

    The Daily Mail went as far as talking of a lovely bromance between Donald Trump and Starmer. Will someone pass me the fucking sick bucket?

    I don’t want to know what any of the mainstream client journalists have got to say about their client, Starmer. I have my own eyes and ears, and I also have my own toes that are still curling from the humiliating sight of a Labour prime minister sucking up to the malignant, loathsome Trump.

    Fascist-charmer-meets-Starmer part one was a horrendous spectacle. You may call it diplomacy, and you are entitled to have that view, but what did Starmer actually achieve?

    The Chagos Islands? Will somebody think of the 371 different species of coral? And what about the Coconut Crab with its leg span of more than one metre?

    Seriously though, he swapped Trump’s approval for a state visit. Hardly a monumental victory for the serial loser, Starmer.

    A trade deal? Show me this deal. Trump is either incredibly forgetful, like his predecessor, genocide Joe, or he’s a liar that changes his mind from one hour to the next.

    I’m absolutely plumping for the latter.

    Starmer: skating on thin ice

    All it will take is one shit round of golf and Trump will take to Truth Social (or whatever it’s called) to call Starmer a communist despot and our trade deal will be forgotten quicker than you can call Zelensky a dictator, and then say you didn’t. Twice.

    A successful visit would’ve been no visit whatsoever, but isolated Starmer walked into the circus as a clown, and left as a clown.

    The one thing that Starmer really wanted from Trump was a cast iron guarantee that American forces would provide a security backstop in Ukraine. Without this guarantee, Britain and France would be sending 30,000 of our own lambs to the slaughter.

    As it stands, the British army would run out of ammunition within a week of fighting a war. You don’t have to be a leading military strategist to come to the conclusion that we would get utterly obliterated without the support of a superpower.

    Starmer didn’t get the assurances that he wanted and needed, but we’ll just ignore that and celebrate the decolonisation of the Coconut Crab and the possibility of a trade deal that nobody knows anything about.

    I just hope Starmer told the president that his dad used to be a toolmaker, otherwise the whole trip was absolutely pointless.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • OPINION: China’s flyers flout aviation rules with flares and flybys

    It happened again. A Chinese pilot flew his aircraft dangerously close to a foreign aircraft, something that is happening with increased frequency.

    In the latest incident, on Feb. 19, a Chinese naval helicopter flew within 9 meters (yards) of a small low-flying Cessna Caravan turboprop over Scarborough Shoal that belongs to the Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources.

    Situated 120 miles (192 kilometers) from Luzon, Scarborough Shoal is well within the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone.

    The previous week, a Chinese J-16 jet fighter made an “unsafe and unprofessional interaction”, releasing at least four flares, 30 meters in front of a Royal Australian Air Force P–8A Poseidon anti submarine aircraft that was flying near the Paracel Islands.

    China claims the Australian aircraft “intentionally intruded” into Chinese airspace. A Chinese described the response as “completely reasonable, legal and beyond reproach,” and “a legitimate defense of national sovereignty and security.”

    A Chinese J-16 fighter jet carries out a maneuver that the U.S. military said was “unnecessarily aggressive” near an American reconnaissance plane flying over the South China Sea, May 26, 2023.
    A Chinese J-16 fighter jet carries out a maneuver that the U.S. military said was “unnecessarily aggressive” near an American reconnaissance plane flying over the South China Sea, May 26, 2023.
    (U.S Indo-Pacific Command)

    In violation of international law, China has drawn straight baselines around the Paracel and Spratly Islands; something that only archipelagic states are allowed to do under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea.

    Countries routinely challenge these excessive maritime claims through naval and aerial freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs).

    We have seen a pattern of aggressive behavior from Chinese pilots. An October 2023 report by the U.S. Department of Defense documented some 180 unsafe aerial encounters by Chinese pilots in the previous two years, and over 100 additional encounters with the aircraft of U.S. allies and partners.

    That tally was more than all such incidents in the previous decade combined.

    Creating unsafe situations

    Most U.S. Navy aircraft are now equipped with external cameras to document dangerous Chinese encounters.

    One should recount that the April 2001 EP3 incident that caused the emergency landing and a hostage-like situation for the 24 member U.S. Navy crew, was caused by a Chinese pilot who was unaware of the concept of propellers. The J-8II pilot was killed in the crash.

    While Chinese pilots are famously aggressive and routinely fly at unsafe and unprofessional close quarters over the South China Sea, the dropping of flares was unseen until around 2022.

    While using flares to signal an unresponsive airplane at a safe distance is lawful and a signal of escalatory actions, how the Chinese pilots are employing them now is dangerous, unprofessional, and dramatically escalates the potential for the loss of life.

    A U.S. team removes fuel and other fluids from an American EP-3E reconnaissance aircraft with a damaged propeller at Lingshui Airfield June 18, 2001 in Hainan, China.
    A U.S. team removes fuel and other fluids from an American EP-3E reconnaissance aircraft with a damaged propeller at Lingshui Airfield June 18, 2001 in Hainan, China.
    (Courtesy of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co./US Navy via Getty Images)

    On Oct. 5, 2023, a Canadian CP-140 reconnaissance helicopter conducting patrols in support of a UN Security Council-authorized sanctions monitoring against North Korea in the Yellow Sea experienced “multiple passes” at five meters (yards).

    Three weeks later, a pair of PLA-Navy J-11 fighters made multiple passes at a Canadian helicopter that was conducting routine patrols as the HMCS Ottawa was conducting a FONOP near the Paracel Islands.

    The Chinese pilots ejected flares during the second flyby, forcing the Canadian pilot to take evasive action.

    In May 2024, PLA-Air Force pilots deployed flares in front of an Australian MH-60-R helicopter that was flying in international waters in support of UNSC-authorized sanctions monitoring against North Korea. The helicopter had to take evasive actions to avoid the flares.

    The following month, a Dutch helicopter flying above its destroyer, also in support of the UN sanctions monitoring in international waters in the Yellow Sea, was approached by two Chinese jets and a helicopter, which “created a potentially unsafe situation.”

    Flares present risks

    There are major risks from using flares. The first is proximity: If a Chinese pilot is close enough to deploy flares in a way that could cause damage, his plane is already flying at an unsafe distance.

    Most of the flares used are pyrotechnic magnesium, i.e. a dense mass of inflamed metal that burns at very high temperatures – to perform as decoys for heat-seeking missiles.

    A J-16 fighter jet ejects flares during a performance at the Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force Aviation Open Day in Changchun, Jilin province, Oct. 17, 2019.
    A J-16 fighter jet ejects flares during a performance at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force Aviation Open Day in Changchun, Jilin province, Oct. 17, 2019.
    (AFP)

    These flares pose multiple risks to planes that could lead to the loss of human life.

    For planes such as a P-8, they can be sucked into a jet engine intake. For propeller driven planes, such as a P-3 or smaller surveillance craft, a direct hit on the engine could irreparably damage the propeller.

    Though the four-engine P-3s and P-8s are both able to fly on one engine, it’s still a risk.

    There is a greater threat to the helicopter rotors. Though it is unlikely they could get through the rotor blades and into the filtered intake, it’s not impossible.

    Moreover, the skin of many military helicopters is made of magnesium alloys and is itself highly flammable.

    An aircraft identified by the Philippine Coast Guard as a Chinese Navy helicopter flies near a Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources plane at Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea on Feb. 18, 2025.
    An aircraft identified by the Philippine Coast Guard as a Chinese Navy helicopter flies near a Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources plane at Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea on Feb. 18, 2025.
    (Jam Sta Rosa/AFP)

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    Many surveillance and anti-submarine helicopters fly with open doors, and the last thing the crew wants is a flare, ejected out of a plane at an angle, getting inside an aircraft.

    Another concern is an escalatory threat. To some sensors on aircraft, the flares can appear as missiles. This is in an already tense operating environment, when an aircraft’s counter-measures are being controlled automatically in response to its sensors.

    Pilots’ perverse incentive structure

    There is no need to use flares in this way, but someone, somewhere, in the PLA decided that this is tactically a good idea – and a natural escalatory step from the “thumping” tactics that their pilots routinely conduct.

    The use of flares is tied to the aggression that we have long seen from Chinese pilots. In their system, aggressive and unprofessional flying is not only not discouraged, but is actually encouraged.

    While there’s no evidence that there’s a PLA-AF directive that requires pilots to make unsafe encounters, it is clearly what is considered “commanders intent” to defend China’s “historical waters and airspace.”

    In Chinese military doctrine, this is referred to as “using the enemy to train the troops.”

    A Chinese Navy J-11 fighter jet flies near a U.S. Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace over the South China Sea, according to the U.S. military, Dec. 21, 2022.
    A Chinese Navy J-11 fighter jet flies near a U.S. Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace over the South China Sea, according to the U.S. military, Dec. 21, 2022.
    (U.S. Indo-Pacific Command via Reuters)

    According to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Center for the Study of the PLA-AF, there is not a single incident that they can point to where a Chinese pilot has faced disciplinary action for aggressive flying.

    In short, behavior that would cost a U.S. pilot his or her wings is encouraged by the PLA leadership.

    The Chinese Navy and Air Force will continue their coercive and risky operational behavior in the East and South China Seas as they seek to enforce Beijing’s excessive maritime claims, impinging on the sovereign rights of other states or making illegal assertions in international waters and airspace.

    A flotilla of PLA-N ships has been sailing some 150 nautical miles east of Sydney, Australia. While such passages are lawful, China’s unprofessional and aggressive tactics are meant to raise the costs to deter other states from flying or sailing where international law permits.

    The law for me, not for thee.

    Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by commentator Zachary Abuza.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Manipulated media: The weapon of the Right

    The re-election of Donald Trump is proof that the Right’s most powerful weapon is media manipulation, ensuring the public sphere is not engaged in rational debate, reports the Independent Australia.

    COMMENTARY: By Victoria Fielding

    I once heard someone say that when the Left and the Right became polarised — when they divorced from each other — the Left got all the institutions of truth including science, education, justice and democratic government.

    The Right got the institution of manipulation: the media. This statement hit me for six at the time because it seemed so clearly true.

    What was also immediately clear is that there was an obvious reason why the Left sided with the institutions of truth and the Right resorted to manipulation. It is because truth does not suit right-wing arguments.

    The existence of climate change does not suit fossil fuel billionaires. Evidence that wealth does not trickle down does not suit the capitalist class. The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion (yes, I put those words in that order on purpose) is better for everyone, rather than a discriminatory, hateful, destructive, divided unequal world is dangerous for the Right to admit.

    The Right’s embrace of the media institution also makes sense when you consider that the institutions of truth are difficult to buy, whereas billionaires can easily own manipulative media.

    Just ask Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and turned it into a political manipulation machine. Just ask Rupert Murdoch, who is currently engaged in a bitter family war to stop three of his children opposing him and his son Lachlan from using their “news” organisations as a form of political manipulation for right-wing interests.

    Right-wingers also know that truthful institutions only have one way of communicating their truths to the public: via the media. Once the media environment is manipulated, we enter a post-truth world.

    Experts derided as untrustworthy ‘elitists’
    This is the world where billionaire fossil fuel interests undermine climate action. It is where scientists create vaccines to save lives but the manipulated public refuses to take them. Where experts are derided as untrustworthy “elitists”.

    And it is where the whole idea of democratic government in the US has been overthrown to install an autocratic billionaire-enriching oligarchy led by an incompetent fool who calls himself the King.

    Once you recognise this manipulated media environment, you also understand that there is not — and never has been — such as thing as a rational public debate. Those engaged in the institutions of the Left — in science, education, justice and democratic government — seem mostly unwilling to accept this fact.

    Instead, they continue to believe if they just keep telling people the truth and communicating what they see as entirely rational arguments, the public will accept what they have to say.

    I think part of the reason that the Left refuses to accept that public debate is not rational and rather, is a manipulated bin fire of misleading information, including mis/disinformation and propaganda, is because they are not equipped to compete in this reality. What do those on the Left do with “post-truth”?

    They seem to just want to ignore it and hope it goes away.

    A perfect example of this misunderstanding of the post-truth world and the manipulated media environment’s impact on the public is this paper, by political science professors at the Australian National University Ian McAllister and Nicholas Biddle.

    Stunningly absolutist claim
    Their research sought to understand why polling at the start of the 2023 Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum showed widespread public support for the Voice but over the course of the campaign, this support dropped to the point where the Voice was defeated with 60 per cent voting “No” and 40 per cent, “Yes”.

    In presenting their study’s findings, the authors make the stunningly absolutist claim that:

    ‘…the public’s exposure to all forms of mass media – as we have measured it here – had no impact on the result’.

    A note is then attached to this finding with the caveat:

    ‘As noted earlier, given the data at hand we are unable to test the possibility that the content of the media being consumed resulted in a reinforcement of existing beliefs and partisanship rather than a conversion.’

    This caveat leaves a gaping hole in the finding by failing to account for how media reinforcing existing beliefs is an important media effect – as argued by Neil Gavin here. Since it was not measured, how can they possibly say there was no effect?

    Furthermore, the very premise of the author’s sweeping statement that media exposure had no impact on the result of the Referendum is based on two naive assumptions:

    • that voters were rational in their deliberations over the Referendum question; and
    • that the information environment voters were presented with was rational.

    Dual assumption of rationality
    This dual assumption of rationality – one that the authors interestingly admit is an assumption – is evidenced in their hypothesis which states:

    ‘Voters who did not follow the campaign in the mass media were more likely to move from a yes to a no vote compared to voters who did follow the campaign in the mass media.’

    This hypothesis, the authors explain, is premised on the assumption ‘that those with less information are more likely to opt for the status quo and cast a no vote’, and therefore that less exposure to media would change a vote from “Yes” to “No”.How the media failed Australia in the Referendum 'campaign'What this hypothesis assumes is that if a voter received more rational information in the media about the Referendum, that information would rationally drive their vote in the “Yes” direction. When their data disproved this hypothesis, the authors used this finding to claim that the media had no effect.

    To understand the reality of what happened in the Referendum debate, the word “rational” needs to be taken out of the equation and the word “manipulated” put in.

    We know, of course, that the Referendum was awash with manipulative information, which all supported the “No” campaign. For example, my study of News Corp’s Voice coverage — Australia’s largest and most influential news organisation — found that News Corp actively campaigned for the “No” proposition in concert with the “No” campaign, presenting content more like a political campaign than traditional journalism and commentary.

    A study by Queensland University of Technology’s Tim Graham analysed how the Voice Referendum was discussed on social media platform, X. Far from a rational debate, Graham identified that the “No” campaign and its supporters engaged in a participatory disinformation propaganda campaign, which became a “truth market” about the Voice.

    The ‘truth market’
    This “truth market” was described as drawing “Yes” campaigners into a debate about the truth of the Voice, sidetracking them from promoting their own cause.

    What such studies showed was that, far from McAllister and Biddle’s assumed rational information environment, the Voice Referendum public debate was awash with manipulation, propaganda, disinformation and fear-mongering.

    The “No” campaign that delivered this manipulation perfectly demonstrates how the Right uses media to undermine institutions of truth, to undermine facts and to undermine the rationality of democratic debates.

    The completely unfounded assumption that the more information a voter received about the Voice, the more likely they would vote “Yes”, reveals a misunderstanding of the reality of a manipulated public debate environment present across all types of media, from mainstream news to social media.

    It also wrongly treats voters like rational deliberative computers by assuming that the more information that goes in, the more they accept that information. This is far from the reality of how mediated communication affects the public.

    The reason the influence of media on individuals and collectives is, in reality, so difficult to measure and should never be bluntly described as having total effect or no effect, is that people are not rational when they consume media, and every individual processes information in their own unique and unconscious ways.

    One person can watch a manipulated piece of communication and accept it wholeheartedly, others can accept part of it and others reject it outright.

    Manipulation unknown
    No one piece of information determines how people vote and not every piece of information people consume does either. That’s the point of a manipulated media environment. People who are being manipulated do not know they are being manipulated.

    Importantly, when you ask individuals how their media consumption impacted on them, they of course do not know. The decisions people make based on the information they have ephemerally consumed — whether from the media, conversations, or a wide range of other information sources, are incredibly complex and irrational.

    Surely the re-election of Donald Trump for a second time, despite all the rational arguments against him, is proof that the manipulated media environment is an incredibly powerful weapon — a weapon the Right, globally, is clearly proficient at wielding.

    It is time those on the Left caught up and at least understood the reality they are working in.

    Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. This article was first published by the Independent Australia and is republished with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Nullifying the Constitution Won’t Make America Great Again

    Anyone who wants to put America first needs to start by putting the Constitution first.

    This should be non-negotiable.

    Winning an election does not give President Trump—or any politician—the authority to sidestep the Constitution and remake the government at will.

    That’s not how a constitutional republic works, even in pursuit of the so-called greater good.

    Thus far, those defending the Trump administration’s worst actions, which range from immoral and unethical to blatantly unconstitutional, have resorted to repeating propaganda and glaring non-truths while insisting that the Biden administration was worse.

    “They did it first” and “they did it worse” are not justifications for disregarding the law.

    For that matter, omitting the Constitution from the White House website—pretending it never existed—does not give the president and the agencies within the Executive Branch the right to circumvent the rule of law or, worse, nullify the Constitution.

    Mounting a populist revolution to wrest power from the Deep State only to institute a different Deep State is not how you make America great again.

    How you do something is just as important as why you do something, and right now, the means by which the Trump administration is attempting to accomplish many of its end goals are antithetical to every principle on which this nation was founded: natural rights, popular sovereignty, the rule of law, the rejection of monarchical law, the need for transparency and accountability, due process, liberty, equality, and limited government, to name just a few.

    Whether the concerns driving this massive overhaul of the government are legitimate is not the question. We are certainly overdue for a reckoning when it comes to our bloated, corrupt, unaccountable, out-of-control bureaucracy.

    So far, however, the Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated government dysfunction, undermined constitutional rights, and deepened public distrust.

    Trump is not making America great again. In fact, things are getting worse by the day.

    Nowhere is this clearer than in the erosion of fundamental freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights. Government officials are muzzling the press, threatening protesters, and censoring online speech. Due process is being ignored altogether.

    The government’s haphazard, massive and potentially illegal firing spree is leaving whole quadrants of the government understaffed and unable to carry out the necessary functions of government as it relates to veterans, education, energy, agriculture, and housing.

    Rather than draining the swamp of corrupt, moneyed interests, Trump has favored the oligarchy with intimate access to the halls of power.

    Rather than reducing the actual size of the government, it appears that the groundwork is being laid by Trump’s administration to replace large swaths of the federal workforce with artificial intelligence-powered systems, expanding automation rather than shrinking bureaucracy.

    Despite claims of saving the country billions through massive layoffs and terminations, cancelled leases and contracts, and the discovery of wasteful or corrupt spending, the supporting documentation provided by DOGE, the so-called department of efficiency headed up by Elon Musk, has been shown to be riddled by errors and miscalculations.

    While claiming to cut back on wasteful government spending in order to balance the federal budget, Trump is pushing to raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion while adding at least that much in tax cuts to benefit corporations and billionaires, all of which would be paid for by the already overburdened middle- and lower-classes.

    Despite campaign promises to bring down prices “on Day One,” inflation is on the rise again and financial markets are tumbling on fears that Americans will be the ones to pay the price for Trump’s threatened tariffs.

    In defiance of states’ rights and in a complete about-face given his own past statements about the authority of state and local governments, Trump is increasingly attempting to browbeat the states into compliance with the dictates of the federal government. Historically, legal precedent has tended to favor the states, whose sovereignty rests in the Tenth Amendment.

    All appearances to the contrary, Trump is not so much scaling back the nation’s endless wars as he appears to be genuflecting to authoritarian regimes in the hopes of building an international authoritarian alliance with fascist governments, while announcing plans to seize other countries’ lands, a clear act of military provocation.

    Trump’s eagerness to expand the U.S. prison system and impose harsher punishments, including the death penalty, would inevitably result in more American citizens being locked up for nonviolent crimes. The Trump administration has also floated the idea of imprisoning American “criminals” in other countries.

    Then you have Trump’s frequent references to himself as an imperial ruler (the White House even shared images of Trump wearing a royal crown), coupled with his repeated trial balloon allusions to running for a third term in contravention of the 22nd Amendment, which bars presidents from being elected more than twice.

    Nothing adds up.

    Not the numbers, not the policies, not the promises.

    If Trump continues to put into power people who are more loyal to him than they are to the Constitution, the consequences will be dire.

    Nullifying the Constitution is not how you make America great again.

    Trump may not have been given a mandate to act as a dictator or a king, but he was given a mandate to rein in a government that had grown out of control.

    That mandate came with one iron-clad condition, which Trump swore to abide by: the U.S. Constitution.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no government official should be allowed to play fast and loose with the rule of law.

    So where does that leave us?

    The job of holding the government accountable does not belong to any one person or party. It belongs to all of us, “We the people,” irrespective of political affiliations and differences of race, religion, gender, education, economics, social strata or any other labels used to divide us.

    No politician, of any party, will save America.

    Only the Constitution—and the people who defend it—can do that.

    The post Nullifying the Constitution Won’t Make America Great Again first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • J’accuse!… the Jew who accuses his fellow Jews of being antisemites

    A rally on the steps of the Victorian Parliament under the banner of Jews for a Free Palestine was arranged for Sunday, February 9. At 11:11pm on the eve of that rally, Mark Leibler —a  lawyer who claims to have a high profile and speak on behalf of Jews by the totally unelected organisation AIJAC — put out a tweet on X (and paid for an advertisement of the same posting) as follows:

    COMMENTARY: By Jeffrey Loewenstein

    As someone Jewish, the son of Holocaust survivors and members of whose family were murdered by the Nazis, it is hard to know whether to characterise Mark Leibler’s tweet as offensive, appalling, contemptuous, insulting or a disgusting, shameful and grievous introduction of the Holocaust, and those who were murdered by the Nazis, into his tweet — or all of the foregoing!

    Leibler’s tweet is most likely a breach of recently passed legislation in Australia, both federally and in various state Parliaments, making hateful words and actions, and doxxing, criminal offences. It will be “interesting” to see how the police deal with the complaint taken up with the police alleging Leibler’s breach of the legislation.

    In the end, Leibler’s attempted intimidation of those who might have been thinking of going to the rally failed — miserably!

    There are many Jews who abhor what Israel is doing in Gaza (and the West Bank) but feel intimidated by the Leiblers of this world who accuse them of being antisemitic for speaking out against Israel’s actions and not those rusted-on 100 percent supporters of Israel who blindly and uncritically support whatever Israel does, however egregious.

    Leibler, and others like him, who label Jews as antisemites because they dare speak out about Israel’s actions, certainly need to be called out.

    As a lawyer, Leibler knows that actions have consequences. A group of concerned Jews (this writer included) are in the process of lodging a complaint about Leibler’s tweet with the Commonwealth Human Rights Commission.

    Separately from that, this week will see full-page adverts in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — signed by hundreds of Jews — bearing the heading:

    “Australia must reject Trump’s call for the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish Australians say NO to ethnic cleansing.”

    Jeffrey Loewenstein, LLB, was a member of the Victorian Bar and a one-time chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission and member of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria. This article was first published by Pearls & Irritations public policy journal and is republished here with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Alexei Sayle and his comic revelations of state surveillance of subversives are closer to the truth than we think

    The following article is from reader Dr Michael Maguire.

    Older readers may recall that Alexei Sayle was one of the ‘alternative comedians’ that appeared on TV programmes such as The Young Ones many years ago.

    But today, Alexei Sayle is regularly on BBC Radio 4, with his current and innovative Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar (Wednesdays at 6:30pm, and on the BBC Sounds app).

    Alexei Sayle: a radical Maoist?

    His lack of ‘imaginary customers’ allows Alexei to muse on his political evolution as the son of parents who were both members of the British Communist Party.

    So, he recalled in a programme last year that his ‘teenage rebellion’ focused on his becoming a ‘Maoist during the Chinese Cultural Revolution’. This led to heated doctrinal arguments with his parents; and his father’s rebuke that he shouldn’t denounce his mother as a ‘running dog supporter of the Moscow Deviationists’ (from the true Marxist-Leninist path to revolution).

    In a recent broadcast, he recalls that when his home got a telephone (land line) his parental warnings that this was undoubtedly being ‘monitored’ by the police or the ‘SS’; the Security Service (MI5), who unlike the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6), very much dislike this abbreviation because of its unfortunate historical connotations.

    So his parents, when using the telephone, would resort to using ‘camouflaged’ terminology when speaking to comrades, in the hope that this would confuse ‘the monitors’.

    Occupational paranoia?

    Listening to this account of ‘occupational paranoia’, I recalled meeting British comrades who were convinced that not only was their telephone and post monitored, but that they were actually subject to periodic surveillance by the police, Special Branch, or even by the SS. Comrades, who didn’t appreciate just how resource intensive such surveillance can be, as it requires no less that ten persons working in shifts to effectively provide 24-hour close surveillance.

    I personally know this from reading Jackie O’Malley’s – my late wife’s – court records, when she was convicted of renting flats and vehicles for the IRA Active Service Unit (ASU), sent to London in 1979 to rescue Brian Keenan from Brixton Prison.

    The detailed Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) monitoring reports reveals that on a Friday evening, the surveillance team outside her New Convent Garden ‘Food For Britain’ (a Civil Service agency) office had to decide that if she was driving not to her London flat, but to her Guildford mother’s home – to cease their ‘tailing’ and simply contact the Surrey Police to request that a patrol car should periodically check if Jackie’s car was parked outside her mother’s house during the weekend.

    An organisational decision made, because the ATS resources had been so stretched by the need to monitor not just the four man ASU, but also their suspected supporters; with some 50 raids subsequently undertaken on homes across England.

    Alexei Sayle: his parents were probably right

    The ‘low level’ and minimal resource monitoring of potential ‘subversives’ can also be potentially undertaken during elections by monitoring the votes cast for those deemed to be ‘subversive’ candidates; a thought that occurred to myself, when I was employed as a Hackney Council town planner, to act as a polling clerk. This involved ticking the electoral register and writing the voters’ registration number on the counterfoil of the ballot paper.

    So, as the ballot papers and their counterfoils have to be legally kept for at least a year, in case of any legal challenges by dissatisfied candidates, it would be potentially possible to identify those voting for a ‘subversive candidate’, particularly if it was a relatively small number. Of course, this would involve violating the ‘sanctity’ of the democratic electoral process of the ‘secret vote’.

    ‘Unthinkable’, of course, in a country which provides funding and the deployment of its Foreign Office staff to monitor the electoral process in countries with a ‘lesser democratic history’.

    Alas no, according to Gordon Winter, a South African BOSS agent stationed in Britain to monitor the Anti Apartheid movement. For he recalled in his memoirs how ‘friendly’ Special Branch officers had enabled his inspection of the ballot papers cast for a very active opponent of the South African regime.

    So, maybe Alexei Sayle’s parents were right – however impossible it sounds.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Dr Michael Maguire

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • An End to Guilt and Shame

    In Sunday’s election in Germany a new party, Alternatives for Germany, broke through the established power structure to become the second strongest force in parliament. A key factor in its success was a call to overcome the postwar guilt and shame that have been predominant in the country. For many years these were a necessary reckoning with past atrocities, but this burden of blame has increasingly lamed the country and become a handicap to its progress. Leaving it behind is part of a gradual evolution that has been going on since the 1990s.

    When I came to Germany in 1993 as a guest professor, I noticed that many students were eager to express their dislike of their country: Germany had done terrible things, and they were ashamed of it. They took pride in this dislike, as if it were a virtue, and they seemed to be trying to win my approval with it. When I pointed out they were feeling guilty about crimes their grandparents’ generation had committed 50 years ago, they responded, “It might happen again!”

    I left Germany after 2½ years and returned in 2000. The attitude of guilt was still there, but not so universal. In classroom discussions a few students defended their country, but they were quickly overruled by the majority. Sometimes after class some students would apologize to me for this minority. They were embarrassed by it, found it shameful.

    The minority grew over the years. Classroom discussions sometimes became heated arguments. The students who wanted to hold on to guilt seemed to do so out of civic duty. Those who wanted to abandon it had an impatient, enough-is-enough attitude.

    In 2010 Shimon Peres, Israel’s president and Nobel-Prize-winner, told the German parliament the most important lesson to be learned from the Holocaust is, “Never again!” His statement was a warning that the Holocaust came not just out of the historical situation back then but out of something in Germans that is there even today. Germans have a personal responsibility for atrocities committed before they were born. This received widespread praise from the establishment.

    The pro-guilt students felt affirmed by this. They insisted present-day Germans have to guard against these tendencies. These students wore their shame like a badge of honor.

    In 2017 Alternatives for Germany gained entry to parliament with 12 percent of the vote as the third strongest party. The establishment parties and media went into full alarm at this threat to their power. They launched a defamation campaign with slanted news and outright lies, implying the AfD was full of Neo-Nazis who would again turn Germany into a pariah in the family of nations. AfD representatives became targets of hatred, their voters of contempt.

    This polarized the country, including the students. Discussions became much more emotional, loaded with anger, self-righteousness and defensiveness. The society was going through a rending transition that has intensified in the past eight years, and the AfD is an important factor in it. In addition to their historical revisionism, they are nationalist libertarian-conservatives favoring less government and stricter asylum laws – a position that is gaining momentum worldwide.

    After Sunday’s election the parties face the unwieldy task of building a coalition that can actually govern. The strongest force is the conservative Union with 28% of the vote. AfD is second with 20%, Social Democrats 16%, Greens 11%, and Left 8%. To isolate the AfD, the Union has refused to form a coalition with it, preferring to cobble together a three-way coalition with the smaller parties. But the differences among them are so deep that agreements will be difficult to reach. The political process will be deadlocked at a time when Germany needs decisive action. The resulting chaos will strengthen AfD all the more, and it may end up with an absolute majority after the next election. If the government falls apart, that could be soon.

    In spite of the political wrangling, Germans are on the way to overcoming their guilt and shame. They’ll remember the atrocities of those twelve terrible years but know they are history. They’ll no longer be chained to the past.

    Then will come the most needed step: Germany must recover its sovereignty after 80 years of Allied domination.

    The post An End to Guilt and Shame first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William T. Hathaway.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Fighting Fascism Means that We Cannot Give Them an Inch

    Donald Trump
    Imperialist Donald Trump unleashed Elon Musk for a hostile takeover of the US government. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo/picture alliance)

    The gradual worldwide shift towards fascism over the past 10 years has significantly elevated the threat of world annihilation. Though this might sound alarmist, as a student of history, there are certainly significant parallels with the 1920s and 1930s one can draw on.

    Only today the threat is even greater. With massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons held by at least nine countries, one wrong move could lead to the kind of bloodbath the world has never before experienced. But, even without the nuclear threat, national stockpiles of conventional weapons have the capacity to destroy entire cities hundreds of times over.

    The wholesale destruction of Gaza is a case in point. As of November 2024, Israel’s military had, in a single year, dropped more than 85 000 tonnes of bombs on the Gaza Strip, exceeding the amount of explosives used in the entirety of World War II. This is only a small fraction of the bombs available to the world’s largest militaries.

    The previous neoliberal order — which began during the 1970s and, arguably, ended with the US’s housing bubble collapse in 2008 — was of course not an era of diplomacy and peace. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its aggressive bombing of over a dozen other countries, portray an era of hawkish Western imperialism in which hundreds of thousands were killed.

    And yet, with the second election of Donald Trump, this imperialist crusade is being set into overdrive.

    It has only been a few weeks since Trump took office and unleashed Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to conduct a hostile takeover of the entire US government bureaucracy.

    In this time, Trump has already threatened to take over the Panama Canal, floated the annexation of Greenland, suggested that Canada become the nation’s 51st state, threatened tariffs on Mexico, Canada, Colombia and China and cut the “soft-imperial” initiatives of USAid — including its funding of HIV medication and sympathetic investigative journalism — in favour of more aggressive influence strategies and threats of economic warfare and military dominance.

    Most recently, with Israel’s genocidal prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to him, Trump announced the proposed forced removal and ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians from Gaza. In his plan, the US would take colonial ownership of the territory to enable his real estate ambitions and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”.

    Some have rationalised Trump’s blackmail as merely a bargaining tactic to pressure other countries into a “better deal”. However, even if these belligerent threats are meant to give him an advantage in negotiations, Trump has shown he is willing to follow through with his ideas when given the chance.

    This is why caving in to any of Trump’s threats is extraordinarily dangerous. The more his tactics are successful, the more he will continue to use them. Everything he can get away with entices him to try to get away with more.

    This has been, and will always be, the modus operandi of such tyrannical politics. Giving even an inch to any aspect of a fascist movement always emboldens it. Just as the establishment politicians of Germany’s Weimar Republic’s appeasement of Hitler enabled him to expand his power and displace them, so too will such capitulation allow the make America great again movement to expand and take over.

    Our politics, therefore, cannot simply be non-fascist. We cannot allow for negotiation and compromise when dealing with fascists. We cannot give them any room to expand or any oxygen to breathe.

    Nor can we limit our opposition to polite and civil forms. We must employ all possible means to fight back because, ultimately, we are defending our dignity and sovereignty in the face of unrelenting, domineering expansionism.

    In other words, we must embrace a politics of anti-fascism.

    What does this mean in the context of South Africa?
    It means that we demand — even compel — President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government of national unity to resist any show of weakness and any propensity to capitulate to US government blackmail. We cannot compromise by quieting our support for the Palestinians or by revoking the Expropriation Act. Doing so will simply embolden the US to demand even more.

    It also means that we need to build solidarity between nations in the Global South. The Hague Group is a start. But it not only needs to expand its membership significantly, its scope should also include political and economic collaboration against US imperial threats. If one nation is threatened with retaliatory tariffs or sanctions for refusing to submit to Trump’s dictates, all nations within this group ought to collectively respond.

    What makes a nation like Colombia or South Africa vulnerable to US blackmail is their insignificant economic power in relation to the largest economy and military on Earth. But a collective response from the Global South can ensure that none of us is isolated and that we are not able to be picked off one by one.

    Last, and most important, it means that we urgently need to build a huge grassroots anti-fascist movement here in South Africa, in collaboration with similar movements worldwide. This movement must be ready to take to the streets to defend one another. It should find new and creative ways to ridicule, undermine and isolate wannabe fascists like the Patriotic Alliance’s Gayton McKenzie, minister of sports, arts and culture, who are happy to make South Africa a neocolony of the US.

    Our movement needs to also physically protect other Africans threatened by xenophobes, conduct citizen arrests of Israeli war criminals who enter the country, block coal exports to the Israeli regime and create an environment hostile to any form that this fascist movement might take.

    Working together, we must defend anti-fascist organising in the belly of the beast, support anti-colonial resistance in Palestine and stop right-wing populism in its tracks.

    We cannot budge and we cannot allow those with a weak backbone in government to budge either, no matter what threats come our way.

    The post Fighting Fascism Means that We Cannot Give Them an Inch first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • No Excuses. No Compromises. No Fear. No Forgiveness

    “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

    Spoken by a fellow in a time when tolerance and trust, faith in the essential goodness of human beings, belief in turn-the-other-cheek stoicism, all were still possible. It was innovative even back then, but an option which could be considered.

    These are different times. No longer does innocence bloom. Hope is a four-letter word, gutted by abuse, now a contemptuous metaphor for hypocrisy and cunning. Faith, charity and love have been quantified, digitized, commodified, sexualized, turned into more weapons of mass deception and poisoning of the human spirit, just box cutters in the toolbox of a tiny elite, self-anointed as the class of absolute privilege and ultimate prerogative, self-appointed as Masters of the Universe. The sociopaths have won the class war and sit at the top of the sh*tpile they’re fabricating.

    No, good people, forgiveness is no longer recommended, no longer possible, such graciousness is not the appropriate noble response anymore.

    We simply cannot forgive those who are doing to our world what we see happening right now.

    It’s unconscionable. It’s repulsive. It’s malevolent. It’s nihilistic. It’s … unforgivable.

    Jesus Christ surely would not approve of what I’m about to say. Then again, these days He’s basically irrelevant, just another marketing brand, an advertising gimmick for knee-jerk religiosity.

    Please listen, friends. Take heed. It’s getting late. We have no choice. Urgency drives our mission. Common decency and timeless morality dictate our agenda.

    Forgive them not … for endless war, carnage for conquest, slaughter for power and control, the creation of enemies to drive weapons sales, the demonization of other countries and their leaders to prepare the public for war and more war.

    Forgive them not … for destroying the environment, killing untold numbers of species, filling the waterways with toxins, polluting the air, pumping greenhouse gases at an accelerating rate into the atmosphere.

    Forgive them not … for poisoning our bodies with man-made chemicals and for-profit pharmaceuticals, for poisoning our food with herbicides, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, for boosting the bottom line with no regard for human health or dignity.

    Forgive them not … for filling the oceans with millions of tons of the debris of “civilization” and turning the vast expanses of life-giving, life-sustaining water into graveyards for the creatures of the sea.

    Forgive them not … for fostering suspicion and hatred, promoting racism and intolerance, for setting humans against one another to make us all easier to control, manipulate and exploit.

    Forgive them not … for persecuting Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and other truth-tellers, while promoting to positions of power serial liars, prevaricating warmongers, self-enriching enemies of truth.

    Forgive them not … for destroying science as an objective methodology for obtaining knowledge and achieving understanding, for buying and bribing scientists to front for their deceptive, money-driven agendas.

    Forgive them not … for rigging the economy via influence peddling and grotesque warping of the democratic process with enormous infusions of money, in order to accelerate the transfer of wealth to a handful of beneficiaries at the top, then use that wealth to leverage even more money to further enrich the already incomprehensibly rich.

    Forgive them not … for desertification, deforestation, the destruction of enormous swaths of arable land, the destruction of rainforests, the ruin of ecologically-sensitive marshlands, the oil spills, chemical spills, all the direct result of blind avarice and predation.

    Forgive them not … for hoarding epic, inconceivable piles of money, while so many millions on the planet struggle to survive, live meal-to-meal, starve to death, die of easily curable diseases.

    Forgive them not … for flooding the planet with weapons, seeding crisis after crisis, being witness and perpetrators of killing, slaughter, unconscionable terror, death and destruction, all in the name of defense industry profits and stock portfolios.

    Forgive them not … for using the media, movies, TV and internet, entertainers and celebrities, to spread lies, propaganda, disinformation, fake news to slander and marginalize bearers of truth, and to confuse, distract, and disempower everyday people.

    Forgive them not … for destroying democracy and the promise of our bold and once-affirming experiment in self-government.

    Forgive them not … for exploiting our innate fear of death and universal desire for well-being, for turning medical care and maintenance of health into yet another revenue stream for predatory capitalism.

    Forgive them not … for violating the innocence of children, exploiting their thirst for knowledge and natural curiosity, destroying their inherent creativity, and turning our educational system into a factory for consumer robots.

    Forgive them not … for taking the beautiful, majestic heavens, the pure, wholesome expanse of outer space and turning it into yet another battlefield, bristling with weapons of terror and killing.

    Forgive them not … for mangling and mutilating timeless messages for spiritual growth and healing; for inverting the lessons teaching the virtues of compassion, caring and sharing; for turning institutionalized religion into cults of self-worship and warring tribes of exclusion and vilification.

    Forgive them not … for Monsanto, Raytheon, Pfizer, Chase, the Fed, Amazon, Google, the NYT, Facebook, Microsoft, the entire web of corporate tyranny.

    Forgive them not … for the Patriot Acts, for the 17 intelligence agencies, the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, the NDAA, the duopoly, Citizens United, for election rigging, voter machine fraud, gerrymandering, the scam of government by the people.

    Forgive them not … for massive intrusive unconstitutional citizen surveillance, both by security agencies and private corporations, and for the oppressive censorship which has destroyed the most fundamental rights of free expression and open exchange of ideas and information.

    Forgive them not … for simply being so self-centered, so selfish, so arrogant, so self-righteous and delusional, they are undermining everyone else on the planet, and creating a world which will eventually be uninhabitable for any of us, including them — the stupid self-sabotaging bastards!

    FORGIVE THEM NOT … FOR THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY DO.

    And what they do is sick and evil … pure and simple.

    We have to get it together, folks! Tolerate none of this. Do not forgive the “people of privilege”. Capture them. Bring them to trial. Imprison them. They know exactly what they’re doing. They do it callously, maliciously, mercilessly, intentionally, with plan and pre-meditation. We know who they are. They cannot be trusted. They cannot be excused — now or ever — if there is to be a world which is functional and supports life and positive human interaction.

    No forgiveness. No excuses. No compromises. No fear.

    FORGIVE THEM NOT …

    The post No Excuses. No Compromises. No Fear. No Forgiveness first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Rachel.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Parihaka’s matriarch, champion of tikanga and peace advocate Maata Wharehoka dies at 74

    OBITUARY: By Heather Devere

    Maata Wharehoka (Ngāti Tahinga, Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Apakura, Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Kuia. 1950-2025

    Maata Wharehoka has been described as the Parihaka Matriarch, Parihaka leader and arts advocate, “champion of Kahu Whakatere Tupapaku, the tikanga Māori practices, expert in marae arts, raranga (weaving) and karanga”, renowned weaver who revived traditional Māori methods of death and burial, “driving force behind Parihaka’s focus to be a self-sufficient community”, Kaitiaki (or guardian) of Te Niho marae for nearly 30 years.

    And I want to add Peace Advocate and Activist. She died aged 74.

    At Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa, the National Centre of Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPCS) at Otago University, Ōtepoti Dunedin, we were fortunate that Maata brought her knowledge and her exceptional presence to help us learn some of the lessons from Parihaka about peaceful resistance, non-violent communication, conflict resolution, consultation, hospitality, humility and mana.

    One of her first talks was entitled “Why do I wear feathers in my hair and scribbles on my face?” and she explained to us the significance of the raukura or albatross feathers that signify peace to the people of Parihaka.

    She used the moko (tattoos) on her mouth, chin and from her ears to her cheeks to teach us the importance of listening first, before you speak.

    Maata taught us the use of the beat of the poi to signify the sound of the horses hooves when the pacifist settlement at Parihaka was invaded by the British militia in 1881.

    The poi and waiata have served as a “hidden-in-plain-sight” performative image by the people of Parihaka that represents consistent resistance to the oppression.

    Maata had been shocked when she first came to the peace centre that we were only able to sing (badly) what she called a “nursery school” waiata. So she gifted a unique waiata to NCPACS to help with our transition to being a more bicultural centre, now named Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa.

    Maukaroko ki te whenua,
    Whakaaro pai ki te tangata katoa
    Arohanui ki te aoraki
    Koa, koa, koa ki te aoraki,
    Pono, whakapono
    Ki te ao nei
    Ko rongo, no rongo, na rongo
    Me rongo, me rongo, me rongo

    Translation:
    Peace to the land
    Be thoughtful to all
    Great love to the universe
    Joy, joy, joy to the universe
    Truth, truth to the world
    It is Rongo, from Rongo, by Rongo
    Peace, peace, peace.

    Maata also hosted a number of students from TAOR/NCPACS at Parihaka for both PhD fieldwork and practicum experience, building a link between them and Parihaka that extends to the next generation.

    She named her expertise “deathing and birthing” as she taught Māori traditions of preparation for dying and for welcoming the new born. One of the students learnt from Maata about the process where the person who is dying is closely involved in the preparations, including the weaving of the waka kahutere (coffin) from harakeke (flax) for a natural burial.

    Maata herself was very much part of the preparations for her own death and would have advised and assisted those who wove her waka kahutere with much love and expertise.

    For me, Maata became one of my very best friends. Her generosity, sense of humour, high energy and kindness quite overwhelmed me. We also became close through working and writing together, with Kelli Te Maihāroa (from Waitaha — the South Island iwi with a long peace history) and Maui Solomon (who upholds the Moriori peace tradition).

    We collaborated on a series of articles and chapters, and our joint work was presented both locally and at international conferences.

    On my many visits to Parihaka I was also warmly welcomed by the Wharehoka family and was able to meet Maata’s mokopuna, all growing up with Māori as their first language and steeped in Māori knowledge and tikanga.

    Maata is an irreplaceable person, a true wahine toa, exuberant, outgoing, funny, clever, fiece, talented, indomitable. Maata, we will miss you terribly, but will continue to be guided by your wisdom and ongoing presence in our hearts and our lives.

    In the words of Kelli Te Maihāroa “She was an amazing wahine toa, who loved sharing her gifts with the world. Moe Mai Rā e te māreikura o Te Niho Parihaka.’

    Dr Heather Devere is chair of Asia Pacific Media Network and former director of research of Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa.

    Publications:
    Kelli Te Maihāroa, Heather Devere, Maui Solomon and Maata Wharehoka (2022). Exploring Indigenous Peace Traditions Collaboratively. In Te Maihāroa, Ligaliga and Devere (Eds). Decolonising Peace and Conflict Studies through Indigenous Research. Palgrave Macmillan.

    Heather Devere, Kelli Te Maihāroa, Maui Solomon and Maata Wharehoka (2020). Concepts of Friendship and Decolonising Cross-Cultural Peace Research in Aotearoa New Zealand. AMITY: The Journal of Friendship Studies, 6(1), 53-87 doi:10.5518/AMITY/31.

    Heather Devere, Kelli Te Maihāroa, Maui Solomon and Maata Wharehoka (2019). Tides of Endurance: Indigenous Peace Traditions of Aotearoa New Zealand. Ab-Original: Journal of Indigenous Studies and First National and First Peoples, 3(1), 24-47.

    Heather Devere, Kelli Te Maihāroa, Maata Wharehoka and Maui Solomon (2017). Regeneration of Indigenous Peace Traditions in Aotearoa New Zealand. In Heather Devere, Kelli Te Maihaora and John Synott (eds.), Peacebuilding and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Experiences and Strategies for the 21st Century. Cham, Springer.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Tragic Tale of a Flower that Wilted too Soon (Part 2 of 2)

    Ruttie Jinnah and M.A. Jinnah IMAGE/Dawn

    Read Part 1    .

    Drugs

    Ruttie’s rush to dash off to Paris was to get drugs. Mrs. Naidu’s letters from Paris and New York to Padmaja make that clear.

    While in Paris in 1929, Mrs. Naidu incidentally discovered from a princess (cousin of queen of Italy), who knew Ruttie, the reason for her visits to Paris. She said that “Madam Zhinna” had been getting drugs through “the long needle,” that is, morphine since her Paris visit in 1924. The concerned princess informed Mrs. Naidu that she had warned Ruttie: “she was ruining her life with drugs and how all her beauty was being destroyed.” (Reddy, p. 314-15.) But Ruttie was in no mood to listen; she just wanted to cope with the crisis, chaos, and commotion that were destroying her from the inside.

    Incidentally, Mrs. Naidu was told the same thing by another person, Princess Journevitch (wife of a famous Russian sculptor), with whom she had lunch in New York in 1929 who said that years ago in Paris Madam “Zhinna’s” drug habit was playing havoc with her gorgeousness and life. (Reddy, p. 364-65.)

    In the US, Mrs. Naidu learned from Syud Hossain that Ruttie was taking drugs while she was in the US. Hossain alerted her of the harmful effects. (For religious violation, Gandhi had ejected Hossain out of India, see note <9> below.)

    That means halfway through their marriage, Ruttie started taking drugs the kamikaze way, i.e., carelessly taking drugs and ignoring warnings of their harmful effects on her mental and physical health. It must have been depressing to watch such a brilliant person travel over 4,000 miles to find solace in drugs.

    Moved out

    On January 4, 1928, Ruttie and Jinnah got down from the train at Bombay’s Victoria train station. They came back after attending the Muslim League session in Calcutta. Mrs. Naidu was on the same train too. Ruttie informed Jinnah that she’s moving to Taj Mahal Hotel. She left with Mrs. Naidu and got a room next to hers. Jinnah went to South Court alone. Kanji helped Ruttie in moving her belongings. Mrs. Naidu’s letter to her daughters:

    “It is extraordinary how few people have even an inkling of what has happened in the very heart of Bombay. Fortunately, everyone is so used to seeing her [Ruttie] here at all hours [that is, in Mrs. Naidu’s room] that no one suspects her being here with her cats and he at home alone.”

    Reddy, p. 333.

    Ruttie and Jinnah’s separation had disturbed Mrs. Naidu more than the couple who got separated, as is obvious the way she put it to her friend Syud Hossain: “The really tragic part of it is that both seem so relieved.” (Ibid, p. 336.)

    An old Parsee friend tried to reunite them. Jinnah shouldered the blame:

    “It is my fault: we both need some sort of understanding we cannot give.”

    In April, Ruttie, joined by her mother Dinbai Petit, left for Europe. Jinnah was already in London with his friend Chaman Lal who had gone to Geneva to attend the ILO (International Labour Organization) Conference.

    Chamanlal then went to Paris. Upon learning of Ruttie’s illness, he headed to the Champs Elysee clinic where Ruttie was bedridden and had 106 degree fever. Ruttie handed him a book of poems by Oscar Wilde and requested him to read. Chamanlal:

    “When I came to the closing lines of The Harlot’s House:

    ‘And down the long and silent street,
    The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,
    Crept like a frightened girl.’

    “I looked up and Ruttie was in coma.”

    Chamanlal’s impression of Ruttie:

    “… I had always admired Ruttie Jinnah so much: there is not a woman in the world today to hold a candle to her for beauty and charm. She was a lovely, spoiled child, and Jinnah was inherently incapable of understanding her. …”

    Ritu Marwah, Jinnah’s daughter, India Currents.

    Chaman Lal informed Jinnah that Ruttie wasn’t feeling well. Jinnah, who was in Ireland, rushed to Paris where he booked a room at George V. Jinnah went to the clinic as Chaman Lal waited for him at a nearby cafe. Jinnah returned after three hours in a relaxed mood and informed him Ruttie was to be transferred to a new clinic with a new medical adviser.

    Money was no deterrent. Jinnah held constant vigil by her side. He stayed with Ruttie at the clinic for over a month. He took care of her and even shared the clinic food with her. She recovered and left for Bombay but without Jinnah.

    Could any one have saved their marriage?

    Interceder

    The thought that crosses one’s mind when reading Ruttie and Jinnah’s story is they needed intercession and someone should have mediated to save their marriage. Was there anyone who could have saved their marriage? The only person who had such credentials and could have gotten any success in reconciling Jinnah and Ruttie was Sarojini Naidu — a devoted friend of Jinnah and a mother figure to Ruttie. And she, in fact, did try to mediate.

    Actually, it was the pitiable state of Ruttie that had prompted Mrs. Naidu to make an effort. Mrs. Naidu’s letter to Padmaja:

    “Well, Ruttie has only us really. Her own people are strangers to her. Her poor mother loves her but drives her distracted … She loves us and trusts us and so she comes to me for sanctuary., poor child. She feels safe here. Safe in her soul.”

    Reddy, p. 335-6.

    It was her genuine love for Ruttie that led Mrs. Naidu to talk to her very good friend Jinnah. Mrs. Naidu continues:

    “Jinnah has grown so dumb. No one can even approach him. I think he is hurt to the core because she left him like that, almost without warning. In any case no one can interfere with him. He is too hard and proud and reserved for even an intimate friend to intrude beyond a certain point. All he says is, ‘I have been unhappy for ten years. I cannot endure it any longer. If she wants to be free I will not stand in her way. Let her be happy. But I will not discuss the matter with anyone. Please do not interfere.’ And he is I suppose like a stone image in his loneliness and Ruttie is, although reveling in what she believes to be the beginning of liberty for her–liberty costs too dear sometimes and is not worth the price.”

    Ibid, 336.

    Mrs. Naidu was writing to her elder daughter but her younger Leilamani was not far from her mind. She continued:

    “I am writing a line to Papi today. Poor child. She must like Ruttie be clamouring for ‘freedom.’ This freedom!!”

    Ibid.

    The only person whose mediation could have bore some fruit, failed. If Mrs. Naidu couldn’t, then probably no one could.

    Author Sheela Reddy believes Ruttie should have consulted Gandhi.

    Could Gandhi have played the savior?

    Reddy (p. 271.) writes: “… Ruttie, without sharing Jinnah’s animus against Gandhi, turned away from the one man who might have saved her.”

    Ruttie, as far as her own life or marriage were concerned, was a very private person. She never mentioned the inner turmoil she was going through or her marital problems even to Kanji, one of her best friends. With Mrs. Naidu and her daughter Padmaja, she was close in that regard and would vent her exasperation and would tell them her problems and frustrations.

    Gandhi and Ruttie met a few times. They did correspond sometimes. Once Ruttie donated money to his fund for Jallianwala Bagh memorial. Jinnah didn’t know about it — not that Ruttie was hiding it from him, it was an spontaneous act. Gandhi wrote in his newspaper column:

    “Mrs Jinnah truly remarked when she gave her mite to the fund, the memorial would at least give us an excuse for living.”

    Reddy, p.230.

    Gandhi’s April 30, 1920, letter to Ruttie asked her to cajole Jinnah to learn Gujarati and Hindustani (a mix of Hindi/Urdu):

    “Please do remember me to Mr. Jinnah and do coax him to learn Hindustani or Gujarati. If I were you, I should begin to talk to him in Gujarati or Hindustani. There is not much danger of you forgetting your English or your misunderstanding each other, is there? … Yes, I would ask this even for the love you bear me.”

    (Kanji was another person to be reminded by Gandhi that his mother tongue was Gujarati. See the letter written in 1947 here. ( https://pennds.org/doing-research/exhibits/show/dwarkadas/gandhi )

    In a June 28, 1919 letter to Jinnah, Gandhi had urged him to learn those languages:

    “I have your promise, that you would take up Gujarati and Hindi as quickly as possible. May I then suggest that like Macaulay you learn at least one of these languages on your return voyage? You will not have Macaulay’s time during the voyage, i.e., six months, but then you have not the same difficulty that Macaulay had.”

    Unlike Ruttie, Jinnah’s background was that of a middle class family from Gujarat and spoke Kuchchhi and Gujarati “beautifully,” per Chagla. His Hindustani was not that good. Both Jinnah and Ruttie were comfortable speaking English. Gandhi knew his letter was unnecessary, but couldn’t resist playing politics.

    (For Jinnah’s Gujarati handwriting, see “Rare Speeches and Documents of Quaid-E-Azam,” compiler, Yahya Hashim Bawany (Karachi: Mr. Arif Mukati, 1987, p. 39. Jinnah was answering questions for a Gujarati monthly Vismi Sadi or Twentieth Century in 1916. The questions were about favorite author, flower, etc. Jinnah is known as Quaid-E-Azam that translates to a Great Leader. See also Dr Muhammad Ali Shaikh, “History: Becoming Jinnah,” Dawn,)

    In the above letter, Gandhi also asked Jinnah to inform Ruttie,

    “Pray tell Mrs Jinnah that I shall expect her on her return to join the hand-spinning class that Mrs Banker Senior and Mrs Ramabai, a Punjabi lady, are conducting.”

    Ruttie never joined the spinning classes. (Her mother Lady Petit had joined and she used to go to those classes).

    In 1924, Gandhi wanted Ruttie to convince Jinnah to boycott British and all other foreign goods. Ruttie didn’t see any political wisdom or practicality in such actions. (Dwarkadas, p. 18. Kanji had similar ideas as Ruttie and he elaborated those in an interview to the Evening News of India May 1924. Ibid. p. 19-20.)

    The question remains: would Gandhi have been the right person to save Ruttie?

    Looking at Gandhi’s

    • married life,
    • his views on sex,
    • his relations with several women (including philosopher/poet Rabindranath Tagore’s niece Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, an educationist and political activist, and
    • “young, golden-haired, blue-eyed Danish beauty,” Esther Faering1, a devout Christian missionary), and
    • his mistreatment of his wife Kasturba,
    • his constant juggling to please and/or to save his girls/women friends from Kasturba’s justified wrath,
    • his experiments of sleeping with young girls to control his sexual urge,
    • his idea of restricting sexual activities to just procreation without any element of pleasure,
    • asking husbands and wives to consider each other as brothers and sisters,
    • and his so many other eccentricities don’t seem the right qualities to qualify him for that role.

    Here is one of the Gandhi advices to Indians:

    “It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife.”

    B. R. Gowani, “Was Gandhi Averse to climax?”

    Very strange and unhealthy advice, indeed. The institution of marriage was and, to a great extent, is still a legal outlet for most people to relieve themselves of troublesome hormones.

    And what was the guarantee that Gandhi, a hardcore politician, wouldn’t have played Ruttie’s request for help to further humiliate Jinnah?2

    Ruttie was a very reserved person when it came to her personal life and so would have never allowed Gandhi to play any role in resolving any of her problems. Gandhi’s intervention wouldn’t have solved anything but could have had detrimental outcome.

    Let’s assume that Ruttie had approached Gandhi for help. (Jinnah would not have stopped Ruttie from approaching Gandhi.) The most Gandhi could have done was to convince Ruttie to join his Ahmadabad ashram where, undoubtedly he would have given her special treatment (as he had offered to Motilal’s daughter Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit who was sent there to wean her away from her Muslim husband). For Ruttie, the stay there would have been worse than the “slave” like life with Jinnah. She was a free bird and thus couldn’t be caged — not only she would have flown out of the ashram in no time but would have probably persuaded many other ashramites to flee with her.

    Another thing Gandhi would have done was to assign Ruttie some social or political work to keep her busy and thus caused her to forget her depression and other problems. But then, she was already doing some of those things with Kanji, but it seems that she didn’t stay too long in those ventures. Dewan Chamanlal had asked her to join trade union but she declined that.

    The final letter

    On a ship back to India, Ruttie poured out her torment and hurt in her letter to Jinnah:

    S. S. Rajputana.
    Marseilles 5 Oct 1928.

    Darling – thank you for all you have done. If ever in my bearing your over tuned senses found any irritability or unkindness – be assured that in my heart there was place only for a great tenderness and a greater pain – a pain my love without hurt. When one has been as near to the reality of Life – (which after all is Death) as I have been dearest, one only remembers the beautiful and tender moments and all the rest becomes a half veiled mist of unrealities. Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon.

    I have suffered much sweetheart because I have loved much. The measure of my agony has been in accord to the measure of my love.

    Darling I love you – I love you – and had I loved you just a little less I might have remained with you – only after one has created a very beautiful blossom one does not drag it through the mire. The higher you set your ideal the lower it falls.

    I have loved you my darling as it is given to few men to be loved. I only beseech you that our tragedy which commenced with love should also end with it.

    – Darling Goodnight and Goodbye

    Ruttie

    I had written to you at Paris with the intention of posting the letter here – but I felt that I would rather write to you afresh from the fullness of my heart. R.

    Shagufta Yasmeen, “Ruttie Jinnah: Life and Love” (Islamabad: Shuja Sons, no date, p. 71-2, for the original letter in Ruttie’s handwriting). For online, see Letters of Note.

    Final months

    Ruttie left Paris just a few days before Mrs. Naidu arrived on October 10. Mrs. Naidu wrote to Padmaja:

    “I think Jinnah tried very hard to get her to come back.” “But Ruttie is, so I am told, beyond all appeal. Her health is still very precarious. But I have had no talk with Jinnah as yet.”

    Reddy, p. 348-9.

    She met him the next day and discussed the political situation in India where politicians were waiting for Jinnah’s arrival and response to Nehru Report.

    Once in India, he got busy. On December 28, at the All-Parties Convention in Calcutta, Jinnah’s demand for 33% Muslim representation in the central legislature was met with derision. One of the Congress leaders Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru ridiculed him and said give whatever this “spoilt child was asking for and be finished with it.” (Wolpert, p. 100.) M. R. Jayakar, spokesman for the Hindu Mahasabha, a communal outfit, said Jinnah represents “a small minority of Muslims.” (Ibid. p. 101.) (The Muslim population was around 25%. Jinnah wanted some kind of parity to secure Muslims with the majority Hindu population.)

    Jinnah calmly requested:

    “… Minorities cannot give anything to the majority….Believe me there is no progress of India until the Musalmans and Hindus are united, and let no logic, philosophy or squabble stand in the way of coming to a compromise and nothing will make me more happy than to see a Hindu-Muslim union.”

    Ibid.

    He also said:

    “We are all sons of the soil. We have to live together… If we cannot agree, let us at any rate agree to differ, but let us part as friends.”

    A. G. Noorani, “Assessing Jinnah,” Frontline ( https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-nation/article30205988.ece )

    Jinnah’s plea fell on deaf ears; he failed miserably. (This is a universal problem, the majority lacks a genrous spirit to concede something concrete to the minority which could make it feel secure.)

    All through January and February 1929, Ruttie remained ill which in turn made her depressed.

    Depression was not restricted to Ruttie, it affected many of her friends in her age group or younger, Reddy notes (p. 352). Mrs. Naidu’s son Ranadheera was addicted to alcohol and so was his sister Leilamani who was teaching in Lahore and surviving as a single woman. Their older brother Jaisoorya was in a Berlin sanatorium, the city where he was studying medicine. Padmaja drowned in melancholy at her own problems. (Years later, Padmaja had a live-in relationship with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.) The only difference between the Naidu children and Ruttie was that the former had their father Dr. Govindarajulu Naidu who was a source of great support to their children while Ruttie didn’t have that kind of continuous help. Lady Petit’s visits to Ruttie were not helpful either. Sarojini Naidu was in North America. In February, Jinnah was off to Delhi for government work. Only Kanji was around who tried his best to give Ruttie as much time as possible.

    Jinnah regularly visited Ruttie in the evenings where Kanji was present too. Their discussions reminded Kanji of the good old days when all three of them used to meet, eat, and discuss politics.

    Ruttie who loved going out, had almost confined herself indoor except for short walks with Kanji. Theosophist Krishnamurti and his secretary came for tea on February 1 at Ruttie’s place. Kanji was there too. Krishnamurti then invited Ruttie at Kanji’s friend’s place for dinner which she attended with Kanji. Around February 11, Jinnah had to leave for Delhi. A couple of days later, Ruttie, Kanji’s wife, and Kanji went for a night show movie.

    On 16 and 17 February, Kanji was on night duty as an honorary magistrate due to the riots in Bombay. On the 17th morning, Kanji picked Mrs. Besant from the train station and had lunch with her. After that he went home for a little while where Ruttie showed up “terribly depressed and unhappy.” (Dwarkadas, p. 56.)

    After four hours he went to drop Ruttie at her place where she served him tea. (Kanji was supposed to have tea with Mrs. Besant.) Kanji stayed there till 7pm due to Ruttie’s “terrific depression,” and left with a promise to return back at 10:15. Mrs. Besant understood and asked him to take care of Ruttie. Upon his return, Kanji was horrified to find Ruttie unconscious but was able to revive her.

    On the 18th morning, Ruttie called and told him to drop by on the way to his office. Her state of depression hadn’t disappeared yet; he did his best to cheer her up. Before leaving, he said: “I’ll see you to-night.” Ruttie’s gloomy reply:

    “If I am alive. Look after my cats and don’t give them away.”

    Dwarkadas, p. 57.

    Kanji writes: “These were the last words Ruttie spoke to me.” Kanji stopped by at 11:15 at night but Ruttie was asleep. He left as he hadn’t slept for two nights. A telephone call on the 19th afternoon informed Kanji that Ruttie had lost consciousness and her surviving chances are minimal. Right away he went to her place but couldn’t find her. (Dwarkadas, p. 57.)

    Ruttie no more

    Jinnah was in Delhi for the Budget Session of the Assembly. On the night of 20 February, 1929, Chamanlal was in Jinnah’s Western Court house in Delhi when Jinnah received a trunk call about Ruttie’s illness. He told Chaman Lal:

    “Rati is seriously ill. I must leave tonight.” “Do you know who that was? It was my father-in-law. This is the first time we have spoken to each other since my marriage.”

    Dewan ChamanLal, “The Quaid-i-Azam As I Knew Him” in Jamil-ud-din Ahmad compiled “Quaid-I-Azam as Seen by his Comtemporaries” (Lahore: Publishers United Ltd., 1966, p. 172.)

    Actually, his father-in-law had communicated the sad news of Ruttie’s death to Jinnah. She had passed away in the evening.

    One hundred and thirty eight days after her last letter, Ruttie died of an overdose – exactly on her 29th birthday. The clutches of sickness, insomnia, drugs, inner anguish, piecemeal companionship instead of constant comradery, inability to cope with life, and anxiety had gotten to the resplendent Ruttie.

    Mrs. Naidu’s January 1928 letter to Padmaja had mentioned about Ruttie’s previous attempt at suicide, “… as I have only now learned–how difficult have been those ten years,” “and how she even tried to put an end to herself deliberately …” (Reddy, p. 335.)

    Ruttie must have thought death was the only way out; so she annihilated herself.

    Funeral

    On the morning of 22nd February, Kanji with Col and Mrs. Sokhey picked up Jinnah from the Grant Road station.

    Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Kanji Dwarkadas, M. C. Chagla, and a good many people (both men and women) had gathered at Arambagh, a Shia Muslim cemetery in Mazgaon (Bombay), for the burial ceremony.

    Jinnah sat next to Kanji during the five hour long rites, and gave an impression that he was alright. After a while, he broke the silence and started talking hastily how he assisted Vittalbhai Patel, speaker of the Assembly, who had gotten himself in a tight corner with the government. He also talked about his work in the Assembly.

    But when the process of placing Ruttie’s body in her final abode began, Jinnah couldn’t maintain the facade of stoicism any longer. Kanji described the scene:

    “Then, as Ruttie’s body was being lowered into the grave, Jinnah, as the nearest relative was the first to throw the earth on the grave and he broke down suddenly and sobbed and wept like a child for minutes together.”

    Dwarkadas, p. 58.

    Jinnah was followed by Kanji:

    “I followed Jinnah and looking for the last time through sorrowful and tearful eyes at the mortal remains of the lovely and beautiful immortal soul, I promised to Ruttie that one day I would write her full story….”3

    Ibid.

    M. C. Chagla described it thus:

    “She was buried on February 22 in Bombay according to Muslim rites. Jinnah sat like a statue throughout the funeral but when asked to throw earth on the grave, he broke down and wept. That was the only time when I found Jinnah betraying some shadow of human weakness. It’s not a well publicised fact that as a young student in England it had been one of Jinnah’s dreams to play Romeo at The Globe. It is a strange twist of fate that a love story that started like a fairy tale ended as a haunting tragedy to rival any of Shakespeare’s dramas. ”

    Darwaish, “The Softer Side of Mr. Jinnah” (Globeistan.com).

    Religion restricts, politics prohibits

    her parents would have consigned her
    to a     Tower of Silence
    she wanted to be cremated
    but as Jinnah’s wife
    she was caged underground

    religion restricts
    politics prohibits

    Mahbano, Masoumeh, and Morvarid
    are to be left at dakhma
    Manisha, Manorama, and Menka
    are destined to be burned
    Mariam, Mahjabin, and Mominah
    are to be imprisoned 6 feet under …

    religion is like a life sentence,
    freedom or parole are hard to come by

    Jinnah meets Kanji

    Next evening, Jinnah met Kanji to know about her final days. Kanji:

    “Never have I found a man so sad and so bitter. He screamed his heart out, speaking to me for over two hours, myself listening to him patiently and sympathetically, occasionally putting a word here and there. Something I saw had snapped in him. The death of his wife was not just a sad event, nor just something to be grieved over, but he took it, this act of God, as a failure and a personal defeat in his life. I am afraid he never recovered right till the end of his life from this terrible shock.”

    Dwarkadas, p. 58.

    Jinnah and Kanji received condolence messages from India’s Viceroy Lord Irwin, Sarojini Naidu (who was in North America at that time), Jiddu Krishnamurti, and others.

    Could anyone be blamed?

    We know about Ruttie’s pain and suffering through her correspondence with Mrs. Naidu and her two daughters, Leilamani and especially Padmaja. and the exchange of letters between the Naidu women. Also Ruttie’s friendship with and her constant need for Kanji throws some light on her sadness and depression. But from Jinnah’s side we know almost nothing of his intense sorrow except for a few sentences spoken to his close friends here and there on rare occasions.

    Thirty nine years after Ruttie’s passing, Kanji was interviewed by an Urdu writer from Pakistan Syed Shahabuddin Dosnani in February 1968, in his apartment in Bombay. Acording to Kanji, sleeping pills were always by Ruttie’s bedside and she ended her life with it. Kanji:

    “She [Ruttie] chose to die on her birthday.”

    Reddy, p. 358.

    It is very tragic that such a wonderful person went to waste and met an untimely death.

    Years later, Jinnah told a friend’s wife:

    “She was a child and I should never have married her. The fault was mine.”

    Reddy, p. 362.

    Let us suppose Ruttie was born in 1880. and was in her mid thirties at the time of their marriage, would it have made their married life more workable? That is doubtful. The problems of time, attention, intimacy, and communication would have cropped up even with a spouse of same age group whether it was with Ruttie or some other person. It was not Ruttie’s age but her passion to live life to fullest and her need for companionship that would have created problems. The marriage would have worked whether the spouse was a “child” or same age person if that person was of a quiet and introverted nature, and not as needy.

    One could say that with Ruttie, Jinnah’s was a second marriage — in a sense that Jinnah was already wedded to politics and was committed to it. But then one has to take into account the fact that Ruttie was almost cut off from her family and from her community (Parsis). Also, Ruttie’s age and her vulnerability made her dependent on Jinnah for all kinds of support, so Jinnah was somewhat right at the assessment.

    To be fair to Jinnah, Ruttie also caused, consciously or unconsciously, immense pain to Jinnah. It is almost impossible to find any of Jinnah’s contemporaries with similar tolerance power as him. One wonders who would have tolerated in the 1920s India, hundred years ago, that his wife was living alone in Paris for months while he was paying the expenses. And his door was open for her upon her return. Jinnah was a very liberal person, ahead of his time. What needed was a bit less solemnness and a little more fun on part of Jinnah which his serious personality and commitments didn’t permit. It was unfortunate.

    When Ruttie was in Paris for a long period, she had met Bhikaiji Rustom Cama (1861 – 1936), a friend of Hamabai Petit, Ruttie’s aunt. Madam Cama, as she was known, was a wealthy Parsi woman who had separated from her husband in India and was residing in Paris and was involved in women’s rights and Indian freedom movement. Upon learning from Ruttie about her nightclub visit with some nobleman whose overdrinking caused a car collision on their way back, Madam Cama flared-up:

    “When such a remarkable man has married you, how could you go to a nightclub with a tipsy man?”

    Reddy, p. 272.

    Madam Cama’s admonishment was harsh but could be overlooked because she was unaware of what Ruttie was going through.

    Ruttie’s was a restless soul full of energy, ideas, curiosity, intellect, bravado, knowledge, literary treasure, and more. She was a romantic but was unable to instill similar feelings in Jinnah, after a couple of years into their marriage, because of his heavy involvement with his professional and political engagements.

    Her illness and reliance on drugs cut her life prematurely short. If she would have gotten more attention from Jinnah, the multi-talented Ruttie could have utilized her potential to the maximum and could have lived longer. She would have been Pakistan’s First Lady if death had not brutally snatched her. And who knows, after Jinnah’s death, she may have been a governor of a state in Pakistan like her contemporaries Vijaya Laxmi Pandit and Padmaja Naidu were in India- or an ambassador, or she would have represented her country at United Nations or would have become a renowned poet/author. Sadly, it was not to be so.

    Two and a half decades after her death, people in Bombay reminisced about Ruttie to Hector Bolitho in these words:

    “Ah, Ruttie Petit! She was the flower of Bombay.” “She was so lively, so witty, so full of ideas and jokes.”

    Hector Bolitho, Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan (London: John Murray, 1954, p.74)

    Dr. Muhammad Ali Shaikh in his article “The Women in Jinnah’s Life” puts the blame on Ruttie,

    “While Jinnah was purpose-oriented and wanted to accord adequate attention and time to his causes in life, Rattanbai wanted to continue living a fairytale romance.”

    Shaikh is entitled to his opinion. However, Ruttie was young and may have gotten over the romantic phase, like most do, and channeled her vigor on issues that were important to her. As we have seen, Ruttie was active at women’s issues, animal welfare, etc. Her intellectual curiosity, her interest in varied subjects, and her prolific reading wouldn’t have permitted her to be in the romantic state for too long. Who knows, she could have been a great writer, poet, or activist.

    The time and company she was not getting from Jinnah, she was looking or begging from Mrs. Naidu and Kanji. At the end of April 1927 Ruttie and Mrs. Naidu met in Lahore. Ruttie begged her to spend a few days with her. Ruttie’s troubled state prompted Mrs. Naidu to accompany her till Rawalpindi but she couldn’t part due to Ruttie’s insistence and went to Kashmir. Upon Mrs. Naidu’s departure, Ruttie wept. Mrs. Naidu to Padmaja:

    “Poor child!” “How she cried when I left. How she pleaded for me to stay and for me to bring you in June. …”

    Reddy, p. 326.

    It was indeed a tragic end.

    Cruel contrast

    Jinnah founded a nation; Ruttie didn’t even manage to find herself.

    Post Ruttie

    Jinnah was heart broken.

    All Ruttie’s books, jewelry, clothes, and other items were packed and put aside.

    Religion had been used in India before but Gandhi exploited it on a national scale. Post three Round Table Conferences between the British government and Indian politicians (November 1930 to December 1932), achieved nothing of significance, Jinnah, attended the first one.

    Jinnah decided to settle in Hampstead, an area in London, where he bought a house in September 1931. He was joined by his daughter Dina and his sister Fatima, who had quit her dental practice in Bombay. She devoted the rest of her life to Jinnah. Dina joined a school and Jinnah started his practice at Privy Council.

    The Manchester Guardian had in 1931 described various groups’ perception of Jinnah at the Round Table Conference:

    “Mr. Jinnah’s position at the Round Table Conference was unique. The Hindus thought he was a Muslim communalist, the Muslims took him to be pro-Hindu, the princes deemed him to be too democratic. The Britishers considered him a rabid extremist-with the result that he was everywhere but nowhere. None wanted him.”

    In 1934, when prominent Indian Muslim League leaders begged him to come back and take over the party leadership, Jinnah returned to India. Dewan Chamanlal also wanted him back in politics. Jinnah took over the leadership of Muslim League, which didn’t do very well in the 1937 provincial elections. In Bombay and UP (the United Provinces), the Congress refused Muslim League a place in the cabinet unless they switched over to Congress. Jinnah’s plea for a “united front” of Muslim League and Congress was rejected by arrogant Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Party, including Gandhi. (A. G. Noorani, “Why Jinnah became defiant,” Frontline, August 21, 2013.

    Aijaz Ahmad points out Congress leaders’ folly in refusing Jinnah’s offer.

    “Few realized that such acts of generosity were necessary if the Congress was to win the confidence of those who felt threatened by the size of its victory; if Jinnah was capable of seeking a ‘united front’ he was also capable of whipping up hysteria on the charge that the ‘Hindu party’ which had taken over was refusing to share with the Muslims any part of its power.”

    Ahmad, p. 14.

    The Congress Party perceived itself as a vast umbrella which wanted all the groups belonging to different castes, ethnicity, and religions to be a part of it.

    So Jinnah used his religious card, vehemently.

    “… The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and litterateurs. They neither intermarry nor interdine together and, indeed, they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. … To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built for the government of such a state.”

    Banglapedia, “Two Nation Theory.”

    (Jinnah was not the first to propound the two-nation theory; several Hindu leaders, including Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, had offered such plans, as far as 1860s. See Shamsul Islam, “Guilty men of the two-nation theory: A Hindutva project borrowed by Jinnah,” Sabrang, 16 May, 2018.)

    In 1936, Jinnah’s daughter Dina fell in love with Neville Ness Wadia, a Christian. (Wadia’s father was born in a Parsee family but had converted to Christianity.) Later on, Neville Ness Wadia converted to Zoroastrianism. Dina had her maternal grandmother’s approval but not of Jinnah.

    Dina countered Jinnah:

    “Why don’t you grant me the freedom which you had in choosing your lifepartner.”

    Saadat Hasan Manto, “Mera Sahab” at Rekhta in both Devanagari & Urdu scripts.

    Jinnah’s reason for insisting Dina marry a Muslim man was a political one because by this time he was deep into the religious swamp. Dina went ahead with the marriage and their relationship got strained.

    Jinnah was a tough person but once in a while he was overcome with memories of Ruttie and Dina so he would order a trunk with Ruttie’s and Dina’s clothes and would reminisce over them; his eyes would get wet.

    (Great Urdu short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto got the above and many other tidbits from Jinnah’s driver Mohammad Hanif Azad. See Manto’s Mera Sahab at Rekhta which has it in both Devanagari & Urdu scripts. Azad4 has narrated the incidents in an interesting manner.)

    Memory Lane has nothing but agonies

    in the middle of the night
    when darkness and loneliness commingled
    the heart wept in whispers
    the mind strolled down memory lane
    there is no joy or bliss
    only pain, sorrow, and agony
    solace is urgently needed–
    it’s the necessity of the moment
    the ship-shaped trunk was ordered to be opened
    Ruttie and Dina’s clothes were spread out
    Jinnah stared at those clothes
    recreating the happy family moments
    remembering the two beautiful women
    one a wife, other a daughter
    one no more, other estranged
    like a dead man standing,
    heart’s pain expressed through tears
    monocle removed, tears wiped off

    After sometime the daughter-father reconciled. Dina and Jinnah corresponded regularly. In 1943, Dina and Neville divorced.

    [Jinnah’s (1939) Will also had Dina and her children as beneficiaries. Jinnah didn’t make any changes to the Will. The Will in its entirety is in Khwaja Razi Haider, “Ruttie Jinnah: The Story Told and Untold” (Karachi: University of Karachi, Appendix IV, p. 155-7.)]

    In August 1947, before departing for Karachi, Jinnah visited Dina and her two children. He gave the Karakul cap he was wearing to his grandson Nusli Wadia. Jinnah also stopped by Ruttie’s grave to say goodbye.

    IMAGE/Dr Muhammad Ali Shaikh/National Archives Islamabad/Dawn/Duck Duck Go

    The love between Ruttie and Jinnah was never lost and they always had it in their hearts till the end.

    Jinnah never got married or had an affair with any one. Ruttie was close to Kanji and she could have found loving comfort in his company if she wanted too, but she never did. She loved Jinnah only.

    Perhaps, some romances are destined that way.

    Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity who took a 180 degree detour from secularism to don an Islamic cap was back to his secularist self when he got Pakistan. On August 11, Jinnah addressed the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan:

    “… You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State….

    “… in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

    On August 14, Pakistan came into existence and the next day India got its independence. It was one of history’s greatest tragedies with communal killing on a vast scale, accompanied by vast scale destruction and innumerable refugees.

    Gandhi. In less than six months after British left, on January 30, 1948, Gandhi became the victim of a Hindu fanatic — Nathuram Godse who pumped three bullets in his chest. One has to really appreciate Gandhi’s efforts during post Partition butchery to save Muslim lives in Delhi and other areas. The shots fired at Gandhi were forewarning of the Hindu fascist raj India will one day become.5

    Jinnah. More than seven months after Gandhi’s assassination, Jinnah passed away on September 11, 1948 after suffering from tuberculosis which he was infected with many years ago but was known only to his Parsi doctor J. A. L. Patel, his sister Fatima, and very few other people. Jinnah was a chain smoker who had smoked for three decades 50 or more Craven “A” cigarettes a day. In May 1946, Dr. Patel had warned him to take things very easy because he only had a year or two left to live. Jinnah had survived the past ten years, in the words of Dr. Patel, on “will power, whiskey and cigarettes..” [Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975, p. 124-6.)]

    From Quetta, where Jinnah was recuperating, he was flown back to Karachi. The ambulance carrying Jinnah, then Governor General of Pakistan, from Karachi airport to the government house broke down. It took a long time for another vehicle to arrive. Military Secretary Colonel Birnie was the only person sent to receive Jinnah. There was no other person or vehicle. It definitely was strange and suspicious. Was Liaquat Ali Khan’s (Jinnah’s right hand) government waiting for Jinnah to die as soon as possible? Jinnah said so, according to his sister.6

    Sister Phyllis Dunham, the nurse who was attending Jinnah in the ambulance, said they were near the refugee camp. There was mud and hundreds of flies. She fanned Jinnah’s face with a piece of cardboard to keep the flies away.

    “I was alone with him for a few minutes and he made a gesture I shall never forget. He moved his arm free of the sheet, and placed his hand on my arm. He did not speak, but there was such a look of gratitude in his eyes. It was all the reward I needed, for anything I had done. His soul was in his eyes at that moment.”

    The same evening, that is, September 11, 1949, Jinnah passed away.

    Dina flew into Karachi from Bombay to attend her father’s funeral. She then returned back to Bombay. After Partition, Dina had decided to stay in India but later on moved to New York, USA.

    Dina Wadia (extreme left), Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s only child, flew in to attend her father’s funeral. Second from right is Jinnah’s sister Fatima. PHOTO/The Press Information Department, Ministry of Information, Broadcasting & National Heritage, Islamabad/Dawn

    Sarojini Naidu (known as “Nightingale of India” or “Bharat Kokila,” a name given by Gandhi), became the governor of Indian state of UP or United Provinces after independence. She had a fatal cardiac arrest on March 2, 1949.

    Fatima Jinnah. (In Pakistan, she is known as Mader-e Millat or Mother of the Nation.) On the first couple of death anniversaries of Jinnah, his sister Fatima was not allowed to make radio speeches. In 1951, she was allowed but was censored. Some pages had disappeared from her book My Brother before it reached the publisher, because they were deemed to be “against the ideology of Pakistan.” (See the pages here for the ideology crap.)

    In 1965, the opposition parties contesting the elections against the US supported military dictator Field Marshall General Ayub Khan persuaded Ms. Jinnah to contest the presidential election against Ayub Khan. Fatima gave a good fight but lost the election because it was rigged. However, she won in both Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, and also in Dacca, East Pakistan’s capital. Fatima Jinnah passed away on July 9, 1967.7

    Kanji Dwarkadas was the senior-most personnel officer and labor consultant in India. In 1946 and 1951, he was invited by the United States government to study housing and labour problems. He passed away in the early 1970s.

    Padmaja was the fourth governor of the Indian state of West Bengal from November 1956 to June 1967. Padmaja waited for Nehru to propose but he never did because he wanted to avoid offending his daughter Indira’s feelings. But they lived together. Nehru had affairs with many other women8 too. Padmaja was aware of it. She once said: “Nehru is not a one woman man!”

    Independent India’s first prime minister Nehru’s seventeen year rule deserves high praise; it was good for minorities. Nehru was worried about the majority communalism when he said: “Communalism of the majority is far more dangerous than the communalism of the minority.” He passed away on 27 May 1964. Since Hindu nationalist Modi came to power in 2014, his government never misses a chance to vilify Nehru.

    Padmaja Naidu passed away on May 2, 1975.

    Dina avoided state invitations from Pakistan but did visit again in March 2004 at the invitation of former chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board Sheharyar Khan to watch India/Pakistan cricket match in Lahore. It was termed “cricket diplomacy” as she and her family, like so many Indians and Pakistanis, wanted to see good relations between both countries. She and her son Nusli Wadia and her grand sons Jehangir and Ness, visited her father’s mausoleum in Karachi. In the visitors’ book, she wrote:

    “This has been very sad and wonderful for me. May his dream for Pakistan come true.”

    Dina passed away on November 2, 2017.9

    ENDNOTES:

    The post The Tragic Tale of a Flower that Wilted too Soon (Part 2 of 2) first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Gandhi’s political power provided him an opportunity to have many girl friends. Whereas his genius let him juggle and manage these relations while having a wife. Madeleine Slade (Mirabehn), Sushila Nayar, Bibi Amtus Salam are some of the females Gandhi was close to. Some of the extracts from Gandhi’s letters:

    “You will continue to haunt me in my sleep. No wonder that [your husband] Panditji (Rambhuj Dutt) calls you the greatest shakti. You may cast that spell over him. You are performing the same trick over me.”

    In another letter dated January 23, 1920, Gandhi wrote, “Saraladevi has been showering her love on me in every possible way.”

    The nature of their relationship is further uncovered in a letter dated August 23, 1920: “You are mine in the purest sense. You ask for a reward of your great tender, well, it is its own reward.”

    Acutely aware of how jealous Kasturba was of several of his adoring disciples, Gandhi tried at first to disarm his wife of such feelings by asking Esther “to help Ba in the Kitchen”. But he warned his “Dear Child” that

    “Ba has not an even temper. She is not always sweet. And she can be petty… You will therefore have to summon to your aid all your Christian charity to be able to return largeness against pettiness… To pity the person who slights you… And so, my dear Esther, if you find Mrs. Gandhi trying your nerves, you must avoid the close association I am suggesting to you.”

    It did not work, of course. Kasturba treated his “Dear child” so harshly in her kitchen that Esther soon broke down. “You were with me the whole of yesterday and during the night. I shall pray that you may be healthier in mind, body and spirit,” Bapu wrote to console Dear Child Esther, “with deep love.”… Gandhi was “glad you opened out heart” about his “difficult” wife. He immediately insisted that Esther must have a “separate Kitchen” for herself. “My heart is with you in your sorrow.”
    2    See “Gandhi Kept On …” (Counterpunch, August 14, 2015).
    3    Kanji: “… It has taken me more than thirty years to fulfil this promise. I dedicated to Ruttie my 85 page “Gandhiji through my Diary Leaves” (1915-1948), published in May 1950.” Dwarkadas, p. 58.
    4    Prior to joining Jinnah, Azad used to work as an extra in Bombay film industry. Post Partition, he worked as a character actor in Pakistan film industry.)
    5    Since 2014, Hindu Modi has created internal partition in India by turning Muslims, over 14% of India’s population, into second class citizens. Other minorities are not doing any better either. Modi’s rise to power, i.e., from Gujarat state’s chief minister to India’s premier, was on the Muslim corpses piled under his watch. He was termed the “butcher of Gujarat.”

    Aijaz Ahmad: “… communal violence always leads to very rich electoral dividends for the BJP [Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party] and its associates …”

    Modi government has banned the recent two part BBC documentary on Gujarat genocide. Many websites, including Elon Musk’s Twitter, have been ordered to take down the documentary; they have complied. Musk, “a free-speech absolutist,” had no qualms in carrying out Modi’s order because India is a huge market. In 2019, the US government overthrew Bolivia’s government. Musk boasted: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” One is prompted to ask Musk: How about a coup in India.? No way, Musk is waiting for a tax break for Tesla in India. One of opposition politician in India, Mahua Moitra, had posted the video on her twitter account but has been taken off; same with the US actor John Cusack‘s twitter account.
    6    Why was Jinnah transported in a broken ambulance and why was there not a spare vehicle? The question has been raised many times but the people in power are neither in a hurry nor are willing to answer. Just after three years, Liaquat Ali Khan, born in 1895, was shot twice during a public rally on October 16, 1951. He was rushed to a hospital but didn’t survive. Within a few seconds after shooting, the police killed the assassin. Pakistan was just a four year old baby then, but its police was far too mature in this matter. It finished the assassin and thus saved lot of the poor country’s money and time from being wasted on finding the real culprits. (In November 1963, US President John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead in the Dallas Police Headquarters, just two days after Kennedy’s murder, by a nightclub owner Jack Ruby.)

    First week of March in 1949 witnessed Allah, Muhammad, and Koran making inroads in Pakistan via Objectives Resolution. Four years later, the Islamists went after one of the Muslim minorities, the Ahmadis, to declare them non-Muslims. They succeeded in 1974. Jogendra Nath Mandal, a Hindu, whom Jinnah had chosen as one of his ministers, had felt insignificant after Jinnah’s death and handed his resignation to Liaquat Ali Khan and migrated to India.

    (Those interested in understanding the tragic condition of minorities in Pakistan should read Mandal’s entire letter.

    Unlike the Hindu parties in India, the Islamic parties in Pakistan have never reached the corridors of power, but then have never been far from the people in power. They have forced politicians to do things in the name of Islam which have done great harm to the country. On the other hand, the army and politicians also use them when needed. On January 17, 2023, the Pakistan’s National Assembly voted to broaden the blasphemy laws by including Prophet Muhammad’s companions which may be a huge number. It seems, pretty soon, the National Assembly will add another clause to the blasphemy laws declaring anyone criticizing the members of the ruling class for their corrupt, criminal, conscienceless actions as blasphemous because they are relatives of Muhammad or of Muhammad’ companions. Nothing is impossible for people in power. (Look at Planet’s Earth’s current Landlord who wants Gaza as “Riviera of the Middle East” which is now in the ruin due to former Landlord‘s genocidal war on Palestinians who are all alone.)

    Pakistan imported 2200 luxury cars in the second half of 2022. A country with more than 232 million people has mere $16 billion in reserves as of February 2025! Every now and then, Pakistani beggars have to rush to China, UAE, Saudi Arabia, or IMF (International Monetary Fund) for either a few billion dollars loan or to extend the payment time. IMF loans are accompanied with harsh conditions — and as usual, the common people bear the brunt.

    S. Akbar Zaidi puts it bluntly:

    “The irony of ironies. An institution which across the globe has been acknowledged as anti-people, elitist and responsible for increasing poverty, misery and destitution across dozens of countries, is now being seen as Pakistan’s only saviour, as it seems the rulers in this country have come round to restarting an agreement which has been in abeyance for almost a year.”

    Another thing the government does, with the blessing of the army, is to apply censorship. In February 2023, access to Wikipedia, a free source of information for students and other people in a country where the government doesn’t provide much, blocked. The reason: Pakistan wants Wikipedia to remove “blasphemous content.” How could you fight this idiocy. After a few days, the ban was lifted. In January 2025, some important amendments were passed to the 2016 Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) which has become a tool to harass media people and journalists — more than 200 such incidents have happened. The army is also good at silencing or disappering its critics or people asking for their rights, such as people of Balochistan.

    The main opposition leader and former Prime Minister Imran Khan (a Pakistani version of Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Tayyip Erdogan, and Victor Orban) is not any better.
    7    If common sense had prevailed over the US supported generals and the elite that this was a golden opportunity to repair relations with the eastern wing, which had been turned into West Pakistan’s colony, it would have saved the break up of Pakistan. It didn’t. After a bloody war, fought in East Pakistan with killings, rapes, and devastation, in December 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
    8    Nehru’s sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit: “Didn’t you know, Pupul?” They lived together for years–for years.” “He felt that Indu [Indira Gandhi] had been hurt enough. He did not want to hurt her further.”

    Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: A Biography, p. 92.

    Nehru had affairs with some other women too, including Lady Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, who presided over India’s partition. Mountbatten’s was an open marriage
    9    In 2007, Dina wrote a letter to India’s then Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh requesting to hand over Jinnah’s Bombay/Mumbai house (South Court, also called Jinnah House) to her with an assurance the house will be used for personal use without any commercial motive.

    “It is now almost 60 years since my father’s death and I have been deprived of my house where I grew up and lived until I married.” “I request you return it to me.”

    Dr. Singh never replied back; had no intention to return back the property.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Being disabled under the Tories was bad. With Labour, it’s soul destroying

    I’ve been struggling to write this column for a while now. Obviously there’s been the personal reasons and professional reasons – both of which become more and more blurred every day. This is especially true when you’re a disability rights columnist and activist who is juggling editing a book, supporting the disabled community, and mourning the loss of both your grandparents.

    There’s also the fact that I’m very aware as someone who focuses on media ableism of the amount of vile rhetoric being pushed out by the government via the corporate media. This itself is having more of a toll on disabled people than the lack of policy announcements is.

    For disabled people, the waters are muddy enough

    It seems like every day a senior official is telling the papers that we don’t deserve to live, and I’m really ultra-aware that highlighting every instance of that will not only cause further distress to disabled people, but also put a huge strain on my mental health.

    In a similar vein, whilst there aren’t any concrete policies out yet I’m really conscious that all of this shit-slinging is on purpose to muddy the waters and turn non-disabled people against us – whilst scaring disabled people into limiting their lives. So, I don’t want to add to the dis-and misinformation that’s being spread.

    But I think more than anything the reason I’m really struggling to write at the moment is because I wanted to have hope. I, perhaps naively, wanted to have a glimmer of belief that life would become a tiny bit easier for disabled people once we got the Tories out. I now feel foolish for ever thinking that.

    If they wanted to, they would’ve

    Labour might’ve only been in power for seven months, but there’s so much they could’ve done in that time that they’ve purposefully delayed.

    They could’ve called off the PIP consultation the very first week if they wanted to, but they let it run it’s course. Despite wanting to launch their own consultation in the spring, which will obviously be totally different, they said they would be paying attention to every response. The disability minister, somewhat patronisingly, even praised disabled people for giving them so many responses to read.

    Labour could’ve done a manner of things to reassure disabled people that life won’t be harder under their governance, but it’s time to face facts that it will be, it already is.

    Because whilst they haven’t given us any concrete plans, they have had plenty of time to tell the media that disabled people on benefits are “taking the mickey”, point out that loads of kids are claiming to have mental health problems now (wonder why), and conveniently reveal that 450,000 more people claimed PIP and DLA last year. And that’s just in the last week or so.

    ‘It’s only been seven months’, and we’ve got another 5 years of this shit

    I know, historically, Labour has always been bad for disabled people (trust me I’ve just written a book about it) but I wanted to hope deep down that nothing could be worse than the last fourteen years of the Tories.

    But the Tories were only able to succeed because of the groundwork that Tony Blair had laid down. Now the people who supported Blair’s vile abuse of disabled people are in charge and there’s nobody to oppose them.

    It was staggering to watch the Tories get worse and worse and worse over the years. But perhaps that’s also why this has been so soul-crushing, because Labour have been able to do this in such a short space of time.

    So many people say ‘give them a chance, it’s only been seven months’. Whereas I can’t believe it’s only been seven months.

    If they’ve created this hostile an environment for disabled people in just the first seven months – what do the next five years hold? And how many of us will still be here to tell the tale at the end of it?

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Musk not only plans to rule the US but also the skies, the seas, and the stratosphere.

    Ever since Donald Trump assumed office on 20 January 2025, the mood in the air has felt rather sombre and bleak. It has become apparent that the US is no longer ruled in a traditional way. Now, it is instead governed by the unelected Elon Musk and his duplicitous DOGE team.

    Elon Musk and DOGE: an unelected power grab?

    Just last week, Musk stood in the Oval Office oddly accompanied by his son “X Ash a Twelve” – with critics labelling the event as a coup d’état. In other words, it was a full-scale takeover of the US government which blatantly ignores the constitution and where Trump, for once, wasn’t the centre of attention.

    Taking questions from reporters, Musk denied a hostile power grab.

    However, he has been involved in some of the most disputed decisions made by the Trump administration so far. This includes the removal of regulations and even gaining access to the Treasury Payments Department, which has sparked fear throughout the streets of Washington and beyond.

    It must be said that the world’s richest man standing up in the world’s highest office taking questions from reporters doesn’t exactly make one feel comfortable about the current state of the US. It now resembles an oligarchy rather than a democracy, where the super-rich tech bros of Silicon Valley sit on the throne.

    As a businessman, Musk appears to wield a great deal of power and prowess. His platform X is a mouthpiece that he uses to promote his own tweets and spread misinformation to his over 200 million followers. It almost resembles, and darkly echoes, “Newspeak from 1984”. This along with his new major role in government appears to have gone completely unchallenged, with the only potential guardrails being the courts.

    Musk using his child as PR?

    He truly has taken Washington and the US into his orbit. Musk has caused a meteor storm to last for years to come through the new level of personal control he possesses. He has demonstrated that he is the puppeteer controlling his new puppet (Trump).

    Musk appears to be relishing in this, and his son X is indefinitely aware of this too. The video of him telling Trump that he wanted him to “shush his mouth” whilst his father was speaking has since gone viral.

    “Taking your child to work day” also seems to hit differently when it is in the grandeur of the oval office. Musk used his child as PR tool to falsely enforce to the American public that he is a good and present father who can get on the working person’s level. However, when X appeared to begin to pick his nose and wipe the residue on the resolute desk, this “sweet image” might have changed for MAGA loyalists.

    I believe using your child as a way of humanising you isn’t exactly what I would describe as “cute” or “fatherly” – but rather a public stunt to appear angelic and innocent to the public.

    Despite this, Musk continues to deny a hostile takeover of the US government. He insists that he is simply trying to help the American people, through instigating major government reform and stopping fiscal spending where it isn’t needed.

    Judicial oversight hampered by social media

    However, his power has been challenged by the courts and judges who labelled what he was doing as “unconstitutional”. This led to Musk attacking them online and calling for them to be impeached for “interference”. He took to X to say “these are grounds for impeachment of the judge” because they ordered his proposed spending freeze to be stopped.

    Since these comments, and further abuse of judges on X from both Trump and JD Vance, former judges have expressed grave concerns over potential threats of violence that they could face – particularly from die hard MAGA fans who would clearly stop at nothing in the name of Trump.

    Due to the fact that judges are also defenceless when countering false allegations, this only makes the situation worse. They cannot challenge the Trump administration’s arguments. It is clearly alarming that Musk’s’ power seems to have gone unchecked by both the constitution and the Trump team. He has evidently exceeded his powers at the expense of congress and voters, purely for his own personal gain.

    However, there are some critics of Musk’s’ unchecked power who are brave enough to speak out about it.

    Musk’s takeover a “very dangerous moment”

    For example, Bernie Sanders said in an interview on CNN that “Musk is clearly running the show”. He warned that the country is at a “very dangerous moment” in time, with an oligarchy taking shape in the US.

    Furthermore, Robert Reich – an outspoken critic of Trump and former secretary of labour under President Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter – believes that there is little that the US can do to constrain Musk and reign him in. However, Reich suggests that a way of stopping him might be to strengthen laws that are applied to social media companies against hate speech as well as disengaging from any further technological endeavours with him.

    Yet Musk appears unbothered by his critics. He believes that he can do whatever he wants due to the mandate that Americans gave to Trump during the 2024 election.

    At several points during interviews with the press he has claimed that he is restoring the “will of the people”. This seems a little hypocritical considering he is an unelected member of the new government.

    But whilst Trump goes off to play golf at Mar a Lago, Musk appears to sit on the golden throne. He continues to spread misinformation online to convince his MAGA cult followers, who show absolute fealty to him, that he is a “man of the people”.

    The bromance is worlds apart from the average working person

    In fact, Musk is worlds apart from the average working person. He is simply pursuing his own personal interests whilst ripping up the constitution in the process. He is doing this through destroying critical federal agencies, firing civil servants en masse, and showing utter disdain for the rule of law.

    Recently, Musk and Trump have sat down with right-wing media outlet Fox News and the journalist Sean Hannity to discuss their relationship. During it, they gushed over each other. In one particularly eery clip, they discussed the Trump campaign and their idea that the media “was trying to drive them apart” by referring to Musk (albeit correctly) as the “President”.

    Musk denied this and continued the cheesy bromance on camera as well as stating his adoration for the president.

    Trump also praised the DOGE department calling it “tremendous”. However, I wouldn’t say “tremendous’ or “groundbreaking” was a fitting way to describe the department.

    Musk’s wrecking ball couldn’t be sending a clearer message

    Many people working for the National Nuclear Security Administration have lost their jobs as Musk has taken a wrecking ball to several key government branches which serve the American people.

    Cuts to jobs have also included firing hundreds of employees at food and medical testing facilities. This could lead to epidemics and health outbreaks.

    Further to this, cuts to USAID and attempts to destroy it seem to have brought a great deal of joy to Musk. He aims to reduce USAID staff from 10,000 employees to just 600.

    All these cuts will inevitably lead to great human costs. There could be outbreaks of epidemics and dangerous viruses. The cuts are cruel and incredibly harmful to those in war zones and low-income countries. These people will now struggle to access vital healthcare and nutritious food.

    After Nazi salutes, the dismantling of the pillars of democracy, and the tearing up of the constitution and virtually the American flag, the message couldn’t be clearer. Elon Musk not only plans to rule the US, but also the skies, the seas, and the stratosphere.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Megan Miley

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: Starmer’s sabre-rattling jingoism is the last refuge of a scoundrel

    What on earth does Keir Starmer think he is doing?

    I’ve gone back through the untold pledges, the impossible missions, the multitude of milestones, the uncosted commitments and plethora of broken promises, and I couldn’t find a single mention of deploying British soldiers to fight a war for a state with a bit of a Nazi problem.

    The British army, made up of 74,000 regular forces personnel and 25,000 reservists, is around half the size of military superpowers such as… erm… Myanmar, Morocco, and Colombia.

    If Starmer was planning to have a shit fight, it’s best not to go armed with little more than a fart.

    Does the prime minister have any children of military service age? When I see a gun-toting Starmer Junior cosplaying on the streets of Mariupol in their Dad’s Army outfit — the one he gets out for the occasional photo-opportunity — I’ll review my stance, but until that time, and not before, the Prime Minister shouldn’t even consider putting someone else’s children in front of one of the most powerful militaries on earth.

    I don’t think that’s particularly controversial, and I certainly have no ill feelings towards any of Starmer’s offspring because that would make me as bad as their pathetic, desperate old man.

    But if you’re not willing to dip your toes into the bath to see how hot the water is you certainly shouldn’t be contemplating the possibility of getting someone else to dip theirs in first.

    Keir Starmer’s jingoism is opportunistic hypocrisy

    Starmer is an opportunistic hypocrite. The attempt to appeal to the often jingoistic British public isn’t entirely dissimilar to Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza.

    The corrupt, genocidal fugitive Netanyahu has been clinging on to power by a thread for some time. The destruction of Gaza helped him buy more time with the demonstrably racist Israeli public.

    Starmer is in a whole heap of trouble at home. His party is less popular than a bunch of shouty, white, tweed-clad, urine-scented Faragists and the Labour Party still hasn’t recovered from the worst start for a government in living memory. Just this week, voters were asked if they trust the Labour Party. Only 16% said they trust Labour.

    Their immigration policy has alienated more people than it has attracted, pretend-economist Rachel Reeves’ plan for growth only seems to apply to poverty and destitution, the filthy rich continue to get considerably richer, and the ‘moderate’ people that loaned Labour their vote just to get rid of the Tories are wondering when a Labour government will actually take office.

    Meanwhile…

    Just this past week, Labour has confirmed they will be cutting £3 billion from disability benefits. Red Tory minister, Stephen Timms claimed “money is tight”, while somehow managing to keep a straight face, safe in the knowledge his boss has already committed £3 billion a year to Ukraine, for as long as it takes.

    Starmer has been desperately thrashing around for a distraction for some time. Trump, Musk and Gaza didn’t serve the intended purpose, so why not talk up throwing a load of British lives into the lion’s den?

    Starmer’s spinners know they have a far greater chance of causing a significant distraction if their liability of a leader is laughably flexing our red, white and blue muscles on the global stage.

    Isn’t patriotism said to be the last refuge of the scoundrel?

    What next? Conscription?

    Look at it from Starmer’s point of view. The United States’ long withdrawal from Europe has moved up a gear with the arrival of the neofascist Trump. So who is going to step up to the plate?

    The right-wing establishment media will bang the war drum, of course, they still think Britannia rules the waves rather than a shitty little isolated island that prefers to waive the rules, these days.

    But they, and Britain’s biggest arms manufacturers, will be telling Starmer how British boots on the ground in Ukraine will save his chaos-ridden, shambles of a government at home.

    If Starmer honestly believes the British public will tolerate the brutal deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of our children to fight a proxy war against Putinist Russia in a former Soviet state, he’s even more deluded, desperate and dangerous than I ever thought possible.

    What next? Conscription? What worked in 1940 isn’t going to work in 2025.

    Stick to playing Fortnite

    Back in the Forties, young people were ready to sign up to fight against fascism on the continent of Europe. Skip forward eighty-odd years and you will see your average young person prefers to fight ghouls on the PlayStation, or document their every move on TikTok.

    And good for them. Stick to playing Fortnite. Go and get drunk with your friends, share a spliff, start a band, play football, do what young people do and NEVER become a victim of conformity.

    What is it with this government and assisted dying? If they’re not telling disabled people that they are a worthless burden on their loved ones and society as a whole, they are talking up sending young people to face their inevitable, gruesome demise under the guise of “peace keeping”.

    We may as well do a block-booking with Pure Cremation at this rate, as this really will not end well for us.

    Starmer will be on Trident, next

    You keep peace with diplomacy, Mr Starmer, not poorly-equipped British teenagers carrying hand grenades.

    I have no doubt this conversation will soon move on to the apparent importance of our nuclear deterrent, and why we need to further invest in something we are never going to have any use for.

    The hawks have a point though.

    What could be better than the threat of Trident while Russian hackers bring down the IT infrastructure of our NHS?

    “Oi, Nikita, put down that gallon of Novichok or we’ll get on the phone to Trump and ask him if we can nuke your Commie ass, when he’s finished his round of golf”.

    Our nuclear deterrent serves no greater purpose than me standing tall at the very highest point of the White Cliffs of Dover, trying to scare off the Russians with a Care Bear stare.

    You’ll have to Google that one, kids.

    In fact, at least I’d provide you with a laugh or two, and you’d even get a bit of change out of £200 billion.

    Not much though.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • It’s time to move on from Corbynism – just as Jeremy himself seems to have done

    There has been an awful lot of talk in the last month or so, with the rise of Reform, as to whether former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn will form a new coalition of independents to provide a left alternative to the Keir Starmer government. In a sense one could understand this. After all, Corbyn received a larger amount of the popular vote in 2017 than Starmer did in the recent constituency landslide.

    However, it could be argued that this prayer for a left-wing coalition is incredibly misguided. The sphere of electoral politics played a filthy hand in taking down Corbyn, and the left’s tendency to crawl back into parliamentarism ought to take some time out.

    Jeremy Corbyn was unfairly taken down.

    It is time to get on with our lives and focus energy elsewhere, as he continues to.

    2015 and the rise of Corbynism

    In 2015, the British Labour Party saw the beginning of the leadership of a man who captured the love of many in the country. His base was made up of those living precarious lives, struggling to survive, or see the ascendency others have had, as well as members of many other groups so dismissively ostracised by the Conservative Party of the age.

    The scaffolding of that base was the greying coals of Britain’s trade union movement, which he gained from his history of supporting them through periods of industrial strife.

    His rise was incredible to watch, as men such as Tony Benn seemed to have their ideas in the Labour Party be voiced by a powerful leadership. Accusations of dominance by the more principally left voices have been a staple in the Labour Party, really since its inception at the turn of the last century. Yet it seemed that at this time real change could be implemented by these people.

    The moments of the 2017 election, various campaigning spots such as the infamous Glastonbury moment, and his seeming ability to blend in with cultural figures not often associated with mainstream politics were stunning. Many local activists took time away from grassroots campaigning and took to door-knocking for him. But all of these efforts were wrung out, and the British conservative and liberal establishment took to dismantling his leadership.

    His policies and general approach to politics is also what attracted both the praise and ire of many.

    Policies that empowered grass-roots movements

    In a recent interview, Corbyn ally Andrew Murray discussed the appeals to Corbyn’s particular form of social democracy. The most important and most poignant, given the situation in Gaza, is Corbyn’s anti-imperialism.

    Imperialism, as Murray states, is endemic to British culture and material existence as a modern nation. Those who have either lived it or taken the time to learn its history know it funds our infrastructure, our industry, and our consumption. Corbyn has firmly stood against this since the beginning of his political career, and in a recent march on London by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, was questioned by the Metropolitan Police.

    Corbyn’s Labour leadership helped to open up discussions on the subjects of British and American imperialism in the UK, that are absolutely vital to cite. After Corbyn’s leadership, grassroots movements like BLM began, Rhodes must fall started its campaign, and the mass protest marches for Palestinian solidarity have been some of the most well attended in London’s history.

    This is not solely due to Corbyn – but having the Leader of the Opposition proudly stand with those oppressed in the Global South helped to spread that conversation to those perhaps without access to that knowledge from life-experience.

    Now that he is out of power, however, the conversation and the campaigning must go on without a dedicated focus on parliament, taking what Corbyn and others helped facilitate in the late 2010s and grow more of that genuine solidarity and opposition from it.

    Times have changed

    The situation seen as it now differs greatly from 2019.

    With his stand as an independent MP in his constituency of Islington North, some have reopened the wilted case for left-wing prominence in the British House of Commons. The assault on Gaza and the movement against it helped to push many away from the Labour Party’s leadership, as even moderates were queasy at the complicit nothingness of Starmer’s cabinet.

    This, combined with terror at Reform’s rise, brought the hopes of a new Corbyn-led coalition after the July election.

    However, this is simply not going to be a successful endeavour, for the same reasons it failed from 2015-2019.

    The reaction to any popular support for a Corbyn campaign will be identical in flavour, because parliamentary politics in the United Kingdom is a racket, moulded by a powerful media who would sweep Corbyn’s legs from him with a stockpile of smears perfected over a decade.

    The answer to this difficult situation is absolutely paramount for tackling the far right and the growing imperialist tirade. Ultimately it comes down to continuing the work that Corbyn’s legacy as leader and MP already helped begin.

    Continuing Corbynism – but not as we know it

    Local community activism should be placed centrally, in order to continue to try to build solidarity with those in our own community and those who suffer because of our governments.

    Trade union campaigning must continue and grow and show its strength – as seen in the industrial action of the last few years.

    Local grassroot work should be done with members of the community facing the sharp end of government policy and business activity.

    And international solidarity networking is of inexpressible importance, as Palestinians, Kurds, and Indigenous peoples everywhere are oppressed by systems of colonial violence.

    Parliamentarism is not the only answer for our world’s growing suffering.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By James Horton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Mental health crisis? The world is literally on fire – of course you’re anxious

    For four days in January, I sat – glued to my computer – as I watched the homes and neighbourhoods of the people I love burning to the ground in Los Angeles. I collated their addresses and I tracked the progress of the fires. I needed to know they were safe – and couldn’t look away. Even though the constant stream of images and videos were deeply upsetting. I was terrified for my friends.

    I cover natural disasters all the time – it’s literally my job to report on the climate crisis. But this time? It hit differently. For the first time, danger was heading directly for the people I love. 

    I was a mess – emotionally, psychologically, and physically. And if you were to ask a mental health professional? They would probably have told you I was in the midst of some sort of mental health crisis and given me a psychiatric diagnosis. The reality though? I was reacting in a pretty understandable way to an ongoing catastrophe. 

    We are only one month into 2025, but we have already seen wildfires destroy over 12,000 homes and kill 29 people in Los Angeles. We’ve also seen Storm Eowyn – a record-breaking cyclone – batter many parts of the UK, an earthquake in Tibet, and floods and landslides in Pekalongan, Indonesia. 

    Research shows that both adults and young people feel like their mental wellbeing is getting worse. In 2024, 15.5% of UK adults reported their mental health as either “bad” or “the worst it’s ever been”. In England alone, over 500 children are referred to mental health services every day for anxiety. Is it any wonder, when the world is literally burning? How could you watch the news and not be filled with anxiety for what is to come?

    Mental Health Bill

    The Mental Health Bill [2025] is making its way through the House of Lords. It is an update to the Mental Health Act [1983]. This is the legal framework for assessing and treating those with severe mental health difficulties. The updated bill aims to give individuals better rights, improve mental health outcomes, and reduce inequalities. The main focus of both pieces of legislation is people who need involuntary hospital admissions.

    Obviously, there is a place for this if someone is an immediate danger to themselves or others. However, the government is spending so much time, money, and energy on dealing with the very end result of poor policies. They are quick to institutionalise. However, they are far less ready to give someone the support and care they might need to recover and thrive. Additionally, cutting someone off from their own community is completely counterintuitive in the long run.

    There is not a single piece of scientific evidence that supports the chemical imbalance theory of mental health problems. Yet still, the crux of government policy on mental health is to wait until people reach crisis point, detain them under the Mental Health Act, and medicate them. They have the ability and the political power to prevent many people from even getting to that point. They choose not to. 

    Instead, Labour could be focusing on the circumstances and conditions that we are all forced to exist in, which are creating and exacerbating mental health problems. 

    Similarly, Calum Miller, MP for Bicester, recently called on the Prime Minister to address the delays children and young people face when trying to access mental health support. He drew attention to the waiting times for Children and Adolescent Mental Health services (CAMHS) in Oxfordshire, and the rest of the country. 

    Again, instead of focusing on reducing waiting times for mental health treatment, why are they not turning their attention to improving the toxic conditions that lead so many young people to struggle with their mental health? 

    A deeply traumatic experience

    The climate crisis is a prime example of this. Thanks to TikTok and other social media platforms, we now have the ability to watch all of these disasters as they unfold. The wildfires in the Pacific Palisades, just like the flooding in Valencia last year, were practically live streamed. How do we expect anyone to watch videos of people running from danger while their houses burn down, and then get a good night’s sleep?        

    Being alive, and paying attention to the world around us has become a deeply traumatic experience. Yet, ask any mental health charity or politician and they will tell you we are in the midst of a mental health crisis. Why are we surprised that people are struggling with their mental health? All you have to do is turn on the TV or social media and a torrent of terrifying – and very real news is there to greet you. 

    James Barnes, Psychotherapist and teaching faculty at Iron Mill College, Exeter told the Canary:

    Barnes suggested that a non medical approach to looking at suffering moves away from biomedical dysfunction, towards an intelligible response – however disabling – to social, political and interpersonal circumstances.

    As the Canary previously reported, this means changing the dominant question. From ‘what’s wrong with you’, to ‘what happened to you’ or, ‘what is happening to you’.

    Barnes Continued:

    There are concrete steps that Keir Starmer’s government could be taking to improve the nation’s mental health. A great place to start would be curbing anxiety around the climate crisis. This means rather than handing out antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, they should be protecting our planet.

    The point of no return

    Climate scientists identified that 2025 was the deadline limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Passing this threshold means an even greater risk of disastrous floods, droughts, and heatwaves. At the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement. This means they agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030. The sticking point however, is that they must have peaked before 2025 – which is here. 

    From reducing the burning of fossil fuels and switching to green energy to reducing the emissions from the financial sector, there are many things the UK government could be doing to tackle the climate crisis at the source.

    Instead, it’s tinkering around at the edges of the problem with false climate solutions like carbon capture and storage (CCS) while green-lighting more environmentally-destructive projects like Heathrow’s third runway and the Stansted airport expansion. 

    The climate crisis is also inextricably linked to the cost of living crisis. There is no doubt this is also driving poor mental health. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that rates of depression were higher among people who were struggling to afford housing costs and energy bills.

    Surely it’s common sense that struggling to pay their bills would make someone sad, or numb, or anxious – or suicidal. Climate disasters such as flooding and extreme temperatures directly impact energy and food costs, making the cost of living crisis worse. 

    Brainwashing

    The government also pushes cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). This aims to get people to change their thoughts and behaviours. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But what happens when your thoughts are based upon facts?

    For example, being anxious about your future is completely understandable. After all, we just watched the Pacific Palisades burn down as a direct result of the climate crisis. Humans are hardwired to survive.

    In the UK, waiting lists for mental health treatment are estimated to now be over one million. So professionals are going to tell one million people that their thinking is the problem. Rather than the capitalist system that’s sidelining their wellbeing and destroying the world around them.

    Similarly, asking people to change their thoughts means they believe themselves and their thoughts are the problem, rather than the conditions they are living in. This means they are far less likely to question the status quo. Obviously, the government does not want people questioning their policies – because that creates a problem. 

    What is clear to me is that the world is becoming a harder and harder place to exist in. There is a new climate disaster every week. It is only a matter of time before the nation’s mental health plummets to even greater lows.

    Unless the government starts to think about the causes, instead of putting a plaster on a gaping wound they are adding fuel to an already raging fire – and there’s only one way it can end. 

    Feature image via Tricia Nelson

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • “Are You Denying that Russia Invaded Ukraine?”

    As I noted the other day, most Americans remain unaware that President Barack Obama initiated the war in Ukraine in February, 2014 with the Euromaiden Coup in Kiev. Those with an ounce of integrity who followed subsequent events, understand that every Russian entreaty for peace was ignored and that Russia’s red line was crossed when the US opened the door for Ukraine to join NATO. Politically, Putin has no choice but to intervene.

    This is the critical missing context every time the official mantra “Russia invaded Ukraine” is incessantly repeated in the mainstream media. And the Deep State and its minions will go on resisting peace and undermining improved US-Russia relations. Patrice Greanville (Greanville Post) called my attention to a good example on the CBS Sunday Morning show of February 16, 2025. Marvin Kalb (age 92) was trotted out to warn that a peace agreement with Russia “might betray Ukraine and send a chilling message to the rest of the world about America as a trusted world leader.” On the front page of today’s New York Times, we read that Trump is abandoning efforts to “punish Russia for starting Europe’s most destructive war in generations.” (NYT, 2/19/2025) Sadly, the “intervention lie” has also been reiterated by Democrats, Bernie Sanders and even some of those on the putative left. Sanders has consistently contributed to the disinformation campaign and called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “a horror that almost embarrasses all of us for being a part of the human race.” (C-Span, March 18, 2022). Again, no context. It seems that, for some, “fighting to the last Ukrainian” was not hyperbole.

    Most readers on this Substack are aware that for at least 30 years, academics and policy makers warned against forward movement by NATO because it would provoke a serious response from Russia. Just a few of these voices include Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Steven Cohen, Bill Burns (CIA director), Jeffrey Sachs, Col. Douglas MacGregor, and John Mearsheimer. To wit, Russia’s legitimate security concerns were alarmingly ignored by the West as US neocons were intent on inciting a war in order to bleed and weaken Russia, hopefully to the point of a fomenting a coup against Putin. This was all undertaken as prelude to confronting China. BTW, there is no evidence that Russia was planning to invade without US provocations. In countless articles and interviews, Prof. John Mearsheimer (Political Science Department at the University of Chicago) has continued to lay out, chapter and verse — with irrefutable evidence — how NATO expansion to Russia’s eastern border led to the war. For starters, Google: John Mearsheimer, “Why Is Ukraine the West’s Fault?”)

    I mention all this because Americans are the most propagandized people on the globe and it will required seeking out alternative sources of information to unlearn the official narrative, not just about Ukraine but also the “Russian threat.” (Think of the Russia-gate hoax, the effects of which still cloud the minds of ordinary citizens). In order, I expect Ukrainians will be the first to grasp that they’ve been used, conned and in Malcolm’s words, “bamboozed.” One can only imagine the angry reaction that will follow. Citizens in European NATO countries will be next and finally, hopefully, the Americans.

    I despise what Trump is doing domestically and in Gaza and it should be resisted by any means necessary. However, to simply yell “Trump, Trump, Trump” at every turn is to fail taking a more nuanced perspective at what is happening in the larger world. I agree with those analysts who believe that the 80 year old Cold War between Russia and the U.S. empire (850 U.S. bases around the globe) is coming to a close and a possible nuclear war has been avoided. We’re slowly transitioning from a world dominated by the neocons who believed their empire would last as long as one could imagine and that’s no small thing.

    The post “Are You Denying that Russia Invaded Ukraine?” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump, Ukraine, and the EU

    I deplore Trump’s actions domestically and also, so far, on Gaza. However, I trust you’re also experiencing a rare morale boost regarding what Trump has begun doing on Ukraine. One consequence we can expect is hysterical, excoriating commentary from the European and US media as they condemn Trump for “betraying Ukraine and appeasing Putin.” On the front page of New York Times (2/15/2025) we read about the “rising Russian threat.” Also, there may well be false flags from Zelensky as he attempts to disrupt and delay productive talks — and save his own ass. Given the absence of an independent media all this will be confusing to the public because they’ve been so heavily propagandized about the war’s background and learned nothing about US motives in starting it. For example, how many Americans know that the Ukraine war was initiated in February 2014 by President Barack Obama? At that juncture, the Euromaiden coup was portrayed in the American news media as a spontaneous, “democratic” transition.

    I’m also enjoying watching Washington’s EU lackeys squeal and squirm after subserviently going along with Biden and the neocon’s war for three years. The suggestion that they or Zelensky merit a seat at the Trump-Putin talks is hilarious. My sense is that these US allies harbored the illusion that the neocons and the Deep State would be ruling the US indefinitely. Now they’re befuddled, humiliated, cut loose and have no leverage and no cards to play. All they can do is bitch from the sidelines and behave as spoilers. Of course, my feelings of satisfaction (and if I might, vindication) are tempered by the fact that half a million fathers, brothers, sons and uncles were slaughtered on behalf of a U.S. proxy war to weaken Russia before taking on China.

    These discredited European leaders have two choices: One, they must drastically increase “security” spending that will provoke massive social unrest as people watch the already weakened welfare state implode. Two, they must try to establish a post-Ukraine working relationship with Russia in order to obtain energy resources and a trading partner. After exposing their populations to a false narrative about Russia since 1945 in order justify NATO, at Washington’s behest, that’s an unenviable task. We can hope that NATO will soon be toast, U.S. troops begin exiting the continent and Europe becomes sovereign. Finally, I’m encouraged that Trump is proposing trilateral talks with China and Russia as this holds promise for a more peaceful world.

    The post Trump, Ukraine, and the EU first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hong Kong pollster to end public opinion research amid crackdown

    For decades, Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute, or HKPORI, tracked public attitudes on sensitive political topics that revealed a public perception of disappearing press freedom and poor popularity scores for the city’s leaders.

    But after its premises were searched and the family members of a former director were questioned by police, it has decided to halt all research activities and review its situation.

    The decision is the latest fallout from a crackdown by Beijing on public dissent in Hong Kong under two security laws.

    “HKPORI will suspend all its self-funded research activities indefinitely, including its regular tracking surveys conducted since 1992, and all feature studies recently introduced,” the institute said in a statement on its website.

    The pollster said it will “undergo a transformation or even close down.”

    “HKPORI has always been law-abiding, but in the current environment, it has to pause its promotion of scientific polling,” the statement said.

    The announcement came a few weeks after police took away and questioned the wife and son of U.K.-based pollster and outspoken political commentator Chung Kim-wah, who has a HK$1 million (US$128,500) bounty on his head.

    Chung Kim-wah, deputy chief executive of Hong Kong's Public Opinion Research Institute, during an interview, August 2020.
    Chung Kim-wah, deputy chief executive of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Research Institute, during an interview, August 2020.
    (RFA)

    President and CEO Robert Chung said “interested parties” are welcome to take over the institute, adding that he plans to “promote professional development around the world” until his current term ends after 2026.

    “The research team hopes there will be another opportunity to resume its work,” the statement said, adding that the Institute will “announce its final decision when the time is right.”

    Accused of incitement

    Chung, 64, a former researcher for the HKPORI and co-host of the weekly talk show “Voices Like Bells” for RFA Cantonese, left for the United Kingdom in April 2022 after being questioned amid a city-wide crackdown on public dissent and political opposition to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

    He is accused — alongside Carmen Lau, Tony Chung, Joseph Tay and Chloe Cheung — of “incitement to secession” after he “advocated independence” on social media and repeatedly called on foreign governments to impose sanctions on Beijing over the crackdown, according to a police announcement.

    RELATED STORIES

    Hong Kong police question wife, son of wanted exiled pollster

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    U.K.-based Hong Kong political scholar Benson Wong said the move was a huge loss to the people of Hong Kong.

    “The biggest loss for the people of Hong Kong that of a professional, neutral and scientific polling organization that once played the role of doctor to the political, economic and social aspects of life in Hong Kong,” Wong told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview.

    “If all of that is going to disappear, I think it will do catastrophic damage to Hong Kong’s … political development,” he said.

    Public opinion research viewed as a threat

    Wong said the move is likely linked to the authorities’ view of public opinion research as a threat.

    He said Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office director Xia Baolong and Beijing’s Central Liaison Office director Zheng Yanxiong don’t seem to want to know what Hong Kong public opinion is.

    Police announced a warrant for Chung Kim-wah’s arrest and a HK$1 million (US$128,400) bounty on his head in December, making him one of 19 overseas activists wanted by the Hong Kong government.

    Since Beijing imposed two national security laws banning public opposition and dissent in the city, blaming “hostile foreign forces” for the protests, hundreds of thousands have voted with their feet amid plummeting human rights rankings, shrinking press freedom and widespread government propaganda in schools.

    Some fled to the United Kingdom on the British National Overseas, or BNO, visa program. Others have made their homes anew in the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany.

    Current affairs commentator Sang Pu said the move would have a “chilling” effect on the rest of society.

    “Public opinion surveys are … are a very important weather-vane,” Sang said. “If those can’t even be done any more, then it blurs the boundaries between what is regarded as political and non-political, or what are seen as sensitive and non-sensitive [topics].”

    “I think this is going to have a chilling effect on a lot more people, and that nobody will dare to do public opinion surveys any more,” he said.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Yam Chi Yau for RFA Cantonese.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Open letter from local Jewish Voices condemns Zionist ‘colonisation’ project

    Asia Pacific Report

    Two independent Jewish Voices groups in Aotearoa New Zealand have written an open letter to the government condemning the Zionist “colonisation” project leading to genocide and criticising the role of the NZ Jewish Council for its “unelected” and “uncritical support” for Israel.

    The groups, Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation, have also criticised a scheduled meeting this week between Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and other ministers and the NZJC.

    “The NZJC is an extremist voice. Their politics are harmful, and their actions jeopardise the good standing of Jews in Aotearoa,” the open letter said.

    ALTERNATIVE JEWISH VOICES AND DAYENU

    “We protest in the strongest terms that Israel’s advocates are being given Prime Ministerial access.”

    The alternative voices also appealed to be consulted along with representatives of the Muslim and Palestinian communities “who have lost the most to racism in recent years”.

    “Hear us out before you act,” the open letter said.

    The full letter (dated 16 February 2025):

    We are Jewish New Zealanders, members of Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation. We understand that your office has scheduled a meeting this week with the NZ Jewish Council (NZJC) and additional ministers. We object in the strongest terms. The NZJC is unelected coterie, forever uncritically aligned with Israel. That is not the Jewish community.

    We have documented in depth that the NZJC is not representative. They are not elected. Their constitution outlines a regional structure for indirect democracy, but much of that structure does not seem to exist.

    They are not accountable to the community. Their president has broadcast her intention to “disempower as much as possible” Jews like Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV) members who “raise their voices”.

    Several of us attended the Wellington Regional Jewish Council’s last community meeting, in 2021. The meeting roundly disavowed the Jewish Council’s tone and their relentless focus on Israel.

    Indeed, the NZJC’s constitution does not even mention Israel or Zionism. The Wellington Regional Jewish Council dissolved itself after that meeting, acknowledging that they have no community mandate. They haven’t been heard from since. So much for regional representation.

    Through public and private channels, members of the Jewish community have repeatedly asked the NZJC to embrace some positive, rights-based vision of the future.

    Instead, through Israel’s 15-month “plausible genocide” in Gaza, the NZJC’s militarism has only become more overt. Juliet Moses was to share a platform with IDF’s head of infantry doctrine Yaron Simsolo at an Auckland event in March, until Jewish objections drove Simsolo’s session offsite.

    This is not solely an issue for the Jewish community. For years, we have protested that the Jewish Council’s related Community Security Group shares politically slanted information about New Zealanders with Israel’s embassy.

    They interpret objections to Israel’s occupation as a security threat to the New Zealand Jewish community, and they share their views of individual Palestinian, Muslim and other New Zealanders with a regime accused of genocide against Palestinians. This creates particular risk for Palestinian New Zealanders, should they ever travel to Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories to visit family and whānau.

    Let us say this clearly: there is nothing essentially Jewish about Zionism. Zionism is a project of colonisation, erasure, apartheid, ethnic cleansing — finally, of genocide. Institutions that wrap their nationalism in our Jewishness are shielding the brutality that we witness daily.

    In this country, the NZJC has been a leading voice in the campaign to confuse Jewish with Zionist, enabling decades of oppression in our names.

    The NZJC does not serve, represent or account to the Jewish community. How many Jewish New Zealanders would choose a representative who, like NZJC president Juliet Moses, retweets defences of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute?

    A Juliet Moses retweeting of the defence of a "Nazi salute" by US billionaire Elon Musk
    A Juliet Moses retweeting of the defence of a “Nazi salute” by US billionaire Elon Musk who is unelected head of the controversial US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Image: Screenshot Alternative Voices

    The NZJC is an extremist voice. Their politics are harmful, and their actions jeopardise the good standing of Jews in Aotearoa. We protest in the strongest terms that Israel’s advocates are being given Prime Ministerial access.

    It’s not hard to guess what the NZJC will be asking for: some special “antisemitism regime” that uses our Jewish identity to shield Israel from the directives of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). They will be asking to divorce the Jewish community from our shared mahi of antiracism and our human rights framework. They will be seeking some exceptional status, suppressing principled protest for Palestinian rights and the criminal accountability of Israeli leaders.

    That conversation should not take place without representation from the Muslim and Palestinian communities. They are the New Zealanders whose voices are being silenced, and frankly they are the communities who have lost the most to racism in recent years.

    Prime Minister, any meeting with the NZJC ought to be recorded in the ministerial diaries as a session with Israel’s ambassadors. And damn it, they will be doing it in our name. We are also the New Zealand Jewish community, and we are so tired of being used this way.

    We would like to join your meeting with the NZJC, bringing Jewish diversity into the room. If you will not open this meeting to the real breadth of the Jewish community, then we wish to schedule a second meeting which includes Muslim and Palestinian representation.

    We work closely with the Muslim and Palestinian communities in Aotearoa, modelling the change that we would like to see in the Middle East.

    Hear us out before you act.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Paul Buchanan: Trump 2.0 and the limits of over-reach

    COMMENTARY: By Paul G Buchanan

    Here is a scenario, but first a broad brush-painted historical parallel.

    Hitler and the Nazis could well have accomplished everything that they wanted to do within German borders, including exterminating Jews, so long as they confined their ambitious to Germany itself. After all, the world pretty much sat and watched as the Nazi pogroms unfolded in the late 1930s.

    But Hitler never intended to confine himself to Germany and decided to attack his neighbours simultaneously, on multiple fronts East, West, North and South.

    This came against the advice of his generals, who believed that his imperialistic war-mongering should happen sequentially and that Germany should not fight the USSR until it had conquered Europe first, replenished with pillaged resources, and then reorganised its forces for the move East. They also advised that Germany should also avoid tangling with the US, which had pro-Nazi sympathisers in high places (like Charles Lindbergh) and was leaning towards neutrality in spite of FDR’s support for the UK.

    Hitler ignored the advice and attacked in every direction, got bogged down in the Soviet winter, drew in the US in by attacking US shipping ferrying supplies to the UK, and wound up stretching his forces in North Africa, the entire Eastern front into Ukraine and the North Mediterranean states, the Scandinavian Peninsula and the UK itself.

    In other words, he bit off too much in one chew and wound up paying the price for his over-reach.

    Hitler did what he did because he could, thanks in part to the 1933 Enabling Law that superseded all other German laws and allowed him carte blanche to pursue his delusions. That proved to be his undoing because his ambition was not matched by his strategic acumen and resources when confronted by an armed alliance of adversaries.

    A version of this in US?
    A version of this may be what is unfolding in the US. Using the cover of broad Executive Powers, Musk, Trump and their minions are throwing everything at the kitchen wall in order to see what sticks.

    They are breaking domestic and international norms and conventions pursuant to the neo-reactionary “disruptor” and “chaos” theories propelling the US techno-authoritarian Right. They want to dismantle the US federal State, including the systems of checks and balances embodied in the three branches of government, subordinating all policy to the dictates of an uber-powerful Executive Branch.

    In this view the Legislature and Judiciary serve as rubber stamp legitimating devices for Executive rule. Many of those in the Musk-lead DOGE teams are subscribers to this ideology.

    At the same time the new oligarchs want to re-make the International order as well as interfere in the domestic politics of other liberal democracies. Musk openly campaigns for the German far-Right AfD in this year’s elections, he and Trump both celebrate neo-fascists like Viktor Urban in Hungry and Javier Milei in Argentina.

    Trump utters delusional desires to “make” Canada the 51st State, forcibly regain control of the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, turn Gaza into a breach resort complex and eliminate international institutions like the World Trade Organisation and even NATO if it does not do what he says.

    He imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court, slaps sanctions on South Africa for land take-overs and because it took a case of genocide against Israel in the ICC, doubles down on his support for Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians and is poised to sell-out Ukraine by using the threat of an aid cut-off to force the Ukrainians to cede sovereignty to Russia over all of their territory east of the Donbas River (and Crimea).

    He even unilaterally renames the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a teenaged display of symbolic posturing that ignores the fact that renaming the Gulf has no standing in international law and “America” is a term that refers to the North, Central and South land masses of the Western Hemisphere — i.e., it is not exclusive to or propriety of the United States.

    Dismantling the globalised trade system
    Trump wants to dismantle the globalised system of trade by using tariffs as a weapon as well as leverage, “punishing” nations for non-trade as well as trade issues because of their perceived dependence on the US market. This is evident in the tariffs (briefly) imposed on Canada, Mexico and Colombia over issues of immigration and re-patriation of US deportees.

    In other words, Trump 2.0 is about redoing the World Order in his preferred image, doing everything more or less at once. It is as if Trump, Musk and their Project 2025 foot soldiers believe in a reinterpreted version of “shock and awe:” the audacity and speed of the multipronged attack on everything will cause opponents to be paralysed by the move and therefore will be unable to resist it.

    That includes extending cultural wars by taking over the Kennedy Center for the Arts (a global institution) because he does not like the type of “culture” (read: African American) that is presented there and he wants to replace the Center’s repertoire with more “appropriate” (read: Anglo-Saxon) offerings. The assault on the liberal institutional order (at home and abroad), in other words, is holistic and universal in nature.

    Trump’s advisers are even talking about ignoring court orders barring some of their actions, setting up a constitutional crisis scenario that they believe they will win in the current Supreme Court.

    I am sure that Musk/Trump can get away with a fair few of these disruptions, but I am not certain that they can get away with all of them. They may have more success on the domestic rather than the international front given the power dynamics in each arena. In any event they do not seem to have thought much about the ripple effect responses to their moves, specifically the blowback that might ensue.

    This is where the Nazi analogy applies. It could be that Musk and Trump have also bitten more than they can chew. They may have Project 2025 as their road map, but even maps do not always get the weather right, or accurately predict the mood of locals encountered along the way to wherever one proposes to go. That could well be–and it is my hope that it is–the cause of their undoing.

    Overreach, egos, hubris and the unexpected detours around and obstacles presented by foreign and domestic actors just might upset their best laid plans.

    Dotage is on daily public display
    That brings up another possibility. Trump’s remarks in recent weeks are descending into senescence and caducity. His dotage is on daily public display. Only his medications have changed. He is more subdued than during the campaign but no less mad. He leaves the ranting and raving to Musk, who only truly listens to the fairies in his ear.

    But it is possible that there are ghost whisperers in Trump’s ear as well (Stephen Miller, perhaps), who deliberately plant preposterous ideas in his feeble head and egg him on to pursue them. In the measure that he does so and begins to approach the red-line of obvious derangement, then perhaps the stage is being set from within by Musk and other oligarchs for a 25th Amendment move to unseat him in favour of JD Vance, a far more dangerous member of the techbro puppet masters’ cabal.

    Remember that most of Trump’s cabinet are billionaires and millionaires and only Cabinet can invoke the 25th Amendment.

    Vance has incentive to support this play because Trump (foolishly, IMO) has publicly stated that he does not see Vance as his successor and may even run for a third term. That is not want the techbro overlords wanted to hear, so they may have to move against Trump sooner rather than later if they want to impose their oligarchical vision on the US and world.

    An impeachment would be futile given Congress’s make-up and Trump’s two-time wins over his Congressional opponents. A third try is a non-starter and would take too long anyway. Short of death (that has been suggested) the 25th Amendment is the only way to remove him.

    It is at that point that I hope that things will start to unravel for them. It is hard to say what the MAGA-dominated Congress will do if laws are flouted on a wholesale basis and constituents begin to complain about the negative impact of DOGE cost-cutting on federal programmes. But one thing is certain, chaos begets chaos (because chaos is not synonymous with techbro libertarians’ dreams of anarchy) and disruption for disruption’s sake may not result in an improved socio-economic and political order.

    Those are some of the “unknown unknowns” that the neo-con Donald Rumsfeld used to talk about.

    In other words, vamos a ver–we shall see.

    Dr Paul G Buchanan is the director of 36th-Parallel Assessments, a geopolitical and strategic analysis consultancy. This article is republished from Kiwipolitico with the permission of the author.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: Starmer’s tanking is a threat to us all

    This utterly dishonest and thoroughly inept Labour Party government, just seven months after its victory by way of default against a deeply loathed, corrupt Tory government, has already crashed and burned – in no small part thanks to Keir Starmer.

    If the consequences of Labour’s abject failure to govern with a degree of competence and integrity where not so dire I would enjoy laughing at them, not entirely dissimilar to the way they laughed at us while the pro-Israel Labour right smeared and plotted against the democratically elected former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

    Distracted at home and abroad

    I must admit, it has been hard not to become distracted by events across the pond. It’s not every day a modern-day tangerine tyrant openly declares his intention to ethnically cleanse an entire population, is it?

    I’ve even heard BBC reporters using the word “relocate” or ‘resettle’ to describe Trump’s plot to shit all over the Middle East and tear up every page in the book of international law.

    A word such as “relocate” would suggest the Gazan population might have some sort of say in their destiny. Being forcibly displaced isn’t optional. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. This isn’t up for debate on the say so of a neofascist real estate salesman.

    The United States of America is no longer a dependable ally. It hasn’t been for some time. Starmer knows this, all he needs to do now is openly admit it.

    But Starmer is afraid. Being isolated from the EU is one thing, but cutting off ties with the neofascist American government is a whole new shit show altogether for the jellyfish, Starmer.

    Back in the mother of all parliaments, Kemi Badenoch (apparently she’s the Tory leader) and Keir Starmer traded blows over Gazan refugees at PMQs.

    Both of the horrible little racists are more than happy to licence the sale of weapons to the colonial outpost of Israel for the purpose of genocide, but they’re not so happy when a handful of Gazans seek refuge in Britain.

    Spot the diff… Oh.

    What is the difference between a Ukrainian woman and child fleeing a dangerous war zone and a Palestinian woman and child fleeing the same desperately perilous situation?

    In the eyes of a sensible, compassionate human being, absolutely nothing whatsoever. But from the viewpoint of an institutionally racist British elite, defending persecuted genocide victims that just so happen to be Muslim isn’t going to win you many votes in the red wall heartlands of Gammon-upon-Tees.

    Sad, no doubt. But absolutely true.

    I really don’t want to hear about Ukrainian people being more in line with “British values”, because we haven’t had a British government with genuine values for the vast majority of our lifetimes.

    If British values are in-line with a former Soviet state that suffers from a bit of a Nazi problem, and a brutal pariah racist endeavour that suffers from a hell of a Zionist white supremacy problem, we’re probably best not to be shouting about British values from the nearest rooftop.

    Once again, the Assisted Dying Bill has also been in the headlines.

    The ideology is the issue

    There is something particularly ghoulish about seeing parliamentarians putting so much effort into ending people’s lives when they have done so very little to assist people with living.

    I cannot support something that leaves disabled people feeling like they are some sort of burden on society. I cannot support something that will be used to exploit disabled people by unscrupulous individuals whose motivation is purely financial gain.

    A responsible government should be looking at ways to improve the lives of disabled people, not ways to cut their benefits, snoop through their bank accounts and force them into unsuitable, low paid work, before issuing them with a fucking death warrant.

    I’ve said this so many times, and I will most likely keep saying it until I’m blue in the face, via ‘Dignitas UK’.

    The name of the political party is absolutely irrelevant. The ideology is the issue. Look past the name, the colour of the rosette, and look past the leadership.

    I had my epiphany many years ago, and that was one of the key reasons as to why around twelve million of us voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s brand of Labour, back in 2017, several years after the current chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, pretended to be a high-flying economist.

    Reeves — predicted by many to replace Keir Starmer when he throws away that huge majority in a few years time — is beginning to make the economy-crushing Kwasi Kwarteng look like John Maynard Keynes.

    Starmer: will he even last that long?

    The Chancellor has always come across as an unlikable careerist with the charisma of a butt plug, and despite her position being utterly untenable in most walks of life, Reeves is most likely to survive whatever is thrown at her, because the establishment will always look after their own.

    The bar of acceptable behaviour in office has been considerably lowered over the last couple of decades. Successive Labour and Tory governments have demeaned the privilege of public service at the very highest level.

    Corruption, incompetence, criminal dishonesty, cronyism, a burning hatred of poor, disabled, and working class people, warmongering, scandalous expenses – I could be talking about any government from any period over the past forty years.

    Political chaos has been normalised by the likes of Blair, Cameron, and Johnson. Truth never shines from hearts filled with corruption and lies.

    If you expected something just slightly better from Keir Starmer and his lightweight government, or maybe you still hold out some hope that things will only get better, I’ll try not to be the one that disappoints you, because you’ve got another four long years of Keir Starmer’s clusterfuckery to do that for you.

    If he actually lasts that long.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • How Israeli propaganda filters into NZ media – drop it, says Mediawatch

    COMMENTARY: By Saige England

    Mediawatch on RNZ today strongly criticised Stuff and YouTube among other media for using Israeli propaganda’s “Outbrain” service.

    Outbrain is a company founded by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) military and its technology can be tracked back to a wealthy entrepreneur, which in this case could be a euphemism for a megalomaniac.

    He uses the metaphor of a “dome”, likening it to the dome used in warfare.

    Outbrain, which publishes content on New Zealand media, picks up what’s out there and converts and distorts it to support Israel. It twists, it turns, it deceives the reader.

    Presenter Colin Peacock of RNZ’s Mediawatch programme today advised NZ media to ditch the propaganda service.

    Outbrain uses the media in the following way. The content user such as Stuff pays Outbrain and Outbrain pays the user, like Stuff.

    “Both parties make money when users click on the content,” said Peacock.

    ‘Digital Iron Dome’
    The content on the Stuff website came via “Digital Iron Dome” named after the State of Genociders’ actual defence system. It is run by a tech entrepreneur quoted on Mediawatch:

    “Just like a physical iron dome that scans the open air and watches for any missiles . . . the digital iron dome knows how to scan the internet. We know how to buy media. Pro-Israeli videos and articles and images inside the very same articles going against Israel,” says the developer of the propaganda “dome” machine.

    Peacock said the developer had stated that the digital dome delivered “pro-Jewish”* messages to more than 100 million people worldwide on platforms like Al Jazeera, CNN — and last weekend on Stuff NZ — and said this information went undetected as pro-Israel material, ensuring it reached, according to the entrepreneur: “The right audience without interference.”

    According to Wikipedia, Outbrain was founded by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav, officers in the Israeli Navy. Galai sold his company Quigo to AOL in 2007 for $363 million. Lahav worked at an online shopping company acquired by eBay in 2005.

    The company is headquartered in New York with global offices in London, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, Cologne, Gurugram, Paris, Ljubljana, Munich, Milan, Madrid, Tokyo, São Paulo, Netanya, Singapore, and Sydney.

    Peacock pointed out that other advocacy organisations had already been buying and posting content, there was nothing new about this with New Zealand news media.

    But — and this is important — the Media Council ruled in 2017 that Outbrain content was the publisher’s responsibility: that the news media in NZ were responsible for promoted links that were offered to their readers.

    “Back then publishers at Stuff and the Herald said they would do more to oversee the content, with Stuff stating it is paid promoted content,” said Peacock, in his role as the media watchdog.

    Still ‘big money business’
    “But this is also still a big money business and the outfits using these tools are getting much bigger exposure from their arrangements with news publishers such as Stuff,” he said.

    He pointed out that the recently appointed Outbrain boss for Australia New Zealand and Singapore, Chris Oxley, had described Outbrain as “a leader in digital media connecting advertisers with premium audiences in contextually relevant environments”.

    The watchdog Mediawatch said that news organisations should drop Outbrain.

    “Media environments where news and neutrality are important aren’t really relevant environments for political propaganda that’s propagated by online opportunists who know how to make money out of it and also to raise funds while they are at it, ” said Peacock.

    “These services like Outbrain are sometimes called ‘recommendation engines’ but our recommendation to news media is don’t use them for the sake of the trust of the people you say you want to earn and keep: the readers,” said Peacock.

    Saige England is a journalist and author, and member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

    * Being “pro-Jewish” should not be equated with being pro-genocide nor should antisemitism be levelled at Jews who are against this genocide. The propaganda from Outbrain does a disservice to Palestinians and also to those Jewish people who support all human rights — the right of Palestinians to life and the right to live on their land.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • OPINION: Banning Khmer Rouge denialism is a bad move for Cambodia and the world

    Quite soon, possibly to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge takeover in April, Cambodia will pass a new law making it a jailable offense of up to five years to “deny, trivialize, reject or dispute the authenticity of crimes” committed during that regime’s 1975-79 rule.

    The bill, requested – and presumably drafted – by Hun Sen, the former prime minister who handed power to his son in 2023, will replace a 2013 law that narrowly focused on denial.

    The bill’s seven articles haven’t been publicly released, so it remains unclear how some of the terms are to be defined. “Trivialize” and “dispute” are broad, and there are works by academics that might be seen as “disputing” standard accounts of the Khmer Rouge era.

    Is the “authentic history” of the bill’s title going to be based on the judgments of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia? If so, there will be major gaps in the narrative.

    Cambodia’s courts are now so supine that one presumes the “authentic history” will be whatever the state prosecutor says it is, should a case come to trial.

    Khmer Rouge fighters brandish their rifles after seizing the garrison protecting Poipet village on the Thai-Cambodia border, April 19, 1975.
    Khmer Rouge fighters brandish their rifles after seizing the garrison protecting Poipet village on the Thai-Cambodia border, April 19, 1975.
    (AFP)

    There are two concerns about this.

    First, the Cambodian government is not being honest about why it’s pushing through this law.

    There is some scholarly debate about the total number of deaths that occurred between 1975 and 1979, and estimates range from one to three million.

    There also remain discussions about how much intention there was behind the barbarism or how much the deaths were unintended consequences of economic policy and mismanagement.

    No nostalgia

    Yet, in Cambodian society, it’s nearly impossible to find a person these days who is worse off than they were in 1979, so there’s almost no nostalgia for the Khmer Rouge days, and the crude propaganda inflicted on people some fifty years ago has faded.

    There are no neo-Khmer Rouge parties. “Socialism”, let alone “communism,” is no longer in the political vocabulary. Even though China is now Phnom Penh’s closest friend, there is no affection for Maoism and Mao among Cambodians.

    Moreover, as far as I can tell, the 2013 law that covers denialism specifically hasn’t needed to be used too often.

    Instead, the incoming law is quite obviously “political”, not least because since 1979, Cambodia’s politics has essentially been split into two over the meaning of events that year.

    For the ruling party – whose old guard, including Hun Sen, were once mid-ranking Khmer Rouge cadre but defected and joined the Vietnam-led “liberation” – 1979 was Cambodia’s moment of salvation.

    People leave Phnom Penh after Khmer Rouge forces seized the Cambodian capital April 17, 1975.
    People leave Phnom Penh after Khmer Rouge forces seized the Cambodian capital April 17, 1975.
    (Agence Khmere de Presse/AFP)

    For today’s beleaguered and exiled political opposition in Cambodia, the invasion by Hanoi was yet another curse, meaning the country is still waiting for true liberation, by which most people mean the downfall of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) of Hun Sen and his family.

    The CPP is quite explicit: any opposition equates to supporting the Khmer Rouge. “You hate Pol Pot but you oppose the ones who toppled him. What does this mean? It means you are an ally of the Pol Pot regime,” Hun Sen said a few years ago, with a logic that will inform the incoming law.

    Crackdown era

    The ruling CPP has finished its destructive march through the institutions that began in 2017 and is now marching through the people’s minds.

    A decade ago, Cambodia was a different sort of place. There was one-party rule, repression, and assassinations, yet the regime didn’t really care what most people thought as long as their outward actions were correct.

    Today, it’s possible to imagine the Hun family lying awake at night, quivering with rage that someone might be thinking about deviations from the party line.

    Now, the CPP really does care about banishing skepticism and enforcing obedience. What one thinks of the past is naturally an important part of this.

    Another troublesome factor is that, with Jan. 27 having been the 80th anniversary of Holocaust Remembrance Day, there is a flurry of interest globally in trying to comprehend how ordinary people could commit such horrors as the Holocaust or the Khmer Rouge’s genocide.

    The publication of Laurence Rees’ excellent new book, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History, this month reminds us that if “never again” means anything, it means understanding the mentality of those who supported or joined in mass executions.

    Yet we don’t learn this from the victims or ordinary people unassociated with the regime, even though these more accessible voices occupy the bulk of the literature.

    RELATED STORIES

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    Nuon Chea Dies at 93, Ending Hopes of Closure For Cambodia’s Victims of Khmer Rouge

    Listen only to the outsider, and one comes away with the impression that almost everyone living under a despotic regime is either a passive resister or an outright rebel. There are a few devotees who find redemption after realizing their own sins – as in the main character in Schindler’s List.

    Yet no dictatorship can possibly survive without some input from a majority of the population. Thus, it’s more important to learn not “why they killed,” but “why we killed” – or “why we didn’t do anything.”

    Remembrance is vital

    The world could do with hearing much more about other atrocities, like Cambodia’s.

    For many in the West, there is a tendency to think of the Holocaust as a singular evil, which can lead one down the path of culture, not human nature, as an explanation.

    One lesson of the 1930s was that the people most able to stop the spread of Fascism were the same people least capable of understanding its impulses.

    The left-wing intelligentsia was content to keep to the position until quite late that Fascism was just a more reactionary form of capitalist exploitation, while conservative elites had a self-interest in thinking it was a tamable version of Marxism.

    Their materialism, their belief that life could be reduced to the money in your pocket and what you can buy with it, didn’t allow them to see the emotional draw of Fascism.

    These intense feelings brought the torch parade, the speeches, the marching paramilitaries, the uniforms and symbols, the book burnings, and the transgressiveness of petty revenge and bullying.

    Perhaps the best definition of Fascism came from Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who said: “there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms.”

    Likewise, the same people now who were supposed to stop the rise of new despotisms have been as equally ignorant about the power of signs and exorcisms.

    Europe kidded itself that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin was as much a rationalist as Germany’s Angela Merkel.

    The notion that all the Chinese Communist Party cared about was economic growth blinded world leaders to its changing aspirations: Han supremacy, jingoism, revenging past humiliations, national rebirth and territorial conquests.

    In Cambodia, it is possible to find books by or about Khmer Rouge perpetrators, yet the curious reader must exert a good deal of effort.

    Those who do that find that a temperament for the transgressive and the cynical motivated the Khmer Rouge’s cadres.

    It won’t be long before the world marks a Holocaust Memorial Day without any survivors present at the commemorations.

    Cambodia’s horror is more recent history, yet anyone who was a teenager at the time is now in their sixties. We haven’t too long left with that generation.

    Even aside from the clear political reasons for introducing the new law, it might give historians pause before writing about the more gray aspects of the Khmer Rouge era – or exploring the motives of the perpetrators.

    Once it becomes illegal to “condone” the Khmer Rouge’s crimes, whatever that means, revealing what one did as a cadre could skirt the border of criminality.

    My fear is that the law will confine history to the study of what the Khmer Rouge did, not why it did it. This would be much to the detriment of future generations worldwide.

    David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by A commentary by David Hutt.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Our Stupid Species

    In short:  Our species was not “born” stupid, but started to become so late in our   history.  It then started on a downward course, and will “soon” go extinct.[1]

    We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.[2]

    Preface

    January, 2025, was a busy month for me![3]  First, on January 6, I celebrated my 85th birthday—on what has come to be called Insurrection Day (because of the events of 2021 in support of Donald J. Trump).  Given that Trump supporters were trying to overthrow our government, I prefer to call it Treason Day!

    Second, during my appointment with my nephrologist, on January 15, we jointly decided that it was time for me to begin dialysis, and the plan was to start on Monday, January 27.  Third, on Sunday, January 26, I started to have some intestinal problems, and they became serious enough for my wife to call an ambulance on Tuesday, January 28, and I was taken to St. Luke’s hospital in Milwaukee; after a wait of about 10 hours (!) I was admitted, assigned a room, then another room.  Fourth, while in the hospital, my intestinal problem was treated, and I received three treatments of dialysis, the last one on Wednesday, February 5, after which I was discharged.  My wonderful wife (of almost 59 years!) has been caring for me since, and I had my first dialysis treatment at a clinic that Friday, February 7, my wife driving me there.  While in the hospital, I started creating this paper “in my head,” and when I arrived home on the 7th started writing a little bit each day since, when able to do so,.  I completed a first draft on February 10.

    *****

    Our species—Homo sapiens—appeared on the scene about 270,000 years ago, and for most of our existence since then we have been foragers:[4]

    The forager way of life is of major interest to anthropologists because dependence on wild food resources was the way humans acquired food for the vast stretch of human history.  Cross-cultural researchers focus on studying patterns across societies and try to answer questions such as:  What are recent hunter-gatherers generally like?  How do they differ from food producers?  How do hunter-gatherer societies vary and what may explain their variability?

    As our ancestors spread across the globe, they encountered environmental differences, and they adapted to those differences in what they ate (e. g., whether or not they ate aquatic life), whether or not they wore clothes or created shelters for themselves, etc.  But they retained certain similarities as well.  For example, the late anthropologist Colin Turnbull [1924 – 1994] wrote this in 1983:

    If we measure a culture’s worth by the longevity of its population, the sophistication of its technology, the material comforts it offers, then many primitive cultures have little to offer us, that is true.  But our study of the life cycle will show that in terms of a, conscious dedication to human relationships that are both affective and effective, the primitive is ahead of us all the way.  He is working at it at every stage of his life, from infancy to death, while playing just as much as while praying; whether at work or at home his life is governed by his conscious quest for social order.  Each individual learns this social consciousness as he grows up, and the lesson is constantly reinforced until the day he dies, and because of that social consciousness each individual is a person of worth and value and importance to society, also from the day of birth to the day of death.

    In other words, each individual was “born to be good,”  was “good natured,” born to live by the principle “love thy neighbor” (!)

    There’s also this interesting statement by the late anthropologist William E. H. Stanner [1905 – 1981][5] (p. 31) regarding the Aborigines in Australia:

    The Aborigines have no gods, just or unjust, to adjudicate the world.  Not even by straining can one see in such culture-heroes as Baiame and Darumulum the true hint of a Yahveh, jealous, omniscient, and omnipotent.  The ethical insights are dim and somewhat coarse in texture.  One can find in them little trace, say, of the inverted pride, the self-scrutiny, and the consciousness of favour and destiny which characterised the early Jews.  A glimpse, but no truly poignant sense, of moral dualism; no notion of grace or redemption; no whisper of inner peace and reconcilement; no problems of worldly life to be solved only by a consummation of history; no heaven of reward or hell of punishment.  The blackfellow’s after-life is but a shadowy replica of worldly-life, so none flee to inner sanctuary to escape the world.  There are no prophets, saints, or illuminati.  There is a concept of goodness, but it lacks true scruple.  Men can become ritually unclean, but may be cleansed by a simple mechanism.  There is a moral law but, as in the beginning, men are both good and bad, and no one is racked by the knowledge.

    Those of us USans[6] who were raised in Christianity may find it difficult to recognize that the concept of deity is not a universal one.  A fact that suggests that where that concept exists, it may have been invented there—or borrowed, with modifications, from a neighboring society.  With the concept functioning to explain why things exist and why they “behave” as they do.  We have been taught that things exist because a Being “out there” created them; it’s possible, however, is that we created god(s) rather than the other way around!

    Or, it may be that God exists, but is a monster!  How else explain the fact that this omniscient/omni-present Being was aware that the Nazis were killing millions of Jews, but failed to use His omnipotence to stop the slaughter?!

    *****

    We humans have been foragers for over 99% of our existence; it should not, therefore be surprising to learn that we became “designed”[7] for that way of life; so that it’s the way of life that’s natural for us.

    And of particular importance is the fact that we became designed for small-group living:[8]

    Many of our problems seem traceable to Homo sapiens being a small-group animal, most comfortable in collections of under 150 people or so, the so-called Dunbar’s number.[[9]]  It was proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar based on studies of primate brain size and group size. That’s roughly the maximum size of most hunter-gatherer groups, as it is today of typical groups of colleagues, lengths of Christmas card lists, and so on.

    From an empirical standpoint:

    The fact that small-group living has become uncommon helps explain many of our problems today—including the likelihood that we are now headed for extinction!

    A shattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich.

    And what adds to that certainty is the recent election of the clueless Donald J. (“drill baby drill”) Trump as our President!!  (More on the threat of our extinction later.)

    *****

    Let me pause for a moment here to say that I wish that I could say that “I can see clearly now ….”  But when we are born into a society, we learn to see through the “lens” provided to us by that society; what I am trying to do here is see through that lens—which is very difficult to achieve!  I must continue with that effort here, though!

    *****

    Agriculture began to replace foraging in some groups about 12,000 years ago, and that was most certainly our “worst mistake” as humans!!   For the new sedentary way of living associated with a dependence on agriculture fostered a growth in a group’s population size, and that development created a situation in which individuals with a tendency to dominate others were now able to do so.

    While a group was still dependent on foraging it had developed means to control such behavior.

    On the basis of … observations, Christopher Boehm:

    proposed the theory that hunter-gatherers maintained equality through a practice that he labeled reverse dominance.  In a standard dominance hierarchy—as can be seen in all of our ape relatives (yes, even in bonobos)—-a few individuals dominate the many.  In a system of reverse dominance, however, the many act in unison to deflate the ego of anyone who tries, even in an incipient way, to dominate them.

    According to Boehm, hunter-gatherers are continuously vigilant to transgressions against the egalitarian ethos.  Someone who boasts, or fails to share, or in any way seems to think that he (or she, but usually it’s a he) is better than others is put in his place through teasing, which stops once the person stops the offensive behavior.  If teasing doesn’t work, the next step is shunning. The band acts as if the offending person doesn’t exist.  That almost always works.  Imagine what it is like to be completely ignored by the very people on whom your life depends.  No human being can live for long alone.  The person either comes around, or he moves away and joins another band, where he’d better shape up or the same thing will happen again.  In his 1999 book, Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm presents very compelling evidence for his reverse dominance theory.

    As some in a group began to dominate/exploit the others, the eventual result was the formation of a social class system.  So that one became born into a social class.[10]

    It was within early Hebrew society that there seemingly first arose individuals who objected to what was occurring (that is, the creation of social class systems with their exploitation).  And a Tradition arose within early Hebrew society which began with Law creation, saw the rise of prophets (like Amos), and, finally,[11] the “ministry” of Jesus.[12]

    The basis of those objections seems to have been a remembrance-of-sorts of an earlier way of life, one for which we had become “designed” (or a subsequent one, such as nomadism).  As Warren Johnson has written:[13]

    The Biblical legend of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden seems clearly to describe the invention of agriculture.

    The reference to a Garden of Eden being spedifically to an earlier foraging way of life.  Our ancestors were not, however, expulsed from the Garden; their development of agriculture led “naturally” to their leaving it.[14]

    Although it was likely the abandonment of foraging for agriculture that somehow led to the early Hebrews objecting to the creation of social class systems during the Neolithic Revolution, the Tradition that developed as a result of that abandonment was misguided![15]  As Barrie Wilson notes,[16] the Torah—the Holy Book of the ancient Hebrews—“presupposes the view that people are decision makers and can choose their path in life.”

    What that assumption failed to recognize is that it was the societal system changes that occurred during the Neolithic Revolution that were responsible for the problems that began to arise during that Revolution.  So that—and given that we are designed for a way of life based on foraging—the solution to those problems (if there is one now!) is societal system change in a reversionary direction.[17]

    In a sense, the utopians over the centuries,[18] in recognizing a need for societal system change, sensed this.  But their writings are not notable for recognizing that we humans are a small-group animal.

    *****

    The societal system changes that have occurred since the Neolithic Revolution—described well by Eugene Linden in his Affuence and Discontent (1979)—have been in a downward direction; we have been headed for (p. 178) “apocalypse,” for extinction!  I next, then, present a case for such a conclusion.

    *****

    If “love of neighbor” should be the primary principle that guides our behaviors today—after all, that’s how we are “designed”!—then the Neolithic Revolution made following that principle difficult![19]  For the development of social class systems fostered the development of invidious thinking[20] (of both a qualitative and quantitative nature) which, first, served to perpetuate class systems.

    Second, invidious thinking is incompatible with the “love of neighbor” principle:  If one thinks of another as “below” one, it will be difficult to demonstrate any degree of love for that person.  It will, then, not be surprising if a high degree of inequality arises in one’s society.  With the wealthy establishing residential enclaves for themselves to enable “out of sight, out of mind” so far as the society’s “unfortunates” are concerned.

    Doing so is not only unfortunate—it’s STUPID!!  For there’s this:

    If you’re fortunate to be in reasonably good health, how should you live your life?  I believe there should be a quest behind the question, which is, you should do all you can to maintain your health to live a purposeful life and serve those less fortunate.  Instead of taking your health for granted, it can be an invaluable resource to support a loved one, a friend, a neighbor or your community.  Your efforts to maintain your health and willingness to help those in need become a model of compassion to serve a greater good in society, rather than for self-serving motives. Plus, helping others can improve your own well-being and sense of self-worth.

    Given that we humans are “born to be good,” we go against our nature when we fail to engage in helping behaviors.

    And this:

    Consider the positive feelings you experienced the last time when you did something good for someone else.  Perhaps it was the satisfaction of running an errand for your neighbor, or the sense of fulfillment from volunteering at a local organization, or the gratification from donating to a good cause.  Or perhaps it was the simple joy of having helped out a friend.  This “warm glow” of pro-sociality is thought to be one of the drivers of generous behavior in humans.  One reason behind the positive feelings associated with helping others is that being pro-social reinforces our sense of relatedness to others, thus helping us meet our most basic psychological needs.

    Research has found many examples of how doing good, in ways big or small, not only feels  good, but also does us good.  For instance, the well-being-boosting and depression-lowering benefits of volunteering have been repeatedly documented.  As has the sense of meaning and purpose that often accompanies altruistic behavior.  Even when it comes to money, spending it on others predicts increases in happiness compared to spending it on ourselves.  Moreover, there is now neural evidence from fMRI studies suggesting a link between generosity and happiness in the brain.  For example, donating money to charitable organizations activates the same (mesolimbic) regions of the brain that respond to monetary rewards or sex.  In fact, the mere intent and commitment to generosity can stimulate neural change and make people happier.

    Those facts, reported above, may make one ask:

    Why, then, isn’t loving behavior the norm in societies such as ours.

    My answer to that question is that when one is born and raised in a society—such as ours—in which competition[21] plays such an important role—for example, the Super Bowl today (February 9, 2025—one is virtually forced to “join the crowd” of those who engage in some competition for their very survival.

     *****

    A reason why it’s UTTERLY STUPID to engage in invidious thinking is that it fosters consumption behaviors—“conspicuous consumption,” in fact.  This was enabled especially since the Industrial Revolution, when technological developments enabled an expansion of production efforts.  The use of fossil fuels—coal first, then petroleum—for that production had the unintended effect of affecting the “operation” of Earth System—in the direction of making Earth increasingly unlivable for humans (along with other species[22]).

    Our burning of fossil fuels is causing global warming; and global warming, in turn, is having various consequences—all of them negative:

    Climate change [[23]] affects all regions around the world.  Polar ice shields are melting and the sea is rising.  In some regions, extreme weather events and rainfall are becoming more common while others are experiencing more extreme heat waves and droughts.  We need climate action now, or these impacts will only intensify.

    Climate change is a very serious threat, and its consequences impact many different aspects of our lives.  Below, you can find a list of climate change’s main consequences.  Click on the + signs for more information.

    A current consequence of extreme importance is the thawing of permafrost caused by the warming that we humans have caused:

    A thawing permafrost layer can lead to severe impacts on people and the environment.  For instance, as ice-filled permafrost thaws, it can turn into a muddy slurry that cannot support the weight of the soil and vegetation above it.  Infrastructure such as roads, buildings, and pipes could be damaged as permafrost thaws.4 Infrastructure damage and erosion, due in part to permafrost thaw, has already caused some communities in western and southern Alaska to have to relocate. Additionally, organic matter (like the remains of plants) currently frozen in the permafrost will start to decompose when the ground thaws, resulting in the emission of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  This contributes to further global climate change.1

    That latter fact—the decomposition of organic matter—is of particular importance for it causes further warming and global warming then “feeding on itself” and, then, being impossible to halt (“runaway”).  If that is now occurring, warming will continue until most of Earth’s permafrost thaws—and we will go extinct!!  The graph below shows global temperature change over the past 2,000 years:

    Note that since about 1850 the trend has been steeply upward!  There’s no reason to believe that that trend won’t continue—with our extinction “soon” being highly likely!  There are articles “out there” with titles such as these:

    “Humans may be extinct in 2026” (during the “reign”of Trump—which would be fitting!)

    “Will the human race go extinct by 2030?”

    “MIT Forecasts Civilization Will Fall By 2040” (but not necessarily go extinct).

    “Human civilization faces “existential risk” by 2050 according to new Australian climate change report”

    Etc.

    In 1984 (!) I published a strategy for bringing about societal system change, thereby possibly “saving” our species from extinction:  “Ecotopia:  A ‘Gerendipitous’ Scenario.” I lacked the financial means to act on that proposal; and although I have brought it to the attention of literally dozens of individuals and organizations, I’ve yet to receive a response from any of them!!  It’s as if most humans have a death wish (or drive)!!

    A more likely reason, however, is media failure to inform/educate the public about the threat posed by global warming.   That failure is at the height of STUPIDITY!   While also being understandable, though:  The commercial media are dependent on advertising for their existence, and advertisers want people to continue to consume—thereby causing continued production and, as a consequence, continued global warming!

    As one with three wonderful children and five fantastic grandchildren, my hope is that they all will have a future.  I find it virtually impossible, however, to have any degree of optimism regarding the human future!!

    Endnotes:

    [1]     Available upon request (from moc.liamgnull@5743nevs) are these two related papers of mine:  “Ten Reasons Why We are Doomed” and “A More Relevant Gaia Hypothesis.”

    [2]     “The 2024 state of the climate report:  Perilous times on planet Earth,” by William J. Ripple et al. [13 co-authors], 2020.  The authors of this report are more cautious than I would be.  I’m retired, so I cannot be terminated!   I should add that little of my life has been spent in academia, my most recent employer being an avionics company (27 years), from which I retired in 2014.

    [3]     Ph.D. in Urban Economic Geography, University of Cincinnati, 1970.

    [4]     The term “hunter-gatherer” is also used, but I avoid that term because it’s a male chauvinist term:  It suggests that hunting—typically done by males—was more important as a source of food than gathering—done typically by females.  Not true!

    [5]     Author of White Man Got No Dreaming (1979); also see this.

    [6]     A resident of the United States—whether or not a “citizen”!

     [7]     The late anthropologist Alan Barnard [1949 – 2022], Hunters and Gatherers:  What Can We Learn from Them (2020), p. 56.

    [8]     Also of relevance here is this article by the Ehrlichs; in it they state:  “Today’s view of normality is possible because everyday thinking about human history largely ignores its first 300,000 years and does not recognize how extremely abnormal the last few centuries have been, roughly just one-thousandth of the history of physically modern Homo sapiens.  Knowing how genetic and cultural evolution over millennia shaped us helps explain today’s human predicament, how hard that predicament is to deal with, and underlines how abnormal human life is in the twenty-first century.”

    [9]     See this on Dunbar’s number.

    [10]    At a later point in time (during the Commercial Revolution, which began in the 11th century?) one’s position in a society—although still influenced by one’s birth—became based on the wealth one was able to acquire.  Which helps explain Trump’s choice of Elon Musk as an advisor.  (Or did Gaia have a hand in this?!  See the second paper listed in note 1 above.)

    [11]    Christianity did not continue the ministry of Jesus!  And per the normative definition of “religion” given in James 1:27, doesn’t even qualify as a “religion”!  Because its focus (except for Quakerism, as one example) is on orthodoxy and rituals, rather than orthopraxy.

    [12]    See my What Are Churches For? (2011).

    [13]    Muddling Toward Frugality (2010), p. 43.  Here’s a discussion of Hebrew origins.

    [14]    Deuteronomy 26:5 says this about Hebrew origins:  “‘Then you shall declare before the Lord your God: ‘My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous.’”  And Morris S. Seale (The Desert Bible, 1974) notes the many desert references in the Bible—which suggests that the early Hebrews were nomads—and only earlier foragers.  Here’s an article on Hebrew history.

    [15]    This is not to say, though, that the ethics of Jesus are not as relevant today as they were 2,000 years ago!

    [16] How Jesus Became Christian (2008), p. 28.  I am puzzled by Wilson’s lack of reference to L. Michael White’s slightly earlier (2004), closely related, From Jesus to Christianity.

    [17]    The current Ecovillage Movement can be thought of this way.  Unfortunately, it has been too “weak” to accomplish much!

    [18]    There have AA many!  I used to own a copy of Henry Olerich’s [1851 – 1927] A Cityless and Countryless World (1893); on the inside of the end cover is a list of utopian literature, and it is a long one!

    [19]    But not impossible—as the life of the recently-deceased President Jimmy Carter [1924 – 2024] demonstrates!

    [20]    This sort of thinking played an important role in the writings of Wisconsin-born intellectual Thorstein Veblen [1857 – 1929].  In his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), for example, “invidious” occurs 104 times!

    [21]    Rather than the cooperation advocated in this book.

    [22] “One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns.”

    [23]    I dislike the use of that term for reasons that I give in my “The Los Angeles Fires ‘Climate Change’ the Cause?”  Available upon request; see note 1 above.

    The post Our Stupid Species first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In the quest to appease Israel, the media undermine our basic rights

    In its eagerness to appease supporters of Israel, the media is happy to ride roughshod over due process and basic rights. It’s damaging Australia’s (and New Zealand’s?) democracy.

    COMMENTARY: By Bernard Keane

    Two moments stand out so far from the Federal Court hearings relating to Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, insofar as they demonstrate how power works in Australia — and especially in Australia’s media.

    The first is how the ABC’s senior management abandoned due process in the face of a sustained lobbying effort by a pro-Israel group to have Lattouf taken off air, under the confected basis she was “antisemitic”.

    Managing director David Anderson admitted in court that there was a “step missing” in the process that led to her sacking — in particular, a failure to consult with the ABC’s HR area, and a failure to discuss the attacks on Lattouf with Lattouf herself, before kicking her out.

    To this, it might be added, was acting editorial director Simon Melkman’s advice to management that Lattouf had not breached any editorial policies.

    Anderson bizarrely singled out Lattouf’s authorship, alongside Cameron Wilson, of a Crikey article questioning the narrative that pro-Palestinian protesters had chanted “gas the Jews”, as basis for his concerns about her, only for one of his executives to point out the article was “balanced and journalistically sound“.

    That is, by the ABC’s own admission, there was no basis to sack Lattouf and the sacking was conducted improperly. And yet, here we are, with the ABC tying itself in absurd knots — no such race as Lebanese, indeed — spending millions defending its inappropriate actions in response to a lobbying campaign.

    The second moment that stands out is a decision by the court early in the trial to protect the identities of those calling for Lattouf’s sacking.

    Abandoned due process
    The campaign that the group rolled out prompted the ABC chair and managing director to immediately react — and the ABC to abandon due process and procedural fairness. Yet the court protects their identities.

    The reasoning — that the identities behind the complaints should be protected for their safety — may or may not be based on reasonable fears, but it’s the second time that institutions have worked to protect people who planned to undermine the careers of people — specifically, women — who have dared to criticise Israel.

    The first was when some members — a minority — of a WhatsApp group supposedly composed of pro-Israel “creatives” discussed how to wreck the careers of, inter alia, Clementine Ford and Lauren Dubois for their criticism of Israel.

    The publishing of the identities of this group was held by both the media and the political class to be an outrageous, antisemitic act of “doxxing”, and the federal government rushed through laws to make such publications illegal.

    No mention of making the act of trying to destroy people’s careers because they hold different political views — or, cancel culture, as the right likes to call it — illegal.

    Whether it’s courts, politicians or the media, it seems that the dice are always loaded in favour of those wanting to crush criticism of Israel, while its victims are left to fend for themselves.

    Human rights lawyer and fighter against antisemitism Sarah Schwartz has been repeatedly threatened with (entirely vexatious) lawsuits by Israel supporters for her criticism of Israel, and her discussion of the exploitation of Australian Jews by Peter Dutton.

    Targeted by another News Corp smear campaign
    She’s been targeted by yet another News Corp smear campaign, based on nothing more than a wilfully misinterpreted slide. She has no government or court rushing to protect her.

    Meanwhile, Peter Lalor, one of Australia’s finest sports journalists (and I write as someone who can’t abide most sports journalism) lost his job with SEN because he, too, dared to criticise Israel and call out the Palestinian genocide. No-one’s rushing to his aide, either.

    No powerful institutions are weighing in to safeguard his privacy, or protect him from the consequences of his opinions.

    The individual cases add up to a pattern: Australian institutions, and especially its major media institutions, will punish you for criticising Israel.

    Pro-Israel groups will demand you be sacked, they will call for your career to be destroyed. Those groups will be protected.

    Media companies will ride roughshod over basic rights and due process to comply with their demands. You will be smeared and publicly vilified on completely spurious bases. Politicians will join in, as Jason Clare did with the campaign against Schwartz and as Chris Minns is doing in NSW, imposing hate speech laws that even Christian groups think are a bad idea.

    Damaging the fabric of democracy
    This is how the campaign to legitimise the Palestinian genocide and destroy critics of the Netanyahu government has damaged the fabric of Australia’s democracy and the rule of law.

    The basic rights and protections that Australians should have under a legal system devoted to preventing discrimination can be stripped away in a moment, while those engaged in destroying people’s careers and livelihoods are protected.

    Ill-advised laws are rushed in to stifle freedom of speech. Australian Jews are stereotyped as a politically convenient monolith aligned with the Israeli government.

    The experience of Palestinians themselves, and of Arab communities in Australia, is minimised and erased. And the media are the worst perpetrators of all.

    Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. First published by Crikey.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Ukraine war shows elites have already built dystopia. Humanity must fight back.

    There are signs that the Ukraine war could be coming to an end, via negotiations. Apart from senseless death and destruction, its only main achievement has been to further empower corporate elites. It unnecessarily boosted human suffering, much like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in the service of an unempathetic, dystopian order. And as the callous competition between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ leaders to out-racist each other shows, this elitist order has a dangerous stranglehold on British politics today.

    Ordinary people’s wellbeing and futures depend on upending this cold-blooded, manipulative rule of establishment politicians.

    Case study #1: Elites used Ukraine as a battlefield for land and resources

    The Western proxy war with Russia could have ended quickly, if the liberal-conservative alliance of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson hadn’t pushed Ukraine away from a peace deal.

    Instead, the conflict has: killed many tens of thousands of troops, and about 12,300 civilians; opened Ukraine up to increasing privatisation in service of powerful corporate interests; hurt poor people at home and around the world, disrupting food and energy supplies and contributing to inflation, and forced Western nations to commit resources to keep the unwinnable war going rather than investing in the welfare of their own citizens.

    Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, aware of US counterpart Donald Trump’s interest in ending the proxy war with Russia, has used natural resources to try and ensure Washington’s essential support.

    Speaking to the Guardian, Zelenskyy promised US corporations “lucrative reconstruction contracts and investment concessions”, along with “priority access to Ukraine’s “rare earths””. Offering opportunities for extracting valuable “rare earth mineral resources” and other minerals like uranium and titanium, he insisted that “for American companies it will create profits”.

    Trump has been clear about his interest in these resources.

    Case study #2: Callous establishment politicians emphasise our differences to prevent unified resistance

    Ordinary people in Ukraine were only fortunate in the sense that Western elites tend to operate refugee policies on what is politically convenient. That’s why the British government was happy to welcome around 213,000 Ukrainians to the UK in less than two years – “equivalent to the number of people granted refuge in the UK from all origins, in total, between 2014 and 2021”.

    The scandalous inhumanity of establishment politicians this week, however, saw them oppose one Palestinian family with four children entering the UK in the same way after UK-backed war criminals Israel had destroyed their home during its genocide in Gaza.

    Commentators rightly slammed politicians for their distortion of truth, “racialised hierarchy” and “clear-cut”, “blatant, rotten”, “anti-Palestinian racism”. Activist Andrew Feinstein even called prime minister Keir Starmer’s repulsive stance “racist white supremacy”.

    Starmer was never going to ‘move leftwards in power’. He was and is the establishment – just as Tory leaders are and just as far-right elitist Nigel Farage is. This dominant order doesn’t care if your personal views are liberal or conservative. It only cares that you’re distracted from talking about the corrupt and out-of-control economic order that threatens our current and future wellbeing.

    Want stability? Then resist dystopia, like the Ukraine war.

    We often hear that centrists value stability, moderation, and pragmatism. But what we have now in the world is far from stability. Both Ukraine and Gaza have revealed that the political and economic elites ruling over us have created a callous, cold-blooded, dystopian world right in front of our eyes. And that threatens everyone’s wellbeing, and darkens everyone’s futures.

    Ukraine made some people think the British state was the good guy and the Russian state was the bad guy. But Israel’s genocide in Gaza should have made it clear to most that the British and US governments are the bad guys too.

    The leaders of all these nations have shown disinterest in human suffering, manipulative, antisocial behaviour, and remorselessness. They have openly attacked and undermined an international legal system that ostensibly fostered global stability, in their ruthless quest for territorial control and natural resources.

    After the Cold War, it was perhaps understandable for many to think that stability meant embracing capitalism. But the relentless profit-seeking of economic elites has compromised any possibility of progress ever since.

    Servile politicians divided us according to our personal identities so that the division between ordinary people and our rulers wasn’t the focus. Meanwhile, the rich entrenched their wealth. In 2024 alone, billionaires increased their wealth by $2tn, “three times faster than the year before”. However, “the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990”.

    That’s not ‘stability’. It’s the gradual capture of our political and economic systems by an increasingly empowered super-rich class.

    We must ALL unite to stop billionaire-led global destabilisation

    Without the divisive influence of the super-rich in Western politics and their support for death and destruction, the world would undoubtedly be a stabler place.

    People might be able to talk to each other, coexist peacefully despite our personal, private beliefs and differences, and meet our basic needs.

    When the political will exists, it’s perfectly possible to mobilise massive resources to protect people. Just think of the Covid-19 pandemic. Supporting each other’s wellbeing wasn’t radical. It was just common sense. And so is ensuring a minimum level of living standards for everyone, protecting their wellbeing, environment, and future.

    That is what creates true stability, not the ongoing rule of tiny elites who completely disregard human suffering in search of personal gain.

    Billionaires simply shouldn’t exist. Their existence is “a sign of economic failure” that undermines ordinary people’s power and wellbeing.

    We have the receipts, because the increasing inequality in recent decades and simultaneously increasing power of the super-wealthy has been utterly disastrous for ordinary people. In both Ukraine and Gaza, meanwhile, the absence of super-wealthy influence would almost certainly have pushed people to talk instead or perpetuating unwinnable conflicts, reducing human suffering significantly.

    Stopping the billionaire-led destabilisation of the world isn’t just a fight for socialists, anarchists, or communists. It’s in the interests of humanity as a whole, with all our unique strengths and flaws. And the sooner we unite to challenge the dystopian order our political and economic elites have built up, the sooner we’ll have true stability.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.