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Category: Opinion

  • The DUP’s refusal to govern with Sinn Féin is just sectarian business as usual

    It’s both official and historic. Sinn Féin, under the leadership of Mary Lou McDonald and deputy leader Michelle O’Neill, is the largest political party in the North of Ireland. It won 27 of the Northern Ireland Assembly‘s 90 seats in the 5 May elections, as the British unionist DUP crashed to second place. O’Neill is now in line to be the North’s first minister. Sinn Féin also won the most first-preference votes. This is the first time any Irish republican political party has achieved this.

    Whilst we try to work out what this result could mean for the North’s position within the UK, the DUP appears to be have its head in the sand. The system of government in the North is such that Irish republicans and British unionists must work together. However, the DUP refuses to commit to entering government with Sinn Féin despite the historic and democratic result. Its position isn’t at all surprising. Try as the DUP might to use the fallout from Brexit as an excuse for not entering government, its thinly veiled sectarianism is fooling nobody.

    Was this the most important election?

    DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson billed this election the “most important in a generation”. Donaldson said he believed it would decide the future direction of the North of Ireland. He urged unionist voters to transfer their votes (the Assembly uses a Proportional Representation Single Transferable Vote system) to other unionist candidates. According to Donaldson, this would have helped to stop Sinn Féin from winning the election and thwarted its aim of holding a referendum on the North’s status within the UK.

    Additionally, according to Donaldson, voting in this way would demonstrate unionist opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP – the post Brexit agreement). Of course, Donaldson neglected to focus on the fact that the DUP was an ardent supporter of Brexit during and since the 2016 referendum.

    The DUP, once again, pulled out of government in the North of Ireland in February this year, citing its opposition to the NIP. It said the NIP creates a border down the Irish Sea, thereby treating the North differently to other parts of the UK. As such, the DUP claimed that it won’t re-enter government until this is resolved. However, it’s also possible that it realised support for Sinn Féin was such that the DUP would be its junior partner in government. This would be unacceptable to a unionist mindset that’s used to having the upper hand in a statelet which has been anti-Catholic from its very foundation.

    Donaldson’s plan to stop Sinn Féin failed miserably. Not only did the two main unionist parties not make gains, they in fact suffered losses. The DUP lost three seats, while the other mainstream unionist party, the UUP, lost one. The DUP’s first-preference vote dropped by almost 7%, while Sinn Féin’s increased by more than 1%. But Donaldson, in a way, may have got something right – the generation that voted in this election showed how unimportant the dominant DUP position is.

    Unionism hasn’t changed

    There can be little surprise at unionist reluctance to work with their republican neighbours as equals. Over the last few decades at least, they’ve made no secret of their feelings for their Irish Catholic and republican neighbours. From fostering suspicion to ensure that they couldn’t gain employment to comparing them to animals, there’s little doubt as to the real reason for the DUP not wanting to enter government.

    But that’s on them. The electorate in the North has shown in this and indeed previous elections that they reject such sectarian politics.

    The DUP hasn’t got the message

    24 years on and the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) has not been the stepping stone towards a united Ireland that leading Irish republicans promised it would be. However, in all my years observing politics on this island, this is without doubt the first time I can remember people from outside Irish republican circles talking about the realistic possibility of a united Ireland. Even if the shape of a potential united Ireland is something that concerns me.

    Regardless of its ineffectiveness for achieving a united Ireland, the DUP had nothing but contempt for the GFA. This is mainly because it means sharing power with its republican neighbours. Following the election result, Donaldson is still refusing to listen to the electorate, and he is instead engaging in ‘I told you so’. He appears oblivious to what has just happened to his party, and how a sectarian mindset has led it here.

    Featured image via YouTube Screengrab – Sinn Féin

    By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • NYT Pundit Thinks U.S. Should Be “Calling the Shots” in Ukraine’s War

    This is a commentary upon N.Y. Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s statement on May 6 that Ukraine’s Government is and ought to be the U.S. Government’s agent in its war against Russia, not representing the interests of the Ukrainian people in it. He introduced the statement by noting that Ukraine is a bad country,

    a country marbled with corruption. That doesn’t mean we should not be helping it. I am glad we are. I insist we do. But my sense is that the Biden team is walking much more of a tightrope with Zelensky than it would appear to the eye — wanting to do everything possible to make sure he wins this war but doing so in a way that still keeps some distance between us and Ukraine’s leadership. That’s so Kyiv is not calling the shots [I boldfaced that — he didn’t] and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath.

    He starts there by putting down Ukraine as a “country,” and then asserts that, fortunately, “Kyiv is not calling the shots and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath.” Perhaps an underlying assumption of his in saying this is that America is NOT “a country riddled with corruption,” and, so, that it is right and good that Ukraine is America’s slave in this matter.

    He continues there:

    The view of Biden and his team, according to my reporting, is that America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty and beat the Russians back — but not let Ukraine turn itself into an American protectorate on the border of Russia. We need to stay laser-focused on what is our national interest and not stray in ways that lead to exposures and risks we don’t want.

    I believe that Friedman truly does represent the U.S. Establishment that he is a part of, and that “Biden and his team” likewise do. I accept Friedman’s statement as reflecting accurately the way that “Biden and his team” (which, given the U.S. Congress’s virtually 100% voting for it in this matter of Ukraine, also includes virtually every U.S. Senator and Representative) feel about the matter: they feel that Ukraine must be their slave in it and must do whatever the U.S. Government demands that it do in its war with Ukraine’s next-door-neighbor, Russia.

    That view — the view that it’s not only true but good that “Kyiv is not calling the shots” in this matter — reflects the view that an imperialist government has toward one of its colonies or vassal-nations (which the imperialist nation nowadays calls instead its ‘allies’). And this is the reason why they treat not only their armies but all of the residents in their ‘allies’ as being appropriate cannon-fodder or ‘proxy soldiers’ in their foreign wars, wars to conquer other countries — such as, in this case, Russia.

    Here was how the former U.S. President, Barack Obama, phrased the matter to America’s graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, on 28 May 2014:

    The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

    It could as well have been said by England’s royals and other aristocrats during their imperialistic heyday.

    All other nations are “dispensable.” America’s military is an extension of international economic competition so that America’s billionaires will continue to rule the world in the future, as they do now. “Rising middle classes compete with us” and are consequently America’s enemies in the “dispensable” countries (everywhere in which vassalage to America’s billionaires — being “America’s allies” — is rejected), so that “it will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.” So he told America’s future generals, regarding those who live (as the 2017 U.S. Army report put it) “in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unacceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.” America’s military are the global gendarmes not of Hitler’s nazi regime in WW II, but of America’s nazi regime in the lead-up to WW III.

    Thomas Friedman, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all of the other U.S. major ‘news’-media, feel this way about it, and report and comment upon the ’news’ that way, but I think that it was a slip-up that Friedman and the Times expressed it, for once, so honestly, especially given that they are master-liars on most international-news reporting and commentary. The pièce de résistance in his commentary was its ludicrously hypocritical line that “America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty.” (They must be America’s slaves but restore their sovereignty. How stupid do they think that the American public is?) That too is typical of aristocrats’ hypocrisies and general corruptness — including that of the U.S. Government itself, which represents ONLY America’s billionaires and other super-rich — it’s a regime and no democracy at all.

    Moreover, whereas America has no business at all to be involved in this war, Russia very much does, and the U.S. regime’s involvement there is ONLY in order to conquer Russia — which is a psychopathic and super-imperialistic objective to have, and not MERELY a real and soaring threat against the safety of all parts of the world — the real and now rapidly growing danger of there being a World War III.

    Incidentally, the title of Friedman’s commentary was “The War Is Getting More Dangerous for America, and Biden Knows It.” It’s an interesting title, because it concerns ONLY what Friedman and America’s other aristocrats care about, which is themselves, and not at all about what any of the ‘dispensable’ countries (including Ukraine) care about. Since the publics everywhere care about preventing a WW III (nuclear war between Russia and America — including all NATO countries), that is a stunningly narrow sphere of concern regarding a potentially world-ending catastrophe. Clearly, America’s aristocrats are rank psychopaths. They control the U.S. Government, and this is the result of that. It’s a Government in which the worst come first, the public last. Russia is up against that: it is up against America, and Ukraine is only the first battleground of WW III, now only at the proxy stage for the U.S. regime but not for the Russian Government, which, in this matter, truly does represent the most-vital national-security interests of its citizens. Everyone except U.S.-and-allied aristocracies (many of whom are buyers of billionaires’ bunkers) have an overriding interest in America’s defeat in this war, before it ever reaches the nuclear stage, of direct Russia vs. U.S. warfare.

    The shame of today’s U.N. is that it’s not enraged against the U.S. Government. This is shaping up to be the biggest scandal and failure in the U.N.’s entire history, virtually its own collapse.

    The post NYT Pundit Thinks U.S. Should Be “Calling the Shots” in Ukraine’s War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Capitalism has always wanted to control our bodies

    Perhaps there was no more fitting of a backdrop for the announcement that the Supreme Court appears to be planning to overturn Roe v. Wade than the simultaneous coverage of the Met Ball’s Gilded Age red carpet last night. While celebrities, oligarchs, and the world’s richest man-baby showed off custom outfits that took skilled craftspeople thousands of hours to complete, in remembrance of a time period that rivals only our own in terms of wealth inequality, POLITICO published a bombshell report that included a leaked copy of the Supreme Courts’ likely majority decision in Jackson Womens’ Health Organization v. Dobbs. The glitzy excesses of the Met Ball paired with this sobering news created a horrifyingly on-the-nose tableau of the ways that capitalist exploitation and excess has always been dependent on the control of (certain) people’s bodily autonomy. 

    While leaks of Supreme Court decisions are virtually unheard of, there is good reason to believe that the leaked decision, written by Justice Alito, will be the outcome in the case. The decision contains language that would not only overturn Roe but would also upend the Constitutional right to privacy altogether. Barring unforeseen changes, this decision would open the juridical door to jeopardizing not just the right to abortion, but also contraception access, marriage equality, and even the right to have sex with any consenting adult you wish. While this ruling would seemingly leave decisions on such rights up to individual states, people in safe liberal enclaves should not rest easy—Republicans already have a plan to target abortion access nationwide. 

    This calculated, coordinated, decades-in-the-making assault on abortion rights is not just a localized political phenomenon that can be explained soley by the partisan ideological commitments of the American right. The control of reproductive health has always been a baked-in feature of capitalist society. As an economic system that entire governmental, civic, and cultural institutions could be built around and made to support, the rise of capitalism demanded a continual supply of workers to increase production and profit, a demand that is often pointed to as the driving force behind the state’s interest in controlling reproductive rights. The dynamics at work can even be observed in the increase of witch-hunt trials in the 16th and 17th centuries, which often focused on persecuting women and people who assisted women in efforts to control their reproductive health. (It is not a coincidence that Justice Alito’s draft opinion cited a 17th-century jurist who presided over the execution of at least two women for witchcraft.) These trials, along with the increased prosecution of women for crimes like infanticide, coincided with the rise of mercantilism and capitalism as the increasingly dominant economic systems around which much of the Western world was being organized. 

    While this ruling would seemingly leave decisions on such rights up to individual states, people in safe liberal enclaves should not rest easy—Republicans already have a plan to target abortion access nationwide.

    Of course, it is also impossible to tell the story capitalism and the class war over people’s invididual bodily autonomy without reflecting on the role of chattel slavery. Enslaved women were used by their owners to “breed” new generations of laborers to be funneled into the insatiable maw of the slave system. All attempts by enslaved people to control their reproductive lives were met with extreme resistance and brutality. The ownership and control of enslaved people’s reproductive capacities was seen as essential for the continuation of the slave economy in particular and of capitalism as a whole. Long after the abolition of slavery, this desire to control the reproductive capacity of Black women persisted, and remnants of this dark past can still be seen today in the language and tactics used by anti-abortion activists. 

    The persistent attack on bodily autonomy is not only due to capitalism’s unceasing need for new generations of workers to feed into profit-driven engines of production; it also highlights capitalism’s need to control pregnant people in order to ensure that domestic and reproductive labor are done at no cost and pose no threat to the overriding system. Because social norms and economic supports have seldomly allowed for other options, pregnant people are often ejected from the sphere of public life and relegated to the private sphere, where they are separated and estranged from one another. Even for people who work in jobs outside the home, the inability to make decisions regarding their own family planning can leave workers so overwhelmed by paid and unpaid labor that they have no time or strength to organize. 

    In her essay “Women: Caste, Class or Oppressed Sex,” written prior to the Roe decision, Evelyn Reed argues that capitalism has pushed women to their lowest status ever in society by confining them only to the family unit, excluding them from a communal society, which has caused them to be isolated and unable to organize themselves. “Despite the hypocritical homage paid to womankind as the ‘sacred mother’ and devoted homemaker, the worth of women sank to its lowest point under capitalism. Since housewives do not produce commodities for the market nor create any surplus value for the profiteers, they are not central to the operations of capitalism. Only three justifications for their existence remain under this system: as breeders, as household janitors, and as buyers of consumer goods for the family,” she writes.

    Reed echoes the claim made by Frederich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that “to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor.” Reed argues that the fight for abortion rights, which allows for the escape from the domestic realm, is central to this emancipation, and to the freedom of all people from the grasp of capitalism. 

    It is not a coincidence that Justice Alito’s draft opinion cited a 17th-century jurist who presided over the execution of at least two women for witchcraft.

    Perhaps this analysis points to one of the central reasons Democrats have been so ineffective in fighting back against the attack on abortion rights: the liberation of the working class is not important to them. Quite the opposite, in fact. Roe v. Wade has never ensured abortion access for all pregnant people in the United States; it has merely ensured that members of the upper classes with the money, resources, and time to navigate the confusing world of reproductive health could do so. Even the Democrats’ last gasp at protecing abortion rights, the Women’s Health Protection Act (which could not pass Senate) was merely a plan to codify Roe, not to ensure abortion access for all. 

    It is clear that the fight for abortion rights should neither be led nor controlled by the Democratic party, or any of the liberal institutions that have shown time and time again their willingness to sell out people’s permanent right to bodily autonomy for temporary political gain. Rather, we should embrace the working-class movements, particularly those led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, to fight for reproductive justice by any means necessary. Without a plan to actually attack the system that seeks to control our reproductive health, we will ultimately fail. Rosa Luxemburg’s writing on the suffrage movement of the early 20th century seems particularly apt today: “The current mass struggle for women’s political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletariat’s general struggle for liberation. In this lies its strength and its future.”

    Pieces marked as Opinion may contain views that do not necessarily reflect or align with those of The Real News Network; they also may contain claims that could not be fully corroborated by TRNN’s editorial team.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Corruptio Optimi Pessima

    … wrong is what really pays …

    — Plato, Republic (ii. 366)

    “During the 1990s, the World Bank changed course to address the ‘cancer of corruption.’”

    I’m not surprised. This was the end of the Cold War — and the end of the generals, like General Ershad in Bangladesh.

    As The Economist observed: “…the cold war’s end prompted western donors to stop propping up anti-communist dictators and to start insisting on democratic reforms.” And it was only in 1991 in Harare, Zimbabwe that heads of states declared that the Commonwealth should promote democracy and human rights.

    But that’s just surface stuff.

    The real insight came from two anthropologists, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in their book Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999) where they say: “It cannot simply be a coincidence that, now that the West ties aid to democratisation under the guise of multi-party elections, multi-party elections are taking place in Africa.” (p 118)

    Money that had hitherto been channeled through the state now began to flow to non-state actors – NGOs. Unsurprisingly, these have proliferated. Again, Chabal and Daloz make an astute observation: “The political significance of such a massive proliferation of NGOs in Africa deserves closer attention. Our research suggests that this expansion is less the outcome of the increasing political weight of civil society than the consequence of the very pragmatic realisation that resources are now largely channeled through NGOs.” (p 22) In other words, a rational response to monetary rewards.

    Bangladesh tells a similar story. According to The Economist: “There are about 20,000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Bangladesh, probably more than in any other country.”

    You can take a business to court for corruption, but you can’t haul Congress or Parliament to court.

    These NGOs (aka civil society) have been paid to “look the other way.” Notice their deafening silence on political violence in this country.

    You may (but probably have not) heard of hartals in Bangladesh: violence unleashed on innocent bystanders by the opposition to bring down the government (“strikes-cum-blockades enforced by partisan thugs” was The Economist’s tortured definition).

    “Politicians are not human.”

    Such was the pronouncement of the brother of Salahuddin (33), a fisherman, who was killed in a skirmish between the two student wings of the political parties in a hartal (Prothom Alo, 6th April, 2001). Two rickshaw-pullers – one of them unidentified, the other Badaruddin (32) – were bombed while they were pulling their rickshaws during hartal hours. It took them 24 to 48 hours to die (The Daily Star, April 4, 2001). An auto-rickshaw was burned to ashes, and when the driver, Saidul Islam Shahid (35), tried to put out the flames, he was sprinkled with petrol, and burned to death. It took him more than two days to die (The Daily Star, April 5, 2001). Truck driver, Fayez Ahmed (50), died when a bomb was thrown on his truck (The Daily Star, April 4, 2001). And Ripon Sikder, a sixteen-year-old injured by a bomb, died on 4 May at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital after struggling for his life for eleven days (The Daily Star, May 6, 2001).

    A headline in The Daily Star reads: “Arson attack on bus kills 9; bomb hurled on transport in several city areas.” On the night of June 4, 2004, a double-decker public bus full of passengers in front of the Sheraton Hotel in Dhaka blew up in flames. “The fire caught my wife Yasmin and burnt her alive before my eyes on the upper deck,” said Abdur Rahim, bursting into tears. Six people were incinerated inside the bus, and a burnt man jumped to his death; two others, including a two-year-old child, Meem, died at Dhaka Medical College Hospital (June 5, 2004).

    The leader of the opposition at the time, Sheikh Hasina, had called a hartal. “This sort of incidents [sic] take place before every hartal and you also know the perpetrators,” said Dhaka Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ashraful Huda, careful not to name the Awami League, Sheikh Hasina’s party, who were destined to be his future boss.

    According to the Banglapedia (“Hartal”) online, 80% of all hartals after 1947 occurred between 1990 and 2011. Of the 721 national hartals recorded by the Banglapedia since the country came into being as East Pakistan in 1947, 591 occurred after the democratic transition of 1990 – that is, 82% in a mere 21 years (1990-2011). The article needs updating for there have been many and severe hartals as recently as 2015, when, according to David Bergman, a journalist, 61 people died, most of them burnt alive, in January alone (Bergman notes that altogether 119 people died through political violence, including hartals, in January and February, 2015. Bergman’s blog is blocked in Bangladesh.) The Economist article on the violence quotes a similar figure of “about 60” killed, though does not mention how.

    Free and fair elections?

    Not a single word appeared in the newspapers of Bangladesh about the findings of Walter Mebane and his team at Cornell was reported in The Economist. Mebane and others studied the figures for the three elections in this country in 1991, 1996 and 2001. The first was clean, the second showed that some 2% of results were problematic and the third, a glaring 9%. Yet the elections had been vetted by the Carter Center and the European Union.

    “We are blessed to be living in a democracy like Bangladesh…,” US Ambassador Harry K. Thomas said in an interview, according to the The Bangladesh Observer of June 25, 2005.

    Fed up, the people yearned for military rule. An editor at the most widely circulated English daily (motto: YOUR RIGHT TO KNOW), told me bluntly, “We know people want martial law, but we can’t print that”.

    The executive editor and his wife, who heads a mammoth NGO, Manusher Jonno, are beloved of western donors.

    My gleanings from newspaper headlines between 2000 and 2019 show that 888 student politicians, who have formed a mafia of extortion and other crimes, have been murdered — by each other. (Body-counting has led to moral and emotional exhaustion, so I have since discontinued the grim census.)

    The NGOs regularly publish grisly stats at the end of each year — but these young deaths are never mentioned. That would expose democracy in Bangladesh, which western donors do not pay them to do.

    It has been estimated by economist Abul Barkat that only 25% of donor money reaches the poor in Bangladesh (New Nation, September 26, 2003); the remainder goes towards meeting administrative costs, including salaries. Chabal and Daloz observe that “…there is today an international ‘aid market’ which Africans know how to play with great skill. Indeed, there is very little doubt that NGOs spend an excessive proportion of their budget on furnishing their members with sophisticated and expensive equipment (from computers to four-wheel drives), leaving all too little for the development projects which justify the work of the NGOs in the first place.” (p 23) This observation can be made of Bangladesh verbatim. Dr. Mozaffer Ahmed, economist and former chairman of Transparency International Bangladesh, echoed Abul Barkat when he observed that “Beneficiaries get only 20 to 22 percent of the foreign funds while [the] rest are used as ‘cost of fund’ meaning house rent, salary and other expenses” (Daily Star, July 11, 2009).

    Therefore, it is not surprising that a BBC survey found that every section of society was suspicious of NGOs. Only three percent surveyed wanted to give them more power — and only two per cent admired social work, the ‘least admired’ of all kinds of work” (Daily Star, December 9, 2005),

    “People respect other people with high moral standards,” says the Oxford University blog quoted in this article’s first line.. Well, they respect money more. And these NGOs (and wider civil society) are not breaking the law. They’re turning a blind eye for the benefit it brings.

    The manifest function of NGOs is to promote civil society and development; their latent function is to purchase the loyalty of the elite — and, in not a few cases, the masses, exploiting their poverty.

    Consider the late, award-winning Father Timm (1923-2020). He and the priests at Notre Dame College valiantly fed 1,000 people daily during the man-made famine of 1974 (as I learned from conversations with the late principal Fr. Peixotto and vice-principal Fr. Banas).

    Yet, in the 1990s, he appeared in The Economist pages (where he was inaccurately described as a Jesuit) boasting of having got so many women to vote! He believed in democracy — despite the evidence.

    NGOs like ASA, with support groups in 40,000 villages, are canvassing women to back the secular Awami League. “In a Muslim state,” says Father Timm, ASA’s American Jesuit (sic) president, “we’ve managed to ensure more rural women cast their vote than men.” It is, he says, “a social revolution to combat the medievalism of the fundamentalists.”

    Apparently, he had learnt nothing from the fact that 1.5 million people had starved to death under a democratically elected​​ — and fanatically anti-Islamic — government of the same party, run by despotic pere, now by despotic fille (Sheikh Mujib and his daughter, Sheikh Hasina). To pater patriae, senior’s honorific, must be added a second: auto-genocidaire. It is as though Pol Pot junior had succeeded Pol Pot senior.

    Fr. Timm’s single-minded pursuit of democracy and secularism, in the teeth of evidence, reminds one of the intellectuals of the last century. “We are familiar with those intellectuals of the twentieth century who were willfully blind to the crimes of totalitarianism.” This succinct observation comes from the pen of Justin E. H. Smith in his aptly-titled book Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, p 462).

    “By the end of the year [1974], the Bangladesh government stood exposed as inept, indifferent and heartless. All its political credit had vanished. Seventy distinguished Bangladeshi economists, lawyers and writers issued a statement saying that the famine was man-made and had resulted from ‘shameless plunder, exploitation, terrorization, flattery, fraudulence and misrule.’ They added that the government was ‘clearly dominated by and…representative of smugglers and profiteers’ (Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh, (Cambridge University Press: 2009), p 181).’

    According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (“famine”, 15th edition, 1988), after the floods of 1974, “The government did not make available to the hungry people large quantities of rice that were available, and merchants exported it to India.”

    Notre Dame College, where Fr. Timm taught and resided (I often saw him playing basketball with the boys), is famed not only for academic excellence, but for keeping students out of politics (two reasons why a recommendation by the principal carries great weight with American universities considering enrolling students from Bangladesh). These juveniles are routinely exploited by the political parties as thugs — Notre Dame, unlike the infamous Dhaka College, keeps parents informed if kids get into politics (students enroll at16 and leave at 18: they’re minors during their stay).

    Indeed, in my talks with the padres, I learned how Sheikh Mujib’s son, Sheikh Kamal, and his thugs descended on the college in the early 1970s and demanded student politics on campus. The priests, in cassocks, such was the dread occasioned by the scion and his cohorts, who had the entire state machinery behind them, decided that night to leave the country rather than run a criminalised institution headed by student leaders. Sheikh Kamal, sensing this, never returned. The wisdom of the fathers of the Holy Cross averted the fate that overtook Dhaka University: on its centenary of founding, a journalist observed, “These days, student leaders even control their teachers, although only around 10 percent of teachers are involved in politics, while the rest are devoted to carrying out their jobs.”

    Fr.Timm, therefore, was uniquely privileged to know how “democracy” and “politics” function in Bangladesh. He knew about the hartals enforced by student thugs who burn people alive. (He was, as we have seen, intimately familiar with the famine of 1974 during our first democracy – he, in fact, started the feeding centre at the college when he witnessed a woman fighting off dogs to get at food in a dustbin.)

    ​​Yet he never spoke out on the subject. He was vocal against child labour in the garments factories, but that children were being exploited by the political parties seemed not to matter given the “greater” cause of democracy, the Big Picture dwarfing the Little People, the grand narratives of the last century unleashed on the hapless. Unsurprisingly, these boys, once criminalized, end up killing each other over turf and spoils (see chart).

    Today, in totalitarian Bangladesh, under Sheikh Hasina, Mujib’s daughter, dissidents are at risk of being disappeared. According to The Economist, “Under her 12-year tenure at least 600 Bangladeshis are reckoned to have been “disappeared””. The newspaper added a new word to its Espresso edition for the week: goom. The Persian word literally means “lost”. State-sponsored abductions, observes Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch, have become a systematic tool of oppression in this country.

    The prime minister’s vade mecum appears to be Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell writes: “More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party disappeared and were never heard of again”.

    What I’m struggling to articulate here has recently been brilliantly portrayed by Eviatar Zerubavel in The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

    “Hush money,” he observes, “always flows down the power ladder….Furthermore, silencing is also used “as a weapon of subjugation…the suffocation of the Other’s voice.” (p 41).

    That Fr. Timm and his NGO, and assorted civil society like Manusher Jonno, serve as conduits for western government lucre to corrupt our best and brightest says a great deal about how hush money wends its way into our pockets.

    No monopoly western publication ever printed any of my articles, poems or short stories on these subjects – but the Indy-media did. They have shoestring budgets and frequently go bust or the publisher, a one-man or one-woman show, dies, and the journal folds.

    If a writer is willing to accept obscurity without pay, neither cash nor kudos, then he or she will be heard by a few friends who might bother to read the material.

    But silence and denial run deep – even among friends and family.

    And that reminds me of those inimitable lines by Robert Burns:

    The man o’ independent mind
    He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.

    — “A Man’s A Man For A’ That”, 1795

    The post Corruptio Optimi Pessima first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Tao of Vladimir Putin

    Since power equals force times speed… Thus, a smaller man who can swing faster may hit as hard or as far as the heavier man who swings slowly.
    — Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do

    Vladimir Putin has won one of the amazing strategic military victories in history.

    The Ukrainians had an army of over 300,000, led by 50,000 to 100,000 fascist fanatics, with hi-tech weapons provided by NATO and with training by the best American, British and Canadian military advisors. They were confident that they could blitz what was left of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and finish their campaign of ethnic cleansing.

    But the lightning attack they planned for this Spring was not to happen.

    The Russians struck first — fielding a must smaller force, perhaps just 100,000 strong, punching through Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) defenses and cutting them off from support — kettling them in Eastern Ukraine where they were vulnerable to artillery and airstrikes. Bruce Lee would have been proud.

    Fencing Without A Sword

    Lee described Jeet Kune Do as “fencing without a sword”, hence his characteristic stance and use of distance, quite unlike the Wing Chun he learned from Yip Man. Feint, thrust, riposte — these are basics — which in Jeet are done almost simultaneously.

    These are also what Putin did — feint, thrust, and riposte. Like Lee, he is a learner.

    By contrast, Americans rely on brute force, usually in gangs — umm… “alliances”.

    The tactics of the NATO gang inevitably involves “shock and awe”, indiscriminate bombing with B52s, the use of uranium munitions, — with the attempt to preserve the lives of one’s own soldiers at expense of women and children in the communities under attack. For every combatant killed about 9 or 10 women and children die.

    Indiscriminate bombing with B52s flatten infrastructure and deprive people of the necessities of life. The use of uranium munitions poisons the environment leading to massive increases in cancer later. The result is both social and environmental disaster. “Shock and awe” is “scorched earth” rebranded Hollywood style. Check out the video game.

    But shock and awe is usually preceded by or accompanies by economic warfare that end up condemning millions to death through starvation and disease. Think: Iraq. Think: Afghanistan.

    Putin’s Psychology

    Way back when, before Joe Biden and his corrupt son Hunter, had probably ever heard of Kiev, Putin had planned to retire in favor of Medvedev. He never really wanted to be a politician. Then Medvedev showed his colors as an Atlanticist, by not opposing the Libya War of 2011. Putin changed his mind. He was, according to all reports, genuinely shocked at the manner of Gaddafi’s death , sodomized with a bayonet. He had done a lot for Russia but if he left the country in the hands of the Atlanticists, it was as doomed as Libya.

    The Internet is full of psychologizing about Putin. He is supposedly a narcissist, a psychopath, and various other things, totally lacking in empathy due to early childhood adversity, living in a single apartment with two other families. What is not mentioned is that those two other families — both Jewish — and his Jewish mother gave him a lot of love, and people throughout his life stepped in to mentor and help him. Putin has a lot to give back, or “pay forward”.

    “He took us to a very famous museum in St. Petersburg,” Rourke said of meeting Putin. “And then later he took me to a children’s cancer hospital. And we went in there and visited the really, really sick, little, tiny, tiny kids. I looked over at him and I saw him and, nobody’s going to want to hear this, but I saw a man with empathy and who was really moved by what these children are going through.“

    Contrast that with Hillary Clinton cackling like the Wicked Witch which she is about Gaddafi’s death — or Obama boasting about how good he was at killing by drone — 90% women and children of course.

    OK but CNN will tell you that Putin is a psychopath. Madeline Albright, who didn’t blink an eye at murdering half a million children describes him as “reptilian”.

    If this is a psychpath, we need more like him.

    The Tao of Russian Strategy

    In Jeet Kune Do, unlike Wing Chun, distance and positioning are very important. This is because Jeet is both offensive and defensive, whereas Wing chun emphasizes close-in defense in confined quarters.

    As with Musashi Miyamoto, Bruce Lee always emphasized pre-knowledge of what an opponent may do, to attack pre-emptively — which, of course, what Putin did.

    In 2014, however, the situation was murky to say the least.

    “When you know yourself and your opponent, you will win every time. When you know yourself but not your opponent, you will win one and lose one.”
    — Sun Tzu, “III. Attack by Stratagem” in The Art of War

    Putin knew that he did not know.

    He who knows not, knows not, he knows not, he is a fool shun him.
    He who knows not and he knows not, he is simple teach him.
    He who knows and knows not that he knows, he is asleep, awaken him.
    He who knows and knows that he knows, he is wise, follow him.
    ― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune

    I would add this: He who knows he knows not, knows to know.

    Russia had to learn. I had to know.

    Certainly, Russia was not strong enough in 2014 to take on the Ukraine AND NATO — not without using tactical nukes. But what were the West’s real intentions? Could they be persuaded to adopt a different path? Putin couldn’t know.

    But he soon found out.

    Failure to implement the Minsk accords, the MH117 and Skripal false flags, CIA sponsored chemical false flag attacks in Syria and the like — and especially sanctions on both Russia and China — showed him that this new version of “the Great Game” was no game at all. More like the Hunger Games.

    If you grow up on the streets, as Putin did, you learn to avoid gangs and fights — except when there is no choice — but to be vigilant and plan countermeasures in advance. So Putin continued to develop military technologies, notably hypersonic missiles, the kalibr missile and supersonic torpedoes that gave Russia the edge.

    Subduing the whale

    It is clear that in 2022, the Ukrainians thought they could rely on the support of NATO, if not NATO intervention, as they had after the CIA coup in 2014. As fascists, they saw Russia’s consistent efforts to resolve the issues diplomatically as weakness.

    War was coming one way or the other. And, as both Bruce Lee and Musashi Miyamoto would advise, it is best to attack first in such a case.

    The Russians had done what it could to resolve the crisis diplomatically despite the Ukrainian fascists occupying more than half of Eastern Ukraine and killing about 15,000 people, mostly civilians. But now it was going to full-on ethnic cleansing, with maximum loss of life— aka genocide.

    Russian intelligence gave prior warning of the Ukraine’s nuclear intentions as well as the existence of biolabs possibly developing pathogens tuned to specific DNA sets, which could, in theory, result in bioweapons targeting certain ethnic groups. The punitive sanctions against both Russia and China amounting to economic war and increasing bellicosity signified that the US wanted to takeover where Hitler and Japan had left off, the domination of Eurasia, even without slave camps and mass murder.

    By this time, Putin had reformed and developed the Russian military, explored new tactics and weapons in Syria, and re-imagined the FSB as something that KGB people in his day could only dream about and that the CIA might aspire to, if it could move beyond bias confirmation.

    American Advantages as Disadvantages

    Ah…, but what about the US’s huge array of hi-tech weapons?

    I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
    — Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do

    Putin focused Russia’s efforts on developing just a few, really effective kicks (as it were). The Kalibr missile system, hypersonic weapons, the S500 and advanced S200 systems. UAVs. The old SU27 family became the advanced SU30 and SU34 systems. Most of these weapons were tested in Syria. The focus was on practicality.

    “Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.”
    — Miyamoto Musashi, precept of the Dokkodo

    While in Russia, weapons companies serve the State, in the US the State serves the weapons companies — so enormous amounts of money go to developing ever more expensive and technologically complex weapons systems such as the F35, the most expensive fighter program in history that is in most respects is already obsolete. Aircraft carriers cost billions of dollars and are, like Japan’s Yamamoto battleship, just large, vulnerable, and now indefensible targets.

    Musashi subduing the whale

    Yes, the US is the whale. And Putin therefore is Musashi.

    And how much of American weapons tech works?

    The Americans have recently claimed that Russia suffers a 60% misfire rate. But where do they get these numbers — the Russians obviously don’t say!

    Those statistics come from the Ukrainians who use obsolete Soviet missiles, which indeed frequently blow up, and from the American Tomahawk missiles, not to mention from the US’s many failed attempts at hypersonic weapons.

    With sanctions, Russia doesn’t have the money to waste and it puts the needs of its people first.

    The US puts the needs of the Military Industrial Complex first — by beggaring healthcare, education and infrastructure.

    Feint, Thrust, Riposte

    Putin was able to leverage good intelligence of his enemies’ intentions with highly trained mobile forces that could be literally everywhere from Donbass in the south to Chernobyl in the north.

    Aware that the genocidal lunatic fringe running the Ukraine cared nothing about the country’s people, only their own ethnic kin — having already made the Ukraine one of the world’s greatest economic disasters and prompting an huge exodus of economic refugees — Putin immediately secured nuclear facilities and biolabs to prevent the “neo-Nazi” lunatic fanatic fringe running from creating dirty bombs or releasing pathogens.

    The war was really won in the first week.

    Of course, Russia lost men and about 200 tanks that first week but saved lives in subsequent weeks. Since that devastating first punch, Russia has lost very few tanks, moving more slowly, using laser detectors, UAVS, satellite imagery and human intelligence to prevent sneak attacks. The UAF has not been able to mount a single successful counterattack and the government will likely soon abandon Kiev.

    The Russians are not afraid to take casualties — they are fighting an existential war and every Russian has a relative who died in the Great Patriotic War. Putin, therefore, has enormous support, except among the Atlanticists, the elitist carpetbaggers left over from the Yeltsin kleptocracy.

    Americans haven’t fought an existential war — since the Civil War. They don’t like casualties, even the paltry 55,000 or so that ended the Vietnam War. For them, war is a video game.

    Let us remember that the US has not won a war against a more or less equal opponent since the Pacific War. In fact, it has lost almost every war since against less capable opponents — notably Vietnam and Afghanistan.

    They will lose this one too.

    Note:

    For the record, I have studied judo, jiu jitsu, karate, shorinji (Japanese Shaolin), and aikido, with some knowledge of ninjutsu. Not that I am good at any of them — but I know something of the zen and tao principles that apply. Putin studied combat Sambo when he was young to deal with bullies. Combat Sambo (as distinct from Sport Sambo) is similar to jiu jutsu — from which judo evolved, and it is, in some respects, similar to Lee’s Jeet. Putin went on to study judo, which is not really useful for combat but whose training inculcates oriental world views. More recently, Putin became interested in Kung Fu and took an exhausting trip to the Shaolin Monastery, with which he has maintained ties ever since, with both his daughters trained in Shaolin. Shaolin is also a “way”, as all Chinese martial arts are and reflects the teachings of Taoist masters.

    The post The Tao of Vladimir Putin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Audacity of the state shows as it accuses Kill The Bill defendant of “re-writing history”

    On the day that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill becomes law, another Kill The Bill defendant, Charli-Mae Pitman, has been found guilty of riot.

    Charli-Mae is one of at least 82 people who were arrested following protests in early 2021 against the draconian Police Bill. 15 others have already received prison sentences for taking part in the protest.

    Audacity of the state

    The state has been relentless in trying to track down people who were involved in the first of the protests, which saw police vehicles set on fire after police officers used extreme violence on protesters, including cracking the edges of their shields down onto people’s heads, striking them with batons, the use of pepper spray, and setting their dogs on people.

    During the trial, prosecutor Sarah Regan showed the state’s audacity when she said:

    The re-writing of history is very relevant to what you have to determine. This is what we say Charli-Mae Pitman is attempting to do.

    She continued:

    On 21 march she was a rioter. She showed her hatred towards the police and showed her hatred against them.

    However, this was a classic case of the state gaslighting the jury. It is, in fact, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) – with its police witnesses who said they feared for their lives – who are re-writing history. It is the CPS that has shown the jury carefully edited footage of the events of the 21 March, sewing it together to make a very inaccurate timeline of what actually happened that day: they condensed an eight hour day to around 15 minutes of footage.

    Regan herself was telling untruths as she made her closing speech, in a successful attempt to find Charli-Mae, who suffers from anxiety, guilty. Charli-Mae was seen in footage to throw something, which she had said was a piece of paper or cardboard, towards the police. Regan said matter-of-factly to the jury that it was, in fact, glass, with zero evidence that this was the case.

    Where’s your broken bones?

    The CPS’s re-writing of history in court follows on from the Avon and Somerset police doing the same thing. Following the first Kill The Bill protest, the force said that its officers had suffered broken bones, and one officer had suffered a punctured lung. It quietly retracted this statement, but only after this fabrication had made news headlines, broadcasting to the nation the story of a mob attacking a defenceless, innocent police.

    However, there’s plenty of evidence of the horrific police violence that took place during Bristol’s Kill The Bill protests in late March, and there were calls from Labour politicians for an investigation into the heavy-handed policing. Just how many protesters were injured isn’t known, but 62 injuries were reported, including seven injuries that needed hospital treatment and 22 head injuries. Meanwhile, Avon and Somerset’s police chief stepped down shortly after criticisms of the policing of the Kill The Bill protests.

    Who’s the real violent mob?

    Charli-Mae was shown on footage to kick out at a police officer, flick a police shield, and hit a policeman on his helmet. This is nothing in comparison to a police force that brutalised protesters and admitted in court that they used “multiple shield and baton strikes“. Yet she is the one who faces a prison sentence, while the officers involved in the events of the 21 March continue to keep their jobs with zero consequences.

    We have to ask who is really the “violent mob” terrorising our neighbourhoods? Could it be those who are paid to ‘protect’ us while they repeatedly beat us over the head dressed as RoboCop?

    According to Inquest, police in England and Wales have been responsible for:

    1815 deaths in police custody or otherwise following contact with the police in England & Wales since 1990.

    Then, there’s at least 194 women who have been murdered by the police and prison system in England and Wales. Back in May 2021, Channel 4 News reported that at least 129 women had come forward in the last two years to report that their police officer partner was abusing either them or their children.

    On top of this, the police’s “racism, misogyny” and “harassment” throughout the country is well-documented. The vile text messages they send to each other about rape, and the selfies they took of themselves with the bodies of Black women Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry: these have been made public.

    Yet instead of taking police powers away, we’re living in a society that has just given them much, much more. With the passing of the Police Bill, they’re going to get away with so much more. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

    Featured image via Shoal Collective

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • We’ve won a battle, but the war on the government’s toxic ideas is just beginning

    On Monday 24 April, the government announced that it was abandoning its plans to push back migrant boats in the Channel, just days before a legal challenge was set to begin.

    This is a profound shift from last September, when volunteers from Channel Rescue witnessed Border Force agents practising using jet skis “pushing back” people in small boats seeking safety in the Channel. The Home Office ordered such exercises in the full knowledge of their lethality. ‘In the Mediterranean Sea’, a report released by the Border Violence Monitoring Network, showed that over 2000 refugees deaths were linked to pushbacks in one year alone. “Pushback” is simply a euphemism for state-sanctioned punishment drowning.

    Legal challenge

    Such tactics are as unlawful as they are dangerous. That’s why four organisations from a range of backgrounds – the Public and Commercial Services Union representing border staff themselves, refugee solidarity organisation Care4Calais, monitoring group Channel Rescue, and human rights group Freedom from Torture – brought a legal challenge. Among other things, we argued that the policy directed officers to breach asylum seekers’ rights to life, and their right not to be subject to inhuman or degrading treatment. We argued that this was a breach of international maritime law, which compels seafarers to help – not harm – people struggling at sea. The Home Office backed down in order to stay out of court – a sign of just how flimsy their case was.

    This victory is not only important in terms of the lives it will directly save. Pushbacks are the thin end of a wedge with consequences not only for migrants, but for our rights and freedoms as a whole. In the Mediterranean, we have already witnessed governments attempting to criminalise seafarers carrying out their duty to rescue people in distress. In May, a crew of human rights defenders will go on trial under sham charges of “aiding illegal migration” for saving people from drowning, and could face over a decade behind bars.

    From demanding that teachers and doctors help with the policing of borders, to introducing mass surveillance under the guise of security, to pouring billions in public money into private prison profiteers, there are far wider consequences of this government’s war on migrants. From the rescue boats of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to the Archbishop of Canterbury, we have seen chilling attempts from the media and politicians to bully and silence people who have dared to stand up for refugee lives.

    Borders bill

    Our victory comes as the Nationality and Borders Bill reaches its final stages in parliament, and as the government announces its disastrous plan to force people seeking asylum onto deportation flights to Rwanda. Former refugee Elahe Zivardar, detained on Manus Island in Australia, has written this week about her own experience of violence and abuse in a scheme she says is “near-identical” to the Rwanda plan:

    Instead of being processing centres, these island prisons are a place of torture, humiliation, cruelty and racism. They are intended to drive innocent people to either go back to the countries from which they came, or die on the island – which some have.

    In the Australian case, the International Criminal Court declared the policy unlawful. There may soon be more fights on our hands.

    We should not have had to take the government to court to defend the sanctity of life. However, the retreat from the government was not just about the legal weakness of the pushbacks case. It’s one thing to attempt to win votes with cheap rhetoric about border control. Yet when ordinary people see the human consequences of border violence up close; when legal challenges and public campaigns force the media to report on the realities of the situation facing migrants and refugees; human decency triumphs. That’s why the anti-migrant wing of politics and public life go to such lengths – from criminalising humanitarians to smearing refugees – to distract from and dissuade our natural instinct to help people who need it.

    Ethics

    The rapid response in Europe to the plight of Ukrainian refugees shows that we are capable of organising relief at a large scale and short notice, and letting compassion lead our approach. Few people want to live in a world where we drown people seeking safety at sea, lock them in detention centres indefinitely, or ship them halfway across the planet. However, if we’re serious about building a different and better future and fighting for safe pathways, an ethical moral migration policy is a shared responsibility. It won’t happen in the courts alone – what happens next is up to us all.

    Written by Kim Bryan, Steve Martin, and Channel Rescue

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Arriva436 – cropped to 770×403 via Creative Commons 3.0

    By Channel Rescue

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • About all the ‘Māori nonsense’ – a response from NZ’s Māori Language Commissioner

    COMMENTARY: By Māori Language Commissioner Professor Rawinia Higgins

    Whether he knows it or probably not, the year Joe Bennett arrived in Aotearoa from England was a milestone year for te reo Māori. After years of petitions, protest marches and activism from New Zealanders of all ethnicities as well as a Waitangi Tribunal inquiry: te reo Māori became an official language in its own land on 1 August 1987.

    This was the same day our organisation opened its doors for the first time and in a few months, we will celebrate our 35th birthday.

    Just getting to 1987 was not an easy road. It was a battle that had already been fought in our families, towns, schools, workplaces, churches and yes, newsrooms for decades.

    In 1972, the Māori Language Petition carried more than 33,000 signatures to the steps of Parliament calling for te reo to be taught in our schools and protected.

    Organised by the extraordinary Hana Te Hemara from her kitchen table, well before the internet, this was flax roots activism at its finest.

    Hana mobilised hundreds of Māori university students who along with language activists and church members from all denominations, knocked on thousands of front doors across Aotearoa.

    As the petition was circulated more easily in urban areas with large populations, the majority of those who signed the petition were not Māori. Most of those Kiwis (who would all be well into their 70s by now) didn’t think that te reo was ‘Māori nonsense’.

    Identity as New Zealanders
    We know from our own Colmar Kantar public opinion polling that more than eight in 10 of us see the Māori language as part of our identity as New Zealanders. Today in 2022, most Kiwis don’t see te reo as Māori nonsense.

    Racist, official policies that banned and made te reo socially unacceptable saw generations of Māori families stop speaking te reo. It takes one generation to lose a language and three to get it back: the countdown is on.

    Last year and the year before more than 1 million New Zealanders joined us to celebrate te reo at the same time, that’s more than one in five of us. We don’t see te reo as Māori nonsense.

    Putting personal opinions aside, the elephant in the room of Bennett’s article is an important and rather large one: te reo Māori is endangered in the land it comes from.

    It is a language that is native to this country and like an endangered bird, its future depends on what we do.

    And from the behaviour of New Zealanders over the past half-century: it does not seem that we are willing to give up te reo without a fight.

    Bennett says that languages that are not useful will wither away because they exist for one reason only: to communicate meaning.

    Telling the stories of humanity
    Languages are much more than this. They tell the stories of humanity, they are what make us human.

    Te reo serves as both an anchor to our past and a compass to the future. It connects Māori New Zealanders to ancestors, culture and identity.

    It grounds all New Zealanders by giving us a sense of belonging to this place we call home. It guides us all as we prepare for the Aotearoa of tomorrow.

    Our team won the world’s most prestigious public relations award last year for our Māori Language Week work because they valued language diversity much as biodiversity.

    The global judging panel told us in the ceremony held in London that we won because our work is critical to the future. Language diversity is the diversity of humanity and if we do nothing, half of our world’s languages will disappear by the end of this century.

    And with them, our unique identities, those very things that make us who we are will disappear with them. It may be nonsense to a few but it’s nonsense more than 1 million of us will continue to fight for.

    A note from RNZ: RNZ feels a deep responsibility, as required by our Charter and Act of Parliament, to reflect and support the use of Te Reo Māori in our programming and content. We will continue to do so. This article was originally published on Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori — Māori Language Commission — in response to Joe Bennett’s Otago Daily Times article “Evolving language scoffs at moral or political aims” on 21 April 2022 and is  republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Class war from the Tories just went up a gear

    We’re currently in the midst of a class war in the UK. However, if you’re the political and media class, it’s a “cost of living crisis“. The latest plans from the Tories do nothing to help the poorest people. But if you’re rich, of course, you’ll be better off.

    Tory warfare

    First up in this class warfare is changing the rules around MOTs. The Tories want to relax them so that cars only have to have one every two years; this is possibly unsafe, to say the least. The major problem with this is it won’t help the poorest people. As I previously wrote, only 35% of the poorest households own a car – versus 93% of the richest ones.

    Then, BBC News reported that the Tories want to increase the number of kids one childcare worker can legally look after. The grand idea behind this is that it will reduce costs – allegedly making the price that parents pay cheaper. However, its mostly richer parents using childcare anyway. Research from 2016 showed that 78% of the poorest parents/guardians wouldn’t return to work/work more hours because of childcare costs. The Tories’ plans will do nothing to address this. As Labour pointed out, it won’t affect availability and therefore won’t affect the cost.

    Don’t worry though – enter Tory MP John Redwood to suggest removing VAT from energy bills. Yeah, thanks for that John. I look forward to saving 5p on the pound it costs my family every time we turn the shower on.

    Class war

    The point is that none of these measures will do anything for the poorest households. You know – the ones bearing the brunt of this class war. Even before things like the 54% energy price increase and National Insurance hike came in, 34% of the poorest people were struggling to pay their bills. In the coming months, there’s going to be carnage.

    If you’re wondering how seriously politicians and the media are taking the class war, look no further than cooking. Angela Rayner, Sajid Javid, the Mirror‘s Pippa Crear and LBC‘s Iain Dale were all happily taking part in a bake-off on Tuesday 26 April. Talk about not reading the fucking room. Because really – cosying-up to bake on the same day we found out food prices have risen by the most in over a decade? Our misery is all a joke to these careerists, whose performative anger at each other is clearly just that.

    So, another day and the political class wage yet more economic warfare on the poorest. And with at least 1.3 million more people set to be pushed into absolute poverty this year, the situation will only get worse. Remind me: when does the revolution start?

    Featured image via 10 Downing Street – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Who will call out the misogyny and abuse undermining women’s academic freedom in NZ universities?

    ANALYSIS: By Richard Shaw, Massey University; Andrew Dickson, Massey University; Bevan Erueti, Massey University; Glenn Banks, Massey University; John O’Neill, Massey University, and Roger McEwan, Massey University

    Threats, intimidation and misogyny have long been a reality for women in public life around the world, and the pandemic appears to have amplified this toxic reality.

    Aotearoa New Zealand is led by one of the world’s best-known female prime ministers, Jacinda Ardern, and was the first country in the world to grant all women the right to vote.

    Yet even here today, attempts to silence, diminish and demean the prime minister, female MPs and other prominent women have plumbed new depths, leading to calls for more robust policing of violent online and offline behaviour.

    Unfortunately, the phenomenon extends well beyond elected representatives and public health professionals into most workplaces, including academia.

    Women working in universities, including those in positions of academic leadership, are also routinely subjected to online vitriol intended to shut them down — and thus to prevent them exercising their academic freedom to probe, question and test orthodox ways of making sense of the world.

    One of the commonest defences of abusive or threatening language (online or not) is an appeal to everyone’s right to free speech.

    And this has echoes within universities, too, when academic freedom becomes a testing ground of what is acceptable and what isn’t.

    A duty to call it out
    The international evidence indicates that almost all of this behaviour comes from men, some of them colleagues or students of the women concerned.

    The abuse comes in various forms (such as trolling and rape or death threats) and takes place in a variety of settings, including conferences. It is enabled by, among other things, the hierarchical nature of universities, in which power is stratified and unequally distributed, including on the basis of gender.

    As male academics we have an obligation not just to call out these sorts of behaviour but also to identify some of the corrosive consequences of the misogyny directed against women academics, wherever they may work.

    We need to use our own academic freedom to assess what can happen to that of academic women when digital misogyny passes unchecked.

    Whose freedom to speak?
    Misogyny in university settings takes place in a particular context: universities have a statutory obligation to serve as producers and repositories of knowledge and expertise, and to act as society’s “conscience and critic”.

    Academic freedom is what enables staff and students to carry out the work through which these obligations are met. This specific type of freedom is a means to various ends, including testing and contesting perceived truths, advancing the boundaries of knowledge and talking truth to power.

    It is intended to serve the public good, and must be exercised in the context of the “highest ethical standards” and be open to public scrutiny.

    A great deal has been written about threats to academic freedom: intrusive or risk averse university managers, the pressures to commercialise universities’ operations, and governments bent on surveilling and stifling internal dissent are the usual suspects.

    But when women academics are subjected to online misogyny, which is a common response when they exercise academic freedom, we are talking about a different kind of threat.

    Betrayal of academic freedom
    The misogynists seek to silence, shut down, diminish and demean; to ridicule on the basis of gender, and to deride scholarship that doesn’t align with their own preconceptions of gender and body type.

    Their behaviour is neither casual nor accidental. As journalist Michelle Duff put it, it is intended to intimidate “as part of a concentrated effort to suppress women’s participation in public and political life”.

    Its aim is to achieve the obverse of the purpose of academic freedom: to maintain an unequal status quo rather than change it.

    It is to the credit of women academics that the misogynists frequently fail. But sometimes the hostility does have a chilling effect. For a woman to exercise her academic freedom when she is the target of online threats to rape or kill requires considerable bravery.

    Women who continue to test perceived truths, advance the boundaries of knowledge and speak truth to power under such conditions are academic exemplars. They are contributing to the public good at considerable personal cost.

    ‘Whaddarya?’
    The online misogyny directed at women academics is taking place in a broader context in which violent language targeting individuals and minority groups is becoming increasingly graphic, normalised and visible.

    We do not believe the misogynistic “righteous outrage” directed at academic women is justified under the statutory underpinnings of freedom of speech.

    Freedom of speech — within or beyond a university — is not absolute, and to the extent that it is invoked to cloak violent rhetoric against women, existing constraints on that freedom (which are better thought of as protections for the targets of misogyny) need strengthening.

    Men who engage in online misogyny almost always speak from an (unacknowledged) position of privilege. Moreover, by hiding their sense of entitlement behind core democratic notions, their self-indulgence does all of us a disfavour.

    With academic freedom comes the moral responsibility to challenge misogyny and not stay silent. What so many women across New Zealand’s tertiary sector are subject to poses a challenge to men everywhere.

    The kind of conduct our women colleagues are routinely subjected to is the sort of behaviour at the heart of Greg McGee’s seminal critique of masculinity and masculine insecurity in New Zealand, the play Foreskin’s Lament. In the final scene of the play, the main character stares out at the audience and asks: “Whaddarya, whaddarya, whaddarya?”

    He might have been asking the question of every man, including those of us who work in universities.The Conversation

    Dr Richard Shaw is professor of politics, Massey University; Dr Andrew Dickson is senior lecturer, Massey University; Dr Bevan Erueti, senior lecturer — Health Promotion/Associate Dean — Māori, Massey University; Dr Glenn Banks is professor of geography and head of school, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University; Dr John O’Neill, head of the Institute of Education te Kura o Te Mātauranga, Massey University, and Dr Roger McEwan is senior lecturer, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • Trespassing Dyson’s palatial land and decolonising the countryside

    We are all of this land. But we’ve been fenced off from it, told that we don’t belong here, and met with ‘KEEP OUT: PRIVATE PROPERTY’ signs. For many of us, the working class, and those brought up in cities without access to nature, the countryside feels alien.

    Of course, whenever we do venture to the villages that dot the countryside, we get a sense that we don’t belong. We’re met with a distinct whiff of Tory, fox-hunting disgust for us.

    This feeling of being unwelcome is magnified even more if you’re BPOC (Black or a Person of Colour) if you’re a Traveller, or if you have a disability.

    Just 1% of the population owns half of the land in England. Land owners tolerate us, at best. They begrudgingly give us access to measly footpaths and bridleways that make up our legal public rights of way (that’s if these ways aren’t overgrown with nettles, or haven’t been planted over), and they expect us to be grateful.

    In 2000, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act gave us the pitiful right to roam on just 8% of England’s land, such as mountains, moors, and heathland. We’re still not legally allowed to access 92% of England’s land, or to swim in 97% of our rivers and waterways.

    So, on 24 April – the 90th anniversary of the Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932 – there were actions across the country.

    Trespassing Dyson’s land

    While people marched on Kinder Scout in their hundreds (more on that later), a lesser-known action was taking place close to Bristol. 50 people came face-to-face with billionaire James Dyson when they trespassed his massive 700-acre Dodington Estate, complete with its mansion and moat. Dyson, who has a net worth of £16.3 billion, owns over 30,000 acres of land in England. That’s more than the Queen.

    The police were called onto the land, while security blocked bridges over the moat. Despite this, the activists managed to take a swim in the palatial lake, while others rowed a boat out onto it.

    The activists struck up a conversation with Dyson himself about unjust land ownership, but it’s unlikely that a man who topped the 2020 Sunday Times’ Rich List will listen. After all, this is a man who avoids inheritance tax, who sees nothing wrong in receiving millions of pounds of government farm subsidy payouts, and who wanted to turn a post-Brexit Britain into a low-tax version of Singapore.

    Dyson's mansion
    James Dyson’s mansion

     

    Dyson trespass swim
    Activists take a forbidden swim in Dyson’s lake

    Kinder Scout

    Meanwhile, in the Peak District, around 500 people hiked up Kinder Scout. Their action was a protest for our right to access land, but it was also much greater than that: it was a march to decolonise the countryside.

    The mass action was led by BPOC groups, as well as the Right to Roam campaign. Haroon Mota, of Muslim Hikers, said:

    Meanwhile, Anneka Deva said:

    BPOC people make up just 2% of rural England

    England’s countryside is overtly a rich and white playground. According to the Right to Roam campaign, in 2018:

    BPOC communities made up just 2% of [the] rural population [of England], while the remaining 98% was white.

    It also stated that:

    Despite making up 13% of the UK population, Black People and People of Colour (BPOC) make up only 1% of visitors to national parks.

    Is this any wonder, when BPOC people are more likely to experience racist abuse in rural areas than in the cities?

    On top of this, the 8% of land that is legally accessible is often too remote to to get to, especially if you are one of the 40% of Black households who don’t have access to a car or van.

    The trespasses will continue

    The weekend’s actions took place following last year’s very successful mass-trespass in Brighton, when hundreds of people hiked on Pangdean Bottom, an area which has been out of bounds to the people since its public purchase by Brighton Council in 1924.

    More trespasses are planned throughout the year. On 8 May, hundreds of people are expected to gather for a mass trespass on private land close to Totnes, while there’s another trespass planned on 14 May in Berkshire.

    These actions are essential because the government just isn’t listening, nor does it care. On 20 April, it announced that it had quashed a review into the right to roam in England, and is refusing to publish any results. This government will do its utmost to protect the elites from the common masses.

    The government and land owners would have us believe that the right to roam – to legally access land – is a privilege. On the contrary, it is the most basic of rights. When we do finally win our right to roam, we shouldn’t stop there: we should rise up together to dismantle this broken system, where 1% of the population owning half of the land is seen as normal.

    This is what the government and elite land owners are afraid of. They’re worried that if we’re given some small freedoms, we might just realise that we’re caged.

    Featured images via activists, with permission

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Graham Davis: Behind the saga of the ‘seized’ Russian super yacht Amadea

    COMMENTARY: By Graham Davis

    If you’re as confused as most people by the exact circumstances surrounding the continuing presence in Fiji of the Russian super yacht Amadea, join the club. Here’s our modest attempt to cut through the fog.

    Twelve days ago — on April 14 — the CJ Patel Fiji Sun newspaper trumpeted an exclusive with Police Commissioner Sitiveni Qilihio, reporting that the Amadea had been seized. It had not. In fact, it still hasn’t been formally seized.

    What happened last week is that the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) obtained a restraining order from the High Court to prevent the Amadea from leaving Fiji. Until that order was granted, there was every possibility in the intervening period of the vessel leaving.

    In fact, lawyers for the owners were arguing that there was no legal justification to detain the Amadea any longer after they had reportedly paid an amount in fines for customs infringements.

    It was only when the High Court granted the restraining order that leaving was no longer a legal option.

    Indeed, all along there has been a suspicion that the vessel might try to make a run for it. It has a significant armoury and the security forces would have already factored in their ability to prevent a determined attempt to leave.

    This application was lodged by the Office of the DPP on a warrant issued by the United States government. The papers are from Washington DC and passed through the Attorney-General’s Office before carriage of the matter was given to the DPP under the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act.

    A second case
    Now there is a second case that has been brought before the High Court for the Amadea to be seized. Yes, taken from the owners altogether in line with the American-led sanctions that have been imposed on the nautical playthings and other toys of Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin’s cronies the world over.

    The Amadea at the Fijian port of Lautoka
    The Amadea at the Fijian port of Lautoka reported as “seized” 12 days ago … Russian super yacht’s fate still to be decided. Image: Fiji Sun screenshot APR

    The High Court will hand down its judgment next Tuesday (May 3), which is expected to be in Washington’s favour.

    And sometime after that, the Amadea will presumably become the property of the US government and sail off into the sunset under the command of Uncle Sam in the direction of the US.

    It has been an astonishing saga. The original, mostly European crew, had orders to sail from the Mexican port of Mazanillo across the entire Pacific to the Russian port of Vladivosok via Lautoka, where the Amadea has been refuelled and resupplied.

    Their services have evidently been terminated and an entirely Russian crew has been on standby to take over when it finally gets permission to sail. Alas for them, their journey to Fiji will have been in vain.

    Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov
    Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov … still doubt about the vessel’s true ownership. Image: Wikipedia

    Incredibly, there is still doubt about the vessel’s true ownership. The whole world has been told that it belongs to the Russian oligarch, Suleiman Kerimov, but there is still evidently no conclusive proof — the vessel’s ownership evidently buried in a labyrinth of multiple shelf companies in places like the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands.

    For the purposes of the High Court case in Suva, the owner is officially stated as being Millemarin Investment Limited. Is it Suleiman Kerimov?

    No evidence about Kerimov
    Millemarin Investment’s local lawyer, Feizal Hannif, told the court there was no evidence that it is. He said the vessel’s beneficial owner was in fact one Eduard Khudaynatov. But counsel for the DPP, Jayneeta Prasad, argued that the ownership of the vessel was not an issue. It was subject to a US warrant and the ownership issue was for the American courts to decide.

    So fortunately unravelling all of this is not Fiji’s problem. But what was Police Commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho doing 12 days ago telling the Fiji Sun that the Amadea had been seized when we won’t know that for certain until next Tuesday, nearly three weeks after the Sun “scoop”?

    And is there going to be any attempt to set the official record straight?

    Australian-Fijian journalist Graham Davis publishes the blog Grubsheet Feejee on Fiji affairs. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • History Returns Again in Ukraine

    After the 2014 coup and eight years of fighting between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists, history has once again exploded and returned to the stage in Ukraine. As Westerners with governments who act blatantly hostile and belligerent to Russia, we should ask: was Russia provoked, and if so, how?

    It is important to question how and why this conflict started. There is a saying about Russia many are familiar with: “Don’t poke the bear.” Well, the US and NATO have been poking the bear for 30 odd years since the downfall of the USSR. The West has adopted an absurd, ahistorical stance towards Russia, continuing to expand NATO, all the while knowing this would enflame tensions and demand a response.

    The first Russian response in Ukraine was in 2014, after the US-backed right-wing coup which kicked Viktor Yanukovych out of power. I covered it extensively here. Many in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea obviously are ethnic Russians, speak Russian, have family in Russia, and do business with Russia. While some of these same people still may favor a strong and independent Ukraine, clearly many are sympathetic to the formation of an independent Donetsk and Luhansk; and the vast majority in the Donbas has no interest in fighting their eastern neighbor. Many in Ukraine are rightly worried about schools no longer teaching the Russian language, about the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and about the Right Sector and Svoboda parties infiltrating Ukrainian politics.  The past eight years have seen thousands killed in the Donbas region. Compared to how the US or another mid-level world power would react, Russia had shown immense restraint.

    Let’s not pretend like they weren’t legitimate concerns when looking from Russia’s national security perspective, which the US is well aware of. The US and NATO have been expanding its military and security apparatus eastward for thirty years, threatening Russia’s security, trade and economic relations, and its sphere of influence. By breaking its promise not to expand, NATO encroached right up to Russia’s borders in the Baltic nations. By invading Iraq and Afghanistan, orchestrating the 2014 coup in Ukraine, along with overthrowing governments and meddling in many other nations, the US blatantly and repeatedly broke international law and any semblance of world order. This undoubtedly led the entire world security architecture to disincentivize international cooperation and gave stronger nations the convenient excuse to take matters into their own hands.

    The US and Western Europe continued to “poke the bear” even after Russia countered Western hegemony in Georgia in 2008 and by retaking Crimea in 2014. The US, knowing full well that Russia’s economic and geostrategic vulnerabilities could be exploited to enhance the power of NATO and the EU, has long had its eyes on Ukraine becoming integrated into the West. In short, while US pundits today claim Putin sees the conflict as a “zero-sum game”, it is blatant projection, as the US and NATO have been playing the same realpolitik chessboard to enhance their geopolitical control over Eastern Europe.

    Even mainstream political scientists understand this: John Mearsheimer, otherwise a respected, establishment liberal professor, has repeatedly blamed the US and NATO as being primarily responsible for the war in Ukraine, taking heat from both sides of the warmongering Washington consensus.

    One has to consider a hypothetical converse situation. If Russia or any other great power was financially and militarily supporting Canada to quell pro-US separatists in Alberta, and the Canadian government sided with the Russians, with thousands of innocent US and Canadian citizens killed in the process, would the US hesitate to invade and install a pro-US government? Not for a second. The US would consider this a threat to national security. This is the basis for the Monroe Doctrine, in which the US considers all of North, Central, and South America its own backyard; any other perceived threat will be ruthlessly invaded, destabilized, or destroyed, just as has occurred in Nicaragua, Chile, and Guatemala, just to name a few instances.

    Even warmongering, imperial architects like George Keenan and Henry Kissinger understood that there was no way Russia would allow for Ukraine to be allied with the West. Even though both figures were ruthless, cynical war criminals, they at least understood that other great powers have interests which differ from ours and their economic and geostrategic imperatives which must be taken into account. That basic level of understanding of realpolitik and analysis of material conditions as well as competition between world powers does not seem to exist in US foreign policy anymore.

    It should be obvious that we’ve entered the imperial overreach stage. The US meddled to try and cajole Ukraine into the EU and NATO, and got its shit wrecked. We fucked around and now we’re finding out.

    Before 2014 Russia would probably have accepted a neutral Ukraine, but no longer. The past eight years have shown that Ukraine would rather kill its own people than negotiate. Ukraine used neo-Nazi forces for eight years and still is in the current conflict, allied to their official National Guard. Ukraine was assisted by the CIA in Eastern Ukraine to help kill separatists. British and US special forces are currently in Ukraine assisting its military. Before the war started, Ukraine was verging on becoming a failed state, Zelensky was widely despised, and the standard of living was falling precipitously for the average Ukrainian.

    This does not justify Russia’s response. It does, however, reveal that great powers will react to continuing pressure and low-level war on their borders when it suits them. It is basic common sense; stronger authoritarian nations (the US being exhibit A) pursue their interests at the expense of weaker ones when they can get away with it, and also overreact or become irrational when threatened. If Russia and Putin has become increasingly paranoid and isolated, what were the conditions that led to this new state of affairs?

    We have to return to the ahistorical framework US power projects. These were exemplified best in the 1990s in two works: Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. Cresting the wave of the fall of the Soviet Union and unipolar US hegemony, these authors codified imperial hubris of late 20th century America, claiming that only liberal representative democracies guided only by capitalist economic structures would expand worldwide and a new era of peace, globalization and cooperation would begin; a “New World Order”, as it were. All this would be implicitly supported by a globe-spanning military colossus, an imperial pax Americana. Autocracies and other authoritarian regimes would not be able to maintain influence as the “free market” expanded to every corner of the planet; and democratic, capitalistic nations would not go to war with each other, this was referred to by Friedman as the “Golden Arches” theory of foreign policy: no two countries with a McDonald’s, and hence, a global capitalist political structure, would ever fight each other again.

    Looking back today, it’s obvious how facile and myopic this view was. Great powers fight over more than ideology: natural resources, security assurances, and the material needs determine how nations compete and jostle for status and hegemony. In hindsight, and without the hegemonic distorting lens of pro-Western propaganda, it’s easy to see that Russia has felt threatened by Western Europe and the USA for generations.

    Ultimately, the US will be content in the near future to “fight to the last Ukrainian.” The domestic US and Western European populations need a new distraction from an economy with skyrocketing inflation and a looming recession. A proxy war against Russia suits Western elites just fine, even though it is clear that Biden, Johnson, Macron, and Scholz have no idea how to proceed. Western nations have little leverage or ability to maneuver in this war; US diplomats especially have no interest in navigating the foreign policy repercussions precisely because they are so insulated from the consequences.

    The establishment needs a scapegoat for the worsening economic situation in Europe and the USA, and the coming recession will be blamed on Russian destabilization of global markets. The monpoly media has conveniently ignored the eight previous years of civil war in Ukraine, a situation that would not be tolerated by any other global power. The narrative shift to Russia as the next boogeyman was very swift, precisely because Washington has no one else to blame for the disastrous collapse of the world economy led by a failing capitalist model. The West was desperate to find a scapegoat and now it has one. The faltering of international norms and relations due to exploitative and reactionary foreign policy decisions of the West likewise exposed cracks in the foundation of the system with no fix in sight. Only a diplomatic solution can bring an end to this war, and at present, US leadership can at best be described as being out to lunch. With no clear plan or desire to minimize the human suffering in Ukraine, the imperial order continues to stumble along due to its own hubris and overreach, blind to the lessons of history.

    The post History Returns Again in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We May Save the Earth but Not in Leather Shoes

    We May Save the Earth but Not in Leather Shoes

    How Can We Save the Earth? One Simple Action Will Make a Difference

    The Planet Needs You to Ditch Leather—Here’s Why

    The Earth Can’t Wait: Why You Need to Ditch Leather Now

     

    We know the Earth is in trouble. But there’s one often overlooked, simple action that will make a difference: Ditch leather.

    Killing animals for their skin comes with the same environmental baggage as killing them for their flesh. If you care about saving the planet, here’s one thing you need to do.

    The post We May Save the Earth but Not in Leather Shoes appeared first on PETA.

    This post was originally published on Animal Rights and Campaign News | PETA.

  • Holyrood faces backlash over creeping authoritarianism in coronavirus bill

    A lot of attention in recent months has been put on the laws and bills going through Westminster which are attempting to reduce our democratic rights. This attention is deserved. We need to stop these bills. We need to take to the streets and protest bills such as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (policing bill), the Nationality and Borders Bill, and the Health and Care Bill. What isn’t being discussed however is that similar attempts are being made in Holyrood by a government typically considered more democratic. If we are to remain vigilant of power grabs by Westminster we must do the same for Holyrood. Don’t let the lack of attention fool you. Holyrood have as much disregard for democracy as Westminster.

    “The whole purpose of protest is to get noticed and to apply pressure”

    It’s important to look at how the policing bill allows the state to further control debate in this country – allowing certain movements and silencing others. It expands upon protest bans/restrictions from laws such as the Public Order Act 1986. This bill increases the size of the area outside Westminster which can be placed under protest restrictions, while also making it an offence to obstruct vehicles there. Such powers would further stifle protest and mean that many protests would be practically state sanctioned. Yet showing discontent towards some form of authority is exactly the point of protest. As Nick Dearden from Global Justice Now said:

    The whole purpose of protest is to get noticed and to apply pressure

    This bill would make it harder to have our voices heard at the exact time they need to be.

    The bill would force people convicted of terrorist offences to be placed under conditions that make it easier for the police to search their homes and give them the power to arrest people without a warrant. It’s important to note the police’s attitude on what constitutes terrorism is skewed with counter terrorism police previously labelling Extinction Rebellion an extremist organisation. These powers could be used against protestors when causing “serious damage to property” is defined as terrorism, and can occur during protests.

    What you don’t know can hurt you

    The subjective nature of the provisions in the bill threaten our right to protest. Various aspects of the bill relating to public nuisance, serious annoyance, and noise complaints are open to interpretation by the police. When I attended protests in the past, the police always had to notify the protestors when they were placing restrictions on the protest. This bill would change that. The bill means that if you didn’t hear the restriction being put in place you could still be found guilty for failing to comply with the restriction as you ought to know it was put in place, potentially receiving six months in prison.

    The bill would also give the police power to shut down protests deemed to be too noisy. However, part of the police’s way of determining this would be through inspecting whether buildings are double glazed or not. In doing so, they would determine the likelihood of a noise complaint. Using such a bizarre metric for deciding whether protests would be too noisy or not is just another example of the arbitrary nature of these provisions which would make it easier to stop protests.

    The “public nuisance” argument

    Protestors have been prosecuted under vague public nuisance laws in the past. 146 charges of causing a public nuisance were brought against Insulate Britain protesters last year. The policing bill will only further this erosion of protest rights through its definitions of public nuisance which remain unspecified. The bill provides no definition of what constitutes serious distress, serious annoyance, serious inconvenience, or serious loss of amenity. It would practically allow the police to determine it by their own definition. This is deeply concerning when causing public nuisance could land you 10 years in prison. The police would be able to arrest people based on their own subjective opinion. The idea that someone could be given 10 years in prison under such vague measures should worry us all. We must take to the streets and protest this bill before we can’t take to the streets anymore.

    The Policing bill is only one of many pieces of legislation that attempt to reduce our democratic rights. Bills such as the Elections Bill, the Health and Care Bill and the Nationality and Borders Bill are just some of the legislation being considered as part of a concerted effort by the government to clamp down on our freedoms. But these are far from the only pieces of legislation affecting our rights. The Coronavirus Act passed in March 2020 ushered in restrictive and authoritarian laws.

    “We’ve been conditioned to live under very strict conditions”

    The government has used the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic as an excuse for greater and greater infringements of our rights. As Oliver Feeley-Sprague of Amnesty International told me:

    We’ve been conditioned to live under very strict conditions… The coronavirus restrictions softened up the public to accept a level of state interference in their lives they wouldn’t normally accept.

    Under the Health Protection Regulations the police could, for example, forcibly detain anyone including children and take a biological sample against their will under the pretence they may be infectious. Non-compliance with this could have also resulted in a criminal charge. Police wrongly brought 270 charges using the regulation up to March 2021. Just like with the police bill these arbitrary measures made it easier for the police to abuse their powers. With 292 cases also wrongly charged under the Coronavirus Act, it is obvious it was abused by the police.

    While it is important to stop the spread of an infectious disease such as Covid-19, it is vital we don’t allow this to be done by wrongly criminalising individuals as this was clearly not successful in stopping the spread of Covid-19 nor used proportionately. 

    Don’t you know there’s a pandemic?

    Justifications of protecting public health have been used to shut down protest. Mark Johnson from Big Brother Watch told me:

    The government has become increasingly anti-protest and this Bill will maintain powers to criminalise protesters if there is a risk of any type of ‘disease’, prolonging the pandemic powers that led to the criminalisation of BLM protests and the Clapham vigil [over the murder of Sarah Everard].

    The Coronavirus Act is even more worrying given the fact it allowed the government to “revive” provisions when needed. It also gave them the ability to suspend elections for up to a year after the passing of the act, delaying democratic accountability in this country. Our ability to fight for our rights is becoming increasingly difficult with laws that can be easily abused by those in power. It’s clear the policing bill is not the only attempt to take away our collective rights. We must ensure our rights aren’t taken away under false pretences of protecting public health.

    But Scotland wouldn’t clamp down on our freedoms, right?

    For many people the Scottish government is far more progressive and compassionate than the Tories. Free university and a more welcoming attitude to immigrants help promote this image of progressiveness. To believe this makes it more democratic however is to ignore its recent attempts to take away some of our fundamental rights. Holyrood was designated a protected site on 1 October which means individuals can now be prosecuted for being on the grounds of Holyrood without consent.

    Just like Westminster, Holyrood seems determined to shut down freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Cross party group the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body (SPCB) now have the power to select what protests are allowed outside Holyrood – helping it control debate in this country. The Kill the Bill Scotland activist I spoke to said that the restrictions on protest at Holyrood and the police bill can be seen:

    in totality as diminishing the government’s accountability. Defending the powerful from the working class.

    If that isn’t enough to shatter your faith in the SNP, then maybe the Coronavirus Recovery and Reform Bill will.

    Perpetual lockdown

    The bill was recently introduced to Scottish parliament and would grant the Scottish government the ability to shut down schools and businesses, and force people into isolation without any parliamentary oversight. The SNP’s attempts to make school closures easier shows a complete disregard for schoolchildren. Schoolchildren’s educations have been greatly affected by lockdown measures and remote learning. Scotland’s schools now have a literacy attainment gap of 24.7% between the richest and poorest pupils, as opposed to only 20.7% pre-lockdown and 21.4% in their numeracy attainment gap, a near 5% increase compared to pre-lockdown numbers.

    Lockdown measures have also had a devastating impact on businesses with 20,000 businesses closing in a year. Unsurprisingly, these business closures have had a detrimental impact on the livelihoods of many Scots, with 41% saying lockdown has negatively impacted their household finances. Another aspect of the bill which may affect people’s finances is the proposal to drop the debt threshold for bankruptcy from £10,000 during in the pandemic to £5,000. It would be reckless to drop the debt threshold for bankruptcy when as we have see many people are still struggling financially from the effects of lockdown.

    Unchecked power at Holyrood

    Not only would the public or other MSPs have no say in the introduction of these measures, but it would also allow the Scottish government the power to extend the act [pdf, p35] until 2025. If enacted, this bill would take away our ability to exercise power on important decisions. We would have no say on going back into lockdown; no say on our ability to move freely; no say on whether our businesses stay open. There’s some seriously worrying parallels between this bill and the Coronavirus Act. They both attempt to control the duration of these measures – ones which have already had a devastating economic and social impact on this country. Don’t be fooled by the SNP’s progressive rhetoric, they are trying to wrestle power away from the public.

    The bill recently received massive backlash with 90% of the 4,000 organisations and individuals consulted on it opposing the bill. This is great news but we must keep the pressure on the Scottish government to ensure this legislation doesn’t pass.

    The SNP shows its true colours

    There are plenty of terrible laws that Westminster are proposing and passing. They must be protested and stopped at all costs. The Tories must be held to account for their actions. While it’s important we raise awareness of these issues, it’s vital we don’t also lose track of creeping authoritarianism in Scotland. The SNP has shown its true colours with their clampdown on protest and their desire to take even more agency away from the general public with the Coronavirus Recovery and Reform bill. We must raise awareness of this fact to avoid a descent into totalitarianism.

    It is right that measures were put in place to try and stop the spread of coronavirus. People’s lives depended on it. But some measures were abused by police – and now in Scotland the SNP is taking things too far. We can’t allow the pandemic to be used by those in power to wrestle more control away from us, stoke fear, and then use that fear to divide us – leaving us powerless to affect change in our lives and in society. We can’t allow them to take away our rights to protest, to have our voices heard. So, we must stand up, be counted, and fight for our rights.

    Featured image via John Campbell

    By Mark Masson

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Russia, Ukraine, and the USA: Trapped in a Cultural Script

    Compassion for Ukrainians victimized by Russia’s violence demonstrates that human hearts care. However, beneath the visible current of compassion there’s an alarming, dangerous dynamic at play.

    What’s hair-raising about this crisis is not only the violence but the fact that US political leaders and media makers are not recognizing positive and negative motivations on both sides of conflict. Instead, they’re deliberately creating an inaccurate good vs. evil storyline, a storyline that ignites unwarranted, dangerous feelings of self-righteous hatred against Russia.

    The US perpetually perceives its role in conflict as that of a heroic rescuer or innocent victim upholding humanity and freedom against evil persecutors. However, 245 years of US history reveal that this perception is fiction, a psychological construct. Psychological analysts Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward called the persecutor, victim, and rescuer scenario a “cultural script.”

    Examination of 245 years of US history reveals that the perception of always being a good guy fighting evil is fiction, a psychological construct. In fact, good and bad, truths and lies invariably exist on both sides of conflict.

    Nonetheless, to deceive others and perhaps themselves, US policymakers’ pattern of relentlessly legitimating their violence, deadly sanctions, and foreign coups by denying the validity of enemy grievances, hiding their own greed and aggressive motives, refusing to cooperatively negotiate, concealing enemy negotiation offers, fabricating lies, omitting significant facts, using false pretexts, and overlooking the disastrous results of a pseudo-religious faith in the problem-solving magic of weapons is so predictable that it’s hard to decide whether it’s more enraging, pathetic, boring, or nauseating.

    Consider one persecutor-victim-hero drama that began in 1979. President Jimmy Carter, livid over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, claimed it was “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Actually, Afghanistan’s Marxist government, which had been trying to reform the extreme, unjust inequalities of wealth and land ownership in Afghanistan, had requested Soviet assistance against insurgents, but the USSR, the “evil persecutor,” didn’t want to send troops. When the Soviets finally complied, they explained it was because of secret US involvement in Afghanistan. The world called the Soviets liars.

    Two decades later US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that Carter had begun aiding the insurgent mujahideen—the “heroes”—six months prior to the entry of the persecutors, the Soviets. A delighted Brzezinski knew this could provoke the Soviets to invade and get mired in their own “Vietnam.” Convinced of Soviet evil and mujahideen goodness, US policymakers ignored that the mujahideen skinned Soviet POWs alive.

    And now we’re to believe that weapon shipments and sanctions are needed for the US to help rescue Ukraine from “evil” Russia.

    The first step in convincing the world to believe the script’s good vs. evil dynamics is to depict Russia as the persecutor who’s motivated, not by fear, but by evil. No problem! Simply label Putin as paranoid and discount Russian fears as ludicrous: NATO’s expansion into Slavic lands, NATO—Ukraine military collaboration, US missile bases in eastern Europe, anti-Russian policies and prejudice in Ukraine, neo-Nazi violence in Ukraine, neo-Nazis and ultranationalists in Ukraine’s police, military, and government, the manipulation of Ukraine by Western profit-seekers, and Western economic and political conquest—likely of Russia itself.

    The next step is to paint the US as a heroic rescuer motivated purely by integrity and compassion. Simple! Muffle up all greed-related motives for antagonizing Russia: US weapon industry profits, NATO’s agenda for bases on the Black Sea, IMF goals, ExxonMobil’s coveting Black Sea fossil fuel deposits, and Biden’s connections with Ukraine’s largest natural gas corporation. Then, conceal US hopes to dominate the global energy trade, maintain the dollar as the international energy trade currency, displace Russia from Europe’s gas market, shut down Nord Stream 2, and export fracked liquefied natural gas to Europe via Ukraine.

    Also ignored are the biases and aims of those social and business circles who are forever dictating US foreign policy according to their pecuniary priorities and uncooperative, control-oriented habits of international relations. President Biden’s administration, for example, includes many members of the Alliance for Securing Democracy—with an advisory board that combines neoconservatives with liberal hawks, Albright Stonebridge Group—with its interest in Russian business acquisitions, and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

    CNAS, whose donors include multiple weapon corporations, the European Union, US Department of Defense, Finland’s Defense Ministry, Amazon, Google, and ExxonMobil, was formerly led by President Biden’s current Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, whose husband, Robert Kagan, co-founded the conquest-seeking neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Yet we’re to assume that donors’ priorities aren’t skewing foreign policy in dysfunctional ways.

    With Russia’s fears dismissed and US greed disguised, the good vs. evil script is further strengthened by permitting only shallow public analysis. For example, how do we know that Russia wasn’t deliberately provoked so that the ulterior goals of certain American social circles could be advanced under the guise of nobly responding to Russia’s aggression? The topic isn’t permitted into discussion.

    Another topic given quarter-inch deep analysis is Biden’s seemingly fair-minded declaration that each nation has the right to choose alliances. It’s an unusual statement coming from a “you’re with us or against us” nation that has punished or ousted national leaders who refused to sever alliances with the USSR or Cuba.

    Nuland’s leaked tapes from 2014 (which mention Biden and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan) and a US record of instigating coups indicate that Americans were likely involved in promoting the bloody 2014 coup of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Yanukovich to install anti-Russian leadership agreeable to European Union and NATO ties. So does Biden’s “right to choose alliances” proclamation apply to nations before a US-approved coup or only afterwards?

    Another enraging example of shallow analysis is the opinion falsely parroted by US “experts” that Putin’s 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine,” lays bare Putin’s imperialist vision for Ukraine and his lack of recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. Whether the experts are deliberately lying or lack reading comprehension skills, their claim is false and, given the self-righteous hatred their claim generates, utterly irresponsible.

    Nowhere in the essay does Putin speak of conquering Ukraine or refusing to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty. Putin specifically describes the relationship between the US and Canada as the type of relationship Russia seeks with Ukraine. When he speaks of “unity,” he’s not speaking of dissolving Ukraine’s political sovereignty. He’s speaking of cultural and historical ties between the two nations.

    Putin’s description of the Bolsheviks’ creation of borders never suggests that he’s doing away with them. It’s possible he’s implying that Donetsk, Lugansk, and certainly Crimea have large Russian populations and do not necessarily belong in Ukraine, especially if Ukraine’s post-coup government is harboring neo-Nazism and installing language and indigenous people policies of a deliberate anti-Russian nature. Note that Ukraine and the US are the only two nations in the UN to vote against the recent resolution to condemn the glorification of Nazism.

    Of course, US policymakers are not uncomfortable with Nazism and, following WWII, employed one thousand Nazis to spy on Russia. And it was US banks and companies such as Ford, General Motors, and du Pont that opportunistically helped fund Hitler’s war arsenal. Even in 1973, the US worked with pro-Nazi collaborators and US corporate funds to plant protests, propaganda, economic sabotage, and violence that climaxed in the CIA’ s horrific 9/11/73 coup of Chile’s Salvador Allende. It’s not surprising that in 2014, Russian news sources claimed that US private military contractors were training right-wing Ukrainian extremists.

    In his essay, Putin clearly states his wish to negotiate with Ukraine, but not with Ukrainian leaders who are mere representatives of Western profiteers eager to use Ukraine’s land and resources for their own benefit. But, of course, US commentators either ignore the statement or, forgetting US history, discount Putin’s fears of Western profiteering as conspiracy theory.

    Double standards also fortify the script. Russia’s invasions are motivated by belligerence, never legitimate fears, while US invasions are motivated by legitimate fears, never belligerence. Same behavior, different judgment.

    Headlines scream of savage Russian war crimes. TV reporters interview sobbing Ukrainians. Yet US, NATO, and Ukrainian war crimes are barely publicized, their victims ignored. Same actions, different judgment. To learn about US war crimes and Afghan and Iraqi suffering, you’ve got to read investigative reporters’ books.

    American groupthink, inflated by its self-righteous role in the script, and seeming to borrow from middle-school social dynamics, jeers and smears President Putin’s every word as absurd and staged. But we’re to trust Biden as honest, unstaged, unconcealing. No proof is needed. Just faith in the script.

    Putin’s wish to protect Donetsk and Lugansk, self-declared republics since 2014, and end Kiev’s 8-year war that has killed 14,000 is automatically mocked as false pretext for conquest. Yet US wishes to protect Ukraine from Russia are trusted as caring, without ulterior design. The role of private military contractors, NATO, and the US in escalating civil war and provoking Russia by arming Ukraine with billions in weapons since 2014 rather than committing to non-violently resolve Ukraine’s internal conflict remains shamefully unassessed.

    The consequences of belief in this drama? The US habitually uses exaggerated fears of evil enemies as false justification for colossal military budgets, NATO expansion, more military bases, troops, weapons, and nukes—all of which pour gasoline on the world tinderbox of tension, drain desperately-needed funding, and fail to resolve conflict.

    If evil is equated with enemies, it becomes deceptively simple for “heroes” to champion goodness: bomb enemies into submission, impose deadly sanctions, strangulate funding, send weapons, engineer coups. But none of these methods nurture goodness. The truth is, those convinced they’re fighting evil are frequently blinded to the immorality and injustice of their own actions against people who aren’t so evil after all.

    The good vs. evil script is also unjust because it enables the “innocent” to get away with all they’ve done to exacerbate conflict. The script can even enable the “innocent,” including Biden administration neoconservatives and liberal hawks, to slickly seize power, resources, and markets from those deemed evil.

    US leaders’ promotion of this good vs. evil storyline appears compassionate, but it isn’t against killing. It isn’t about justice. It’s about pushing a script that provides pretext on the part of those proclaiming their own goodness to inflict injustice and violence against Russia and Putin, already verbally crucified by a mob of liars. It’s about solidifying our allegiance to US policymakers’ decisions about whom we should kill and whom we should cry for. Yet policymakers step beyond Constitutional grounds when they use their power to turn our hearts on and off, to bait us to hate some and love others to serve their greed for Mid-Eastern, Ukrainian, and Russian wealth.

    We’ve got to scrap the script and view conflict impartially. We deserve accurate, sophisticated information about conflict, not propaganda that teaches us to hate. We need full truth to help us ground irrational fears of bad guys, cure the sickness of greed, and offer caring and friendship, not just for those falsely deemed innocent and heroic, but for all of us, with 360◦ of empathy, all the way around the world.

    • View all six videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNEw9-1OIk-CwU-5vAElcg

    • Read the entire essay at Countercurrents

    • This article was first published at TRANSCEND Media Service

    The post Russia, Ukraine, and the USA: Trapped in a Cultural Script first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Rod Jackson: Why New Zealand’s response to the covid pandemic was proportionate?

    COMMENTARY: By Professor Rod Jackson

    In a recent article (Weekend Herald, April 16) John Roughan wrote that the covid-19 pandemic has been an anticlimax in Aotearoa New Zealand.

    Surprisingly, he acknowledges covid-19 has killed about 25 million people worldwide, so hopefully he was referring to New Zealand’s 600 deaths. He goes on to ask how many lives we in New Zealand have saved and states that it’s “not the 80,000 based on modelling from the Imperial College London that panicked governments everywhere in March 2020”.

    I beg to differ. It is because governments panicked everywhere that the number of deaths so far is “only” about 25 million.

    A recent comprehensive assessment of the covid-19 infection fatality proportion — the proportion of people infected with covid-19 who die from the infection — found that in April 2020, before most governments had “panicked”, the infection fatality proportion was 1.5 percent or more in numerous high-income countries. Included were Japan, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

    Without stringent public health measures, covid-19 is likely to have spread through the entire population, and an infection fatality proportion of 1.5 percent multiplied by 5 million (New Zealanders) equals 75,000.

    That’s close to the estimated 80,000 New Zealand lives likely to have been saved because our “panicking” government, like many others, introduced restrictive public health measures.

    Public health successes are invisible
    What Roughan fails to appreciate is that public health successes are invisible. Unlike deaths, you cannot see people not dying.

    Without the initial public health measures and then the rapid development and deployment of highly effective vaccines (unconscionably largely to high-income countries) there would have been far more deaths.

    Roughan asks “is this a pandemic?” He states that 25 million covid deaths are only 0.3 percent of the world’s population (“only” 16,000 New Zealand deaths).

    How many deaths make a pandemic? In 2020, covid-19 was the number one killer in the UK, responsible for causing about one in 10 deaths in every age group, with each person who died losing on average about 10 years of life expectancy.

    In the US, more than 150,000 children have lost a primary or secondary caregiver to covid-19.

    So, has our pandemic response been proportionate?

    Stringent public health measures were highly effective pre-omicron, but are unsustainable long term.

    New Zealand is incredibly fortunate
    We are incredibly fortunate that highly effective vaccines were developed so rapidly.

    Even the less severe omicron variant is a major killer of unvaccinated people, as demonstrated in Hong Kong, where the equivalent of 6000 New Zealanders have been killed by omicron in the past couple of months, due to low vaccination rates.

    Unfortunately, despite our high vaccination rates, we are unlikely to be out of the woods, and it is likely a new covid-19 variant will be back to bite us. The only certainty is that the next variant will need to be even more contagious to overtake omicron.

    As long as covid-19 passes to a new host before killing you, there is no selection advantage to a less fatal variant. We are just lucky that omicron was less virulent than delta.

    Pandemics over the centuries have often taken several generations to change from being mass killers to causing the equivalent of a common cold.

    What response will we accept as proportionate to shorten this process with covid-19 without millions of additional deaths?

    As immunity from vaccination or infection wanes, we will need updated vaccines to prevent regular major disruptions to society.

    A sustainable proportionate response
    Unlike the flu, which has a natural R-value of less than two (one person on average infects fewer than two others), omicron appears to have an R-value of at least 10. That means in the time it takes flu to go from infecting one person to two, to four, to eight people, omicron (without a proportionate response) could go from infecting one to 10 to 100 to 1000 people.

    There is no way that endemic covid will be as manageable as endemic flu.

    The only sustainable proportionate response to covid-19 is for New Zealanders to embrace universal vaccination.

    It is likely that vaccine passes will be required again if we want to live more normally and for society to thrive. It cannot be difficult to make the use of vaccine passes more seamless.

    Almost every financial transaction today is electronic and it must be possible to link transactions to valid vaccine passes when required.

    Almost 1 million eligible New Zealanders haven’t had their third vaccine dose, yet few are anti-vaccination.

    Rather, thanks to vaccination and other public health measures, the pandemic has been an anticlimax for many New Zealanders and the third dose has not been a priority.

    As already demonstrated, for the vast majority of New Zealanders, a vaccine pass is sufficient to make vaccination a priority.

    Professor Rod Jackson is an epidemiologist with the University of Auckland. This article was originally published by The New Zealand Herald. Republished with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Sustainable warfare: new ‘green’ Elbit drones are a masterclass in military weirdness

    The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) is no stranger to a bad idea. Nobody who has spent more than five minutes in or round the UK military would deny it. The MOD’s latest project is a ‘green’ drone. In itself, this is a symptom of a broader global push towards ‘sustainable’ brands of warfare. This increasingly sees national militaries, and their worldviews, being used to grapple with an issue which has no military solution. Being oppressed or killed by green military equipment, let’s be honest, is hardly different from being oppressed or killed by the usual hardware.

    So what’s the story?

    In their quest for some good green optics, the MOD have enlisted none other than Elbit Systems. Yes, the firm which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s drones. The same Elbit Systems whose London HQ was blockaded by anti-arms-trade activists just days ago. Elbit’s latest offering: the Sustainable Aviation Pathfinder. Alongside their partner, global defence contractor KBR, Elbit announced they would begin initial test flights soon:

    Affinity Flying Training Services Ltd (Affinity), has embarked on a series of battery-powered flight tests for the UK Ministry of Defence to assess the feasibility of environmentally friendly alternatives to current military aircraft.

    Yes, you read correctly: “environmentally friendly alternatives to current military aircraft”. War is going green, and the MOD are trying extremely hard to make this sound like a feasible idea. This seems like a good opportunity to have a look at the MOD’s record on the environment.

    Little green men?

    Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) have compiled data which can help the MOD. That is, if the department is really serious about the environment. For example, the MOD produced 3.2mn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) in 2016.2017. That is 3 percent of the UK’s national CO2e.

    But this does not include CO2e produced by actual warfighting or defence contractors. Indeed, the UK was a key party in the War on Terror, which SGR say produced 3000mn tonnes of CO2e between 2001 and 2017.

    Let’s be clear. Recent campaigns have made the climate worse. As The Canary reported previously:

    The Costs of War Project has also asserted that the enduring military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have resulted in “the degradation of the natural resources in these countries and a radical destruction of forest cover”. It said “the animal and bird populations have also been adversely affected”.

    A global problem

    The issue is not limited to the UK military. Globally, militaries have started to position themselves as a leading force in climate politics. However, some campaigners ask what the implications of this really are. According to Nick Buxton from the Transnational Institute (TNI), we should be very cautious about letting militaries lead on climate change:

    …by framing climate change as a security matter, it also has significant consequences in shaping how we respond to a warming planet. As the climate crisis unfolds, is the military the institution we want to turn to for solutions?

    And as TNI point out in their climate security primer:

    The fundamental problem with making climate change a security issue is that it responds to a crisis caused by systemic injustice with ‘security’ solutions, hardwired in an ideology and institutions designed to seek control and continuity.

    They add:

    At a time when limiting climate change and ensuring a just transition requires a radical redistribution of power and wealth, a security approach seeks to perpetuate the status quo.

    Ignoring the threat?

    Despite the green rhetoric around, for example, the new drone project, the UK’s own review suggests that the country’s leaders are unwilling to change course in order to counter climate change.

    As the militarism monitor Forces Watch has it:

    …the government’s recent Integrated Defence and Security Review gives a strong indication that, despite some discussion of the challenges posed by climate change, the nation state and national interest will continue to be prioritised. The new competitive age – powered by defence and security industries – envisioned by the review falls far short of facilitating the kind of cooperative approaches we need in the face of climate emergency.

    Zero solutions

    As we’ve heard here, national militaries and arms firms have no solutions to the biggest security threat facing humanity. However, they are desperate to tick some ‘environmental’ boxes, whilst continuing to be major polluters.

    At its core, the Elbit ‘eco-drone’ project is a gimmick. Its one which allows a morally dubious firm to tout its environmental credentials, all whilst making money, contributing to emissions, and causing harm. Because, at the end of the day, a missile fired from a ‘sustainable’ drone has the same effect as one fired from any other – at least for the people at the receiving end.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Nehemia Gerhsuni-Ayhlo, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Dan McGarry: How to do something about Australia’s Pacific ‘stuff up’

    THE VILLAGE EXPLAINER: By Dan McGarry

    If the coming election goes to Australia’s Labor party, Penny Wong is very likely to become Foreign Minister. So when she speaks, people across the region prick up their ears.

    Without the least disrespect to her recent forebears, she could be one of the most acute, incisive and insightful FMs in recent history.

    Whether she’ll be any more effective than them is another matter.

    Australia has a long tradition of placing prominent front-benchers into the role, and then pointedly ignoring their efforts, their advice and their warnings. It’s as if government leaders find their greatest rival and send them trotting off around the globe, more to keep them from making mischief at home than to achieve anything noteworthy while they’re gone.

    In Australia, it seems, foreign policy is domestic policy done outdoors.

    If she achieves nothing more, Wong would be well served to look closely at the people supporting her, and to spend considerable effort re-organising and in fact re-inventing DFAT.

    Its disconnection from other departments, especially Defence and PMO, has created an internal culture that spends more time feeding on itself than actually helping produce a persuasive or coherent foreign policy.

    Ensuring foreign policy’s primacy at the cabinet table is a big ask, but it will be for naught if the department can’t deliver. There are significant structural matters to be dealt with.

    Rolling development and aid into the department was a significant regression that hampered both sides. Volumes can be written about the need to distinguish development assistance from foreign policy, and many of them could be focused on the Pacific islands region.

    The two are mostly complementary (mostly), but they must also be discrete from one another.

    It’s far more complicated than this, but suffice it to say that development aid prioritises the recipient’s needs, while foreign relations generally prioritise national concerns. The moment you invert either side of that equation, you lose.

    Exempli gratia: Solomon Islands.

    It’s well known that Australia spent billions shoring up Solomon Islands’ security and administrative capacity. Surely after all that aid, they can expect the government to stay onside in geopolitical matters?

    Applying the admittedly simplistic filter from the para above, the answer is an obvious no.

    Aid is not a substitute for actual foreign relations, and foreign relations is definitely not just aid.

    So is Penny Wong correct when she calls the CN/SI defence agreement a massive strategic setback? Sure.

    Is she right to call Pacific Affairs Minister Zed Seselja “a junior woodchuck”, sent in a last minute attempt to dissuade Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare from signing the agreement?

    The idea of a minister responsible for the complex, wildly diverse patchwork of nations spanning such a vast space has value. But in terms of resources and policy heft, Seselja rides at the back of the posse on a mule.

    There are good reasons to devote an entire office to Pacific affairs. There are also blindingly good reasons to keep the Foreign Minister as the primary point of contact on matters of foreign policy.

    That means the role—and yes, the existence—of the Pacific Affairs ministry needs a ground-up reconsideration. Notionally, it fulfills a critical role. But how?

    It’s fair to say that Wong is more insightful than those who describe Solomon Islands as a fly-speck in the Pacific, or a Little Cuba (whatever the F that means). But in the past, Labor’s shown little insight into the actual value and purpose of foreign policy.

    For the better part of four decades, neither Australian party was fussed at all about the fact that there had been few if any official visits between leaders. Prime Ministers regularly blew off Pacific Islands Forum meetings.

    In Vanuatu’s case, the first ever prime ministerial visit to Canberra was in 2018. Why aren’t such meetings annual events?

    Australia is rightly proud of its pre-eminence in development assistance in the Pacific islands. But that never was, and never will be, a substitute for diplomatic engagement. And you can’t have that without a functioning diplomatic corps whose presence is felt equally in Canberra and in foreign capitals.

    But even that’s not enough. Penny Wong has yet to show in concrete terms how she plans to address what could accurately be called the greatest strategic foreign policy failure since WWII: Leaving Australia alone to guard the shop.

    In 2003, George W. Bush was rightly vilified for characterising Australia’s role in the region as America’s Sheriff.

    Bush hails 'sheriff' Australia
    Bush hails ‘sheriff’ Australia. Source: BBC News

    But the Americans weren’t the only ones who walked away, leaving Australia alone to engage with the region. The UK and the EU (minus France in their patch) rolled back their diplomatic presence substantially.

    Even New Zealand agreed to restrict its engagement in large areas in deference to its neighbour. The most enduring presence was provided by organisations without any meaningful foreign policy role: UN development agencies and multilateral financial institutions.

    Since the beginning of the War on Terror, there has been a consistent and often deliberate draw-down on the capital provided by democratic institutions, multilateral foreign policy, and indeed any collective course-setting among nations.

    Post Cold-War democratic momentum has been squandered on an increasingly transactional approach to engagement that’s begun to look alarmingly like the spheres of influence that appeal so much to Putin and Xi.

    This hasn’t happened in the Pacific islands alone. The UN has become an appendix in the global body politic, one cut away from complete irrelevance. ASEAN and APEC are struggling just as hard to find relevance, let alone purpose, as the Pacific Islands Forum or the Melanesian Spearhead Group.

    Australia has “led” in the Pacific islands region by being the largest aid donor, blithely assuming that all the other kids in the region want to be like it. But that “leadership” masks a massive gap in actual influence in shaping the agenda in a region that’s larger and more diverse than any other in the world.

    The data’s there if people want it. This isn’t a particularly contentious… er, contention, if you’re among the far-too-small group of people who actually live in and care about the future of the region.

    In a regional dynamic defined and dominated by transactional bilateralism, China holds all the aces. The only hope anyone has of slowing its growth in the region is through meaningful multilateralism that treats Pacific island countries as actual nations with national pride and individual priorities. Instead of silencing them, their voices should be amplified and defended, not by Australia alone, but by every other democratic nation with the means and the will to do so.

    If we can’t respect the equal standing of nations, we can’t protect their integrity.

    Scott Morrison may indeed be one of the worst exemplars of this blithe disregard for actual foreign policy engagement. He’s certainly won few friends with his world-class foot-dragging on climate change. America’s suddenly renewed interest in the region is an indication that they’ve woken up to the Bush administration’s mistakes.

    It’s also clear they don’t trust Australia to play Sheriff any more. Kurt Campbell’s upcoming visit to the region is just the latest in a series of increasingly high profile tours of the region.

    So yes, Penny Wong is justified in saying that China’s advances in the Pacific derive at least in part from Australia’s lack of a coherent and effective foreign policy.

    But foreign policy is not made at home. It’s not Australia’s interests alone that matter. And subjugating Pacific nations in compacts of free association isn’t a substitute for actual policy making.

    Pacific island nations will not defend Australia’s national interests unless they share those interests. The only way that Australia—and the world—can be assured they do is by actively listening, and by incorporating Pacific voices into the fabric of a renewed and revitalised global family.

    Dan McGarry was previously media director at Vanuatu Daily Post/Buzz FM96. The Village Explainer is his semi-regular newsletter containing analysis and insight focusing on under-reported aspects of Pacific societies, politics and economics. His articles are republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • How the war in Ukraine is being fought in the media

    As is the case with any war, the war in Ukraine is being fought on many fronts: in the streets, in the financial realm, and in the media. The battle over information about the war itself, how it started, and who is most at fault (and what their motivations are) is a critical factor shaping how governments and citizens around the world respond to the unfolding conflict. In this panel, TRNN contributor Radhika Desai speaks with Benjamin Norton and Daniel Haiphong about Western media’s coverage of the war, corporate media’s complicity in fomenting conflict and feeding the military-industrial complex, and about what critical media literacy tools people can develop to better navigate the fog of war.

    Benjamin Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker based in Latin America. He is the founder and editor of Multipolarista and was formerly a producer and reporter for TRNN. Daniel Haiphong is a journalist, writer, political analyst, and host of The Left Lens. He is a weekly contributor to The Black Agenda Report and his work has been featured in a range of outlets, including MintPress, CounterPunch, and Friends of Socialist China. He is also the co-author of American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

    Pre-Production: Paul Graham
    Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley

    Pieces marked as Opinion may contain views that do not necessarily reflect or align with those of The Real News Network; they also may contain claims that could not be fully corroborated by TRNN’s editorial team.

    Transcript

    The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • A Paean to “Warm-Hearted Sex”

    The upper-class married men of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna, like those of Tolstoy’s aristocratic milieu, often led debased, clandestine sexual lives which clashed with their more genteel, conjugal relations. They had invariably married within their own class, of course: unblemished young ladies from good families, versed in the arts of cultured conversation and amateur musicianship. Young ladies who had saved their “treasure” — only to find themselves shocked and unprepared for the raw male passions of the bridal suite.

    Such men, by contrast, were certainly “experienced.” Since their days in college and in military service, they had freely visited brothels in the customary red-light districts.  Moreover – to our present-day dismay – children as young as 14 could legally become registered streetwalkers. Such poor children, probably abused in earlier years and desperate for cash, were easy prey for such well-heeled “gentlemen.” Sexual release was sought and obtained–but with the usual hangover of queasy shame. In short, as Freud realized, these men admired women whom they could not desire, and desired women whom they could not love. (There were exceptions – one of Leo Tolstoy’s older  brothers warmly loved and married a prostitute.) But generally, as Freud described, these upper-class males experienced a conflicted eroticism: affectionate tenderness vs. uninhibited sensuality. The outcome was devastating for so many of these genteel
    couples: often impotent husbands, often frigid wives.

    But what possible relevance could Freud’s observations in Vienna, well over 100 years ago, have now? Well, as I wrote briefly in my book Riddles of Eros (1994), researcher Alfred Kinsey’s tremendously influential books on human sexual behavior (1948, 1953) introduced an unfortunate misconception – that sexual behavior occurs simply to discharge sexual tensions. The preposterously overpraised Kinsey researchers not only promoted the misguided notion that sex is nothing more than such “release,” but also that there are six equally valid “outlets” in which to achieve it. (Bestiality, anyone?). Like hunger or the need to “evacuate,” the sex-drive merely urgently sought for tension-reduction (ejaculation, climax, whatever).

    Since the 1960s, the generally easy access to reliable contraceptives has been a great boon for “planned parenthood.” And, more recently, with the availability of generally reliable “morning-after” pills (still under-publicized to uninformed teenage girls), the numbers of abortions performed per annum should have dropped precipitously. But they haven’t, at least in the U.S . — and one explanation is that, while the product is over-the-counter in most states, its price may discourage purchase. (Of course, these products are freely provided in many other countries).

    After Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, and Wilhelm Reich (who insisted that only total orgasms would lead to emotional health), the prevailing conception became a purely physiological one. Like other bodily functions (e.g., hunger), sexual tension could be pleasurably released through satisfactory sexual activity with an available “partner.”

    What resulted, for so many starved for real human contact, was a depersonalized casualism. For the sexual encounter, Kinsey notwithstanding, is by nature a highly intimate one. Human touching and embracing are not only sexually arousing, but highly emotionally communicative, extending a trusting vulnerability which for a time transcends emotional isolation. Such contact, when defensive dissociation is overcome, is of the utmost intimacy far transcending mere conversation. Such misunderstanding of sexual intimacy has, in my opinion, devalued its subjective, uniquely personal quality – and reduced varied sexual encounters for many to merely an impersonal consumption of pleasure.

    The post A Paean to “Warm-Hearted Sex” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Boris Johnson’s 1,000 days in power: who cares?

    The corporate media was awash with column inches on Tuesday 19 April, discussing Boris Johnson’s 1,000 days as Prime Minister. But the more crucial question here is, who the fuck cares? Because whoever the PM is, it’s always the same: perpetual class war.

    Living obituaries

    It seems to be an unwritten rule that as soon as a PM hits some sort of milestone anniversary, the corporate media is duty-bound to dedicate articles to this sort of nonsense. Theresa May had them after 365 days in power. David Cameron had them for certain years and after his first term in office. Gordon Brown even had a book on his first year as chancellor (clearly his first year as PM wasn’t that noteworthy). And Tony Blair had a living obituary (a veritable eulogy) for his first decade as prime minister.

    So, now it’s Johnson’s turn.

    1,000 days of clusterfucking

    The corporate media have been churning out potted history lessons about him as fast as he lies. The Guardian trumpeted that:

    From prorogation to partygate: 1,000 days of Boris Johnson as PM

    The UK prime minister leaves a trail of scandals, U-turns and law-breaking as he reaches his milestone

    National World did a political ‘listicle’, lamenting:

    The 14 scandals that define Boris Johnson’s time in office – 1000 days on from becoming Prime Minister

    And the Mirror went further, managing a half-century of Johnson’s misdemeanours:

    Boris Johnson’s first 1,000 days – his 50 biggest scandals, rows and U-turns as PM

    iNews, meanwhile, sat completely on the fence, whimpering:

    From Partygate to vaccines: Boris Johnson’s biggest failures and successes in first 1,000 days as PM… Mr Johnson’s premiership has seen him deliver Brexit and preside over a successful Covid vaccine rollout, but it has also been marred by scandal and sleaze.

    But what does all this from the corporate media mean? Absolutely fuck all.

    Dumbing-down leaders’ crimes

    It’s been a standard for years to do these ‘retrospectives’ on sitting leaders. All it serves to do is focus our minds on the individual actions of PMs: like people labelling Johnson the first sitting PM to be a criminal. This ignores Blair’s illegal invasion of Iraq, the UN’s accusations against Cameron’s government of “grave” and “systematic” violations of disabled people’s human rights, and May’s presiding over the Windrush scandal.

    The point being that it’s not individual actions that are the problem. It’s the system that every sitting PM has ever presided over which is the real scandal. They’re all as bad as each other. The root cause is a system deliberately designed to create a society where the poorest and most marginalised people’s lives are infinitely dispensable in a perpetual class war. Until we address that root cause, then all the ‘1,000 day’ column inches in the world are just churnalism.

    Featured image via Sky News – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • We owe it to the victims of conflict to tell the unsanitised truth about war

    Warning: this article includes graphic descriptions and images of injury and death

    Almost every day we see reports of horrific atrocities committed in Ukraine, with images of dead or mutilated bodies often sanitised by blurring. But as a Labour MP argues, the public should not be protected from seeing the true horrors of such atrocities.

    This is not about sensationalising, but standing witness to what is happening because we owe it to the victims of those crimes.

    The tragedies we are witnessing in Ukraine are devastating for the people there. Sadly they are not exceptional. The Canary has a long history of reporting on such war crimes – from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Yemen, to Turkey, and beyond.

    It’s essential the horror of all of these conflicts is told.

    Revealing the truth

    UK Labour MP Chris Bryant tweeted that media –  in this case BBC World – should not protect the public from seeing the truth about atrocities taking place in Ukraine:

    Byline Times executive editor Peter Jukes argues that we owe it to the victims of war and their families to reveal the full truth of such crimes:

    Unsanitised crime scenes

    Over many days tweets from independent sources provide unsanitised images of alleged war crimes, mostly discovered in Bucha. For example, one tweet claims to show more murdered civilians with their hands tied behind their backs. Another shows dead bodies of civilians left lying in the streets.

    This tweet shows the burnt bodies of dead civilians, apparently families:

    And this video shows the horrible scene that followed the bombing of the railway station at Kramatorsk, with at least 50 people dead:

    As for the total devastation of Mariupol, this level of destruction is reminiscent of what happened in Grozny (Chechnya) and Aleppo (Syria).

    Butchery in Bucha

    There are also other reports about alleged atrocities committed in Bucha.

    On 4 April it was claimed that the bodies of 410 civilians had been found in towns near Kyiv after the Russian military retreated. A mass grave was also discovered in Bucha. It was alleged that Russian soldiers had fired on men fleeing the town, and had killed civilians at will.

    Regarding atrocities in Bucha and the other towns of Hostomel and Irpin, Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia Vasyl Myroshnychenko commented:

    We see civilians’ dead bodies lying around the city, many of them have their hands tied up… Multiple rapes of women, children killed. This is a massacre.

    Many other atrocities were reported by a number of papers, including the Daily Mirror.

    Anatomy of murder captured by drone

    Then there was the now infamous murder, captured by drone, of what appears to be a civilian who simply stepped out of his car, with hands raised, after being ordered to by the military.

    Zdf commented:

    The pictures from March 7 show Russian soldiers dragging the body of the man away from his car and into a ditch. A woman and a child were also travelling with him. They are later led by soldiers into the nearby forest. What happens to them then, the pictures do not show.

    A BBC report takes up the story – and it is shocking:

    Some answers already exist for a couple who were killed by the Russians and left to decompose on 7 March. Their rusty, shrapnel riddled car lies in the road next to one of the petrol stations, reduced to a shell by fire. Next to it are the burnt and twisted remains of a body that is just about recognisable as the remains of a man. A wedding ring is still on the corpse’s finger. Stretched out inside the hulk of their car is what is left of the incinerated body of a woman, the mouth opened in what looks like a scream. …

    The bodies, the BBC discovered in an investigation this month, are of Maksim Iowenko and his wife Ksjena. They were part of a convoy of 10 civilian vehicles who were trying to escape the Russians and get to Kyiv.

    The report continued:

    Also in the car were their six-year-old son and the elderly mother of one of Maksim’s friends. Both of them survived and were eventually released by the Russian soldiers.

    They were found walking back down the road, and the woman told her family that Maksim was shouting that a child was in the car when he was killed.

    The elderly woman and the boy are now safe but traumatised.

    The report added: “Under the laws of war civilians are protected, and when they are killed in defiance of those laws, their deaths amount to war crimes”.

    But that was just one event, amongst hundreds of similar atrocities. It demonstrates all loss of morality.

    Dehumanising the enemy

    From the beginning of this war there have been reports of countless numbers of civilians murdered and tortured. These and similar acts are war crimes, says Amnesty International. They may even be considered acts of genocide.

    It’s now understood that as many as 20,000 civilians may have lost their lives in the city of Mariupol alone. And Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, understands that more than 6,000 cases of war crimes have been opened for investigation.

    But why are civilians dealt with in this way? The answer is that, as with most wars, the protagonists are made to see the enemy – military or civilian –  as less than human.

    The following tweet includes an audio recording of what’s claimed to be Russian soldiers being ordered to kill in this way. The man giving the orders says “Here is a whole village of civilians. Shoot the civilian cars”:

    According to the Guardian, the recording was intercepted by Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, in relation to the attacks in Bucha. If it proves to be authentic, it demonstrates not just the dehumanising of civilians but also the brutalisation of the combatants.

    “Unspeakable, deliberate cruelty”

    Human Rights Watch’s European media director posted a thread, commenting on some of the recent examples of atrocities:

    Human Rights Watch has documented many alleged war crimes, in a number of locations in Ukraine.

    Hugh Williamson, Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia director, commented.

    The cases we documented amount to unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence against Ukrainian civilians. Rape, murder, and other violent acts against people in the Russian forces’ custody should be investigated as war crimes.

    The HRW report added:

    The laws of war prohibit willful killing, rape and other sexual violence, torture, and inhumane treatment of captured combatants and civilians in custody. Pillage and looting are also prohibited. Anyone who orders or deliberately commits such acts, or aids and abets them, is responsible for war crimes. Commanders of forces who knew or had reason to know about such crimes but did not attempt to stop them or punish those responsible are criminally liable for war crimes as a matter of command responsibility.

    The accounts listed in the report, detailing horrific atrocities, will no doubt add to other evidence to be examined by the international courts.

    Denials or in denial

    And then there’s another narrative: the denial by Russia of any involvement in war crimes and atrocities:

    This separate statement, issued by the Russian ministry of defence via its Telegram account, was in response to claims of war crimes committed in Bucha.

    It concludes:

    All this confirms conclusively that the photos and video footage from Bucha are another hoax, a staged production and provocation by the Kiev regime for the Western media, as was the case in Mariupol with the maternity hospital, as well as in other cities.

    Moscow also has its many supporters and apologists. For example, there’s this article in the Orinoco Tribune. It in turn refers to another article, published on the ‘War On Fakes’ site.

    And there’s this lengthy article by Jacques Baud, former member of Swiss strategic intelligence. He argues that Ukraine made serious errors in the years leading up to the war and it could have been averted.

    Justice?

    Putting aside the geopolitics, what is undeniable in this conflict, as with many others, is the way civilians and their homes have been criminally targeted from day one. And it is these civilians, not governments, who ultimately deserve our support.

    Moreover, journalists have an obligation to reveal, as far as they can, the truth about the horrors of war – for to do anything less would arguably equate to complicity. Indeed, over the years The Canary has not shirked from revealing the horrors of such crimes, sometimes publishing images and videos that bring home the full truth of what took place.

    And the more the truth of war is revealed, the more likely the perpetrators of war crimes will be exposed and hopefully brought to justice.

    Featured image via Flickr Creative Commons / manhhai cropped 770×403 pixels

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Gavin Ellis: Show us the full horror of war in Ukraine

    COMMENTARY: By Gavin Ellis

    Atrocities and total war are not pixilated or sanitised. They bring death with unimaginable brutality and obliterate lives with indifference. It is time to stop protecting the New Zealand public from these grim realities of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Our news media post warnings about disturbing images and then obscure them out of a long-held regard for the sensibilities of readers and viewers over portrayal of death. We see shapeless body bags while those lying in the street are given a dignified digital shroud.

    Yes, we read and hear descriptions of what the innocent citizens of Ukraine have had to endure at the hands of Russian invaders. However, we are shielded from most graphic detail of what is being done in a mission to “demilitarise and de-Nazify” a democratic nation that posed no defence threat to its neighbour.

    How often do we see and hear the phrase “Warning: The following item includes disturbing images including dead bodies” when, in fact, we are left to imagine what the body looks like under its obscuring mantle?

    I was moved to think about New Zealand media depiction of the victims of war crimes in Ukraine by an essay that appeared in The New York Times last Saturday. Written by long-time photojournalist David Hume Kennerly, it was headed “Photographing Hell”.

    Kennerly was a combat photographer in Vietnam and was responsible for the iconic image of a vat of cyanide-laced Flavor Aid surrounded by corpses in the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana. He is no stranger to war and death and was reminded of Jonestown when he saw images of the bodies of civilians lying in the street when Bucha, on the northern outskirts of Kyiv, was retaken by Ukrainian forces.

    Those images were denounced by the Kremlin as “fakes” and “provocations”, to which Kennerly responded: “The images of these atrocities were taken by trusted photojournalists. They are the truth, and a record of the mendacity and brutality of the Russian military. As accusations of war crimes mount, these photos are the documentation the world needs to finally understand what is really happening in Ukraine.”

    ‘Direct line to people’
    He went on to describe photographs as “a direct line to people, over the heads of officials, pundits and disinformation” and said some photographs will always have the power to make us confront horror.

    One of the images accompanying his essay had that effect on me. It was a photograph of a body bag. It had been unzipped far enough to reveal the side of a face staring resolutely ahead. In death, the man was telling us he was an eye-witness to the atrocity that had taken his life.

    The photograph had been taken by Carol Guzy, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who covered the conflicts in Kosova and ISIS-held Mosul. Her photographs taken following the liberation of Bucha are confronting and include bodies being exhumed from mass graves, charred corpses, and open caskets. Yet somehow it is the unseeing eye peering from a body bag that is truly iconic.

    Kennerly’s essay recalls similarly iconic images from his time in Vietnam, such as Eddie Adams’ picture of a Vietcong suspect being executed in a Saigon street and Nick Ut’s image of a young girl running naked down a road after being burnt by napalm. They helped to change public attitudes to that war.

    The 1965 Life magazine cover photo by Larry Burrows from the Vietnam war of a US helicopter gunner with a dying pilot at his feet. Image: Film & Megapixels

    He could have added Ronald Haeberle’s photograph of a pile of bodies, victims of the My Lai massacre by American soldiers, that appeared on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and forced the U.S. military to confront its own crimes. And Malcolm Browne’s photograph of a Buddhist monk in the act of self-immolation in Saigon shook the United States and elsewhere. And Larry Burrows’ Life magazine cover story showing a helicopter gunner with a dying pilot at his feet.

    Or he could have gone back further. Start with Goya’s depictions of the Peninsular War between 1810 and 1820, then move to Robert Capa’s moment-of-death image of a falling soldier in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and Margaret Bourke-White’s graphic portrayal of the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp that appeared in Life magazine in May 1945. Our understanding of those events is rooted in what we were shown more than what we were told. As Kennerly observes in the essay: “Evocative images can affect policy, spur action, and every now and then alter the course of history”.

    indelibly on the public record
    Now we have Ukraine and Kennerly says many of the photographs from that war deserve to live as indelibly on the public record as the photos of Vietnam (and elsewhere).

    But will they achieve that status if news media sanitise and, yes, censor them?

    Kennerly ends by saying he’s getting tired of endless disclaimers (there is one at the top of his New York Timescontribution) that warn of “Graphic Material”.

    “The best photographs of war might make us want to look away. It’s imperative that we do not.”

    I agree, but I concede there is a strong tradition in this country (and in many other places) of shielding audiences from the visual depiction of death. I cannot recall, for example, seeing an unobscured image of the face of a dead person in our media, unless from a safe distance.

    I certainly don’t recall publishing one during my editorship of The New Zealand Herald although I certainly saw many confronting images. News agencies observed the practice of sending the image and expecting editors to decide whether or not to publish it.

    Jessica Fishman, in a very good US study of how the media censor and display the dead entitled Death Makes the News,notes that news organisations make a distinction between writing about death and portraying it visually. Much of her book is devoted to explaining why images are not published, including the dangers of “death pornography”.

    Exceptions made by media
    However, she identifies exceptions that media make. More often than not those exceptions are made for bodies somewhere else. Too often they are images of people “who don’t look like us”. Those are poor reasons for publication.

    There are some good reasons for being extremely circumspect about publishing images from within your own country when there is a strong likelihood they will be seen by grieving relatives and friends. This is the principal reason New Zealand media do not publish pictures of bodies in fatal road crashes. It was one of the compelling judgements made by New Zealand media following the Christchurch mosque massacre when coverage concentrated on survivors.

    Inevitably, however, there will be exceptions to this domestic reticence. For example, in 1972 the Daily Mirror in Britain ran a front page picture of a priest administering last rights to a protester, one of 13 killed by British troops in the Bloody Sunday incident. It is a picture I, too, would have published because it bore witness to demonstrably disproportionate use of state force.

    Similarly, I would have published a photograph carried on the front page of The New York Times in 2013. It wasn’t local. It documented a war crime.

    The image was of a row of bodies, four of them children, in white shrouds with only their faces visible. They were the victims of a Syrian chemical attack in Damascus.

    The paper’s public editor Margaret Sullivan, in a column explaining the decision to publish, invoked the images from Vietnam that Kennerly is now resurrecting. She said they brought home the horror in a way that words never could, and the image from Syria was similarly “capable of changing the narrative, possibly affecting the course of history”. Tragically, that picture has not.

    Now we have Ukraine and the strong likelihood that images captured by photojournalists in the war zone will contribute to mounting evidence of war crimes. There are precedents: Photographs taken by Ron Haviv in Bosnia played a material part in the conviction of Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and a local warlord by the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague.

    Images add to outrage
    New Zealand publication and broadcast of explicit images of war crimes against Ukraine will not tip the balance of history or convict war criminals. However, as elsewhere, a New Zealand audience’s exposure to them will add to the weight of international public opinion against the perpetrators. Images will add to outrage.

    Equally, or perhaps of even greater importance, verified explicit images of war crimes and victims may help to counter Russian propaganda still being freely disseminated in this country through the Daily Telegraph New Zealand website (no connection to the publications of the same name in London and Sydney). It carries, unquestioningly, both RT and Sputnik “news” services.

    This is not to say that New Zealand media should declare open season on publishing pictures of the dead. Far from it. We are the better for not being exposed to recurring death pornography.

    There are also limits to what the public can be expected the bear. In 1991, for example, Associated Press pulled from the wire an image of the charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier who had failed to escape from a burning truck on the Gulf War’s Highway of Death. One picture editor called it “the stuff of nightmares”. London’s Observer was one of only a handful of papers that ran it — and repeated publication in a book on the war. I vividly recall the image. Would I have inflicted it on a New Zealand audience? No.

    Decisions on whether to publish defining images that capture far more than a moment are hard when the central focus is a corpse. It requires not only a determination of newsworthiness but also a self-examination of motives. Publication must serve a higher purpose than merely shocking an audience.

    Sadly, pictures that serve that higher purpose will continue to emerge from Ukraine. I hope editors in this country publish them. They were paid for with the lives of innocents.

    Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications – covering both editorial and management roles – that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a blog called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Gordon Campbell: On gendered perceptions in Aotearoa politics

    COMMENTARY:  By Gordon Campbell

    In recent weeks, barely a day has gone by without Christopher Luxon demonstrating the chasm of ability that exists between the leaders of Aotearoa New Zealand’s two major political parties. When his latest gaffe (on public transport funding) was politely pointed out to him by a NZ Herald journalist, Luxon replied: “I haven’t really thought too deeply about it, to be honest.”

    Maybe that should be National’s next election campaign slogan: “Thinking Is For The Liberal Elite: Vote National!” For a party that claims to disdain mediocrity, National appears to have elevated a prime specimen of it to its top position.

    Before the public transport gaffe slides down the memory hole, it is worth keeping in mind what Luxon actually said. As he told the NZ Herald: “Fundamentally, it [public transport] has got to stand on its own merits…”

    When reminded public transport has been heavily subsidised in modern times, Luxon admitted he had not thought deeply on the subject. “I haven’t thought too deeply about it, to be honest. I think the bottom line is, we want to encourage more mode shift,” he said…

    ”Public transport needs to stand on its own feet, it can’t be subsidised or underwritten right? It has to be able to build its own case.”

    What are we to make of stupidity on this scale? Leave aside the fact that public transport already stands on its merits, by providing a public service, and by helping to combat climate change.

    Leave aside the fact that roads and politicians — and Air New Zealand, both now and while Luxon was CEO — are also all heavily subsidised.

    Look instead at the extra costs the public would be facing from what Luxon is proposing. Transport Minister Michael Wood has spelled out some of them:

    “Under Luxon’s plan a multi-zone bus fare in Auckland would go from $12.60 to $31.50, in Christchurch a $4.70 trip would become $11.75, a train ride in Wellington would go from $19 to $47.50, and superannuitants would no longer be able to use their SuperGold Card to catch off-peak and weekend public transport.”

    In all likelihood, Luxon would not really follow through and do what he just said. His modus operandi is gradually becoming clear. It follows this basic pattern: what Luxon says is almost beside the point, since the gaffe (once it has been detected by other people) will be quickly followed up by a scrambled attempt to conceal the meaning his words plainly conveyed.

    Essentially, the details are merely the window dressing for the slogans that take up most of the rentable space inside his noggin. Such as: Government Bad, Private Sector Good. Regulations Bad For Business, Open Slather Good For Business. Unions Bad. Farmers Good. Landlords Very Good. Climate Change Hurt My Head.

    Footnote: All the same, Luxon is posing as the champion of the people fighting the cost of living pressures. Yet that pose is wildly inconsistent with what he has actually been advocating, and opposing.

    As Clint Smith has pointed out, the list includes :

    Luxon’s cost of living policies: – oppose the Winter Energy Payment – oppose the minimum wage hike – oppose the benefit increase – oppose Fair Pay Agreements – increase public transport prices – $2 tax cut for typical Kiwi taxpayer – $18,000 tax cut for him.

    Gendered double standards
    The double standard involved here is breathtaking. If a female politician said something as laughable as Luxon’s proposal on transport subsidies and defended it on the basis that she hadn’t thought about it too deeply, she would never survive the fallout.

    She would be roundly damned as a scatterbrain and a show pony, and deemed plainly unfit for higher office.

    Yet because Luxon is a man in a suit, and because he is the leader of a National Party that has always been suspicious of conspicuous intelligence, he is being enabled to continue on his bumbling way.

    Jacinda Ardern on the other hand, is held to a different standard. Obviously, there is and should be a range of opinions on whether her government is doing the right thing. Even people who routinely vote Labour criticise it on the details and pace of change it is currently overseeing.

    However, much of the most vehement criticism levelled at Ardern has little to do with policy detail and a lot to do with her gender. Her competence — which includes a command of detail across the whole range of government activity, and an ability to communicate the details succinctly — is commonly held against her.

    In an excellent article on Stuff last week, Michelle Duff tackled that issue head on:

    Two years into the pandemic, there is talk about the new normal. Here’s what that looks like. It is open misogyny, visible on every platform and supported and promoted by upvotes on Reddit, laughing emojis on Facebook, comments about “that woman” on LinkedIn, and someone who looks like your Aunty referring to the PM as “Cindy” and calling her a “c…”.

    It is targeted and increasingly violent misogynistic abuse and threats – illustrated by but not limited to the escalation in gendered hatred directed towards Ardern – being directed at public-facing women from central and local body politicians to journalists, public servants, academics and chief executives.

    Ardern is (a) the most prominent and (b) the most consistent target of the gendered hatred that Duff is talking about. Yet as Duff reports, the abuse and the escalating threats have a wider context:

    The amount and tone of gendered disinformation and misogynistic abuse online has exploded since last August, constituting both a national security threat and a human rights issue that authorities are struggling to combat. It appears to be part of a concentrated effort to suppress women’s participation in public and political life, borne from far-right ideology designed to oppress women that has spread to a more mainstream audience.

    “There’s an increase in the amount, and there’s an increase in the intent, and that’s to control and punish women who challenge male dominance, the Prime Minister but all women,” says Disinformation Project lead Kate Hannah. It is worse for women of colour and wāhine Māori, gender minorities and disabled women, she says.

    It is a spectrum of abuse, and at one end it begins with the denigration intentionally conveyed by the use of the term “Cindy” to refer to the Prime Minister. As Duff says:

    Some might find this funny, but its aim is to diminish. Massey University senior lecturer Dr Suze Wilson, who studies leadership, says no-one called John Key “Johnny,” or Chris Luxon “Chrissy,” in an attempt to infantalise or belittle them. “Right from the outset you had people saying, ‘I don’t want to be told what to do by that woman,’ with an element of ‘how dare she tell me what to do.’ That had to pre-exist for this to be possible.”

    But that was petty compared to now. “What’s really tipped it is the more violent rhetoric. The straight out abusive terms, the c-word, the horse-face, the threats to kill. “It comes from this idea that if any woman comes into a position of power she’s not acting as a ‘good’ woman should — and that’s why this doesn’t only come from men, it comes from people who cleave to more traditional idea around gender roles…”

    Like most of the rhetoric that characterises the anti-vaxx movement, the gun lobby and other parts of our public discourse, these extremes of politicised misogyny have been imported here from the United States — a country where religious beliefs permeate the perceptions of what are seen to be the appropriate gender roles.

    I’m not implying that this alarming trend — and the double standard it entails — is the fault of Christopher Luxon. But he is definitely a beneficiary of it. Because if politics was a level playing field, Luxon wouldn’t be standing a chance against Ardern. On every conceivable measure of ability, he simply isn’t in her league.

    Footnote: On that point, Luxon is often dismissed as being a John Key clone. That’s a mistake. Because what Luxon has been proposing are very hard right policies, and not the moderate centrism that enabled Key to be seen as an amiable, grinning placeholder acceptable to a wide range of voters.

    Instead, Luxon and David Seymour are trying to inject policies into the political mainstream that over the past 30 years, have enjoyed only about 5-10 percent support at most. It isn’t a stretch to regard their “small government” extremism as having more than a little in common with the “That bitch can’t tell me what to do” extremism mentioned above.

    Gordon Campbell is an independent progressive journalist and editor of Scoop’s Werewolf magazine. This article has been republished with the author’s permission.

  • A Note on Marx’s Atheistic Humanism

    Karl Marx’s thought is justifiably characterized as “materialist.”  In his doctoral dissertation, he had contrasted the theories of Democritus and Epicurus, both of whom rejected Pythagorean-Platonic notions of a separate world of the “spirit” (i.e., of eternal “patterns” from which transient, this-world things supposedly derived).  Like many radical humanists of the mid-19th century, Marx was profoundly influenced by Feuerbach’s dismissal of an illusory “God” as in actuality a projection of the potential powers of humanity.  Not only Christianity but virtually all world religions had insisted on an after-worldly disposition of the immortal “soul” — transmigration, inferior reincarnation (bad karma), infernal punishment for this-worldly “sins,” and so on.  (By contrast, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra reassured the dying tightrope walker that there was no hell to fear — death was simply a termination.)

    Despotic rulers, from times immemorial, had utilized priestly elites to indoctrinate their credulous “subjects” in humble obedience — lest the “God” of reigning ideology impose horrific, never-ending punishments on their recalcitrant, immortal souls.  Even into the 20th century, most people worldwide remained indoctrinated in some variant of belief in virtuous humility as a crucial basis for after-worldly “salvation” (variously depicted).  Oppressed populations, fearing disease and death, would solicit “divine” protection through prayer, and offer ritual sacrifices as a quid pro quo for divine favor.  To Marx (as well as Freud), all this was a survival of fear-dominated times, in which hapless humans, unable to comprehend the class-based origins of their oppression, desperately looked skyward for fantasized rescue.

    Where did this almost-universal notion of the “soul” come from?  Nineteenth century anthropologists concluded that, in pre-modern times, the occurrence of death remained a mystery.  At one moment, the dying loved one was still talking, her features lively and animated–and then, inert stillness.  (“The rest is Silence” — Hamlet.)  To observers of such a moment, something appeared to have left the body, which remained in place but now forever motionless.  This “something,” our remote ancestors must have (falsely) surmised, must have ascended to some other realm or dimension.  Thus, the after-worldly, immortal “soul” — and, along with it, absurd, this-worldly anxieties about its “salvation.”  For Marx, such preoccupation was a terrible travesty, a deluded affront to confronting the very real, material problems of survival and to struggling to overcome the deprivations of being oppressed and exploited.

    The post A Note on Marx’s Atheistic Humanism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Open letter to Minister Faafoi – an appeal to help 34 abandoned Papuan students

    OPEN LETTER: By David Robie of Asia Pacific Report

    Kia ora Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi

    It is unconscionable. A bewildering and grossly unfair crisis for 34 young Papuan students – 25 male and 9 female – the hope for the future of the West Papua region, the Melanesian half of Papua New Guinea island ruled by Indonesia.

    They were part of a cohort of 93 Papuan students studying in Aotearoa New Zealand on local provincial autonomy government scholarships, preparing for their careers, and learning or improving their English along the way. They were also making Pacific friendships and contacts.

    They were fast becoming a “bridge” to New Zealand. Ambassadors for their people.

    And then it all changed. Suddenly through no fault of their own, 41 of them were told out of the blue their scholarships were being cancelled and they had to return home.

    Their funds were cut with no warning. Many of them had accommodation bills to pay, university fees to cover and other student survival debts.

    They were abandoned by their own government, some of them being close to completing their degrees of diplomas. Appeals to both the provincial governments in Papua and the central government in Jakarta – even to President Joko Widodo — were ignored.

    Yes, it is unconscionable.

    New Zealand help?
    Surely New Zealand can respond to this Pacific plea for help?

    Asia Pacific Report first published a story about the plight of these students back on January 27. Since then many stories have been written about the students’ struggle to complete their qualifications, including Māori Television, Newsroom, Tagata Pasifika, RNZ Pacific, and Wairarapa Times-Age, and Tabloid Jubi, Cendrawasi Pos and Suara Papua in Papua.


    An interview by Laurens Ikinia with Tagata Pasifika last month.   Video: Sunpix

    They must finish their studies here in New Zealand because returning home to a low wage economy, high unemployment, the ravages of the covid-19 pandemic, and an insurgency war for independence will ruin their education prospects.

    Papuan students studying in Australia and New Zealand face tough and stressful challenges apart from the language barrier. As Yamin Kogoya, a Brisbane-based West Papuan commentator, says from first-hand experience:

    “Papuan students abroad face many difficulties, including culture shock and adjustments, along with anxiety due to the deaths of their family members back in West Papua, which take a toll on their study.

    “As well as inconsistencies and delays in Jakarta’s handling of funds, corruption, harassment, and intimidation also contribute to this crisis.”

    At present, out of 17 students currently studying at the Universal College of Learning (UCOL) in Palmerston North, only 10 are able to attend classes. Seven students cannot attend because of their visa status and tuition fees which have not been paid.

    Five students at AUT
    At Auckland University of Technology, out of five students studying there, one is doing a masters degree, four are studying for diplomas and one is not enrolled because the government has not paid tuition fees.

    Out of the 41 recalled students, the visas for some of them have already expired while others are expiring this month.

    Of the 34 students still in New Zealand and determined to complete their studies, the breakdown is understood to be as follows:

    UCOL Palmerston North – 15
    Institute of the Pacific United (IPU) New Zealand – 6
    AUT University – 4
    Ardmore Flying School – 2
    Waikato University – 2
    Canterbury University – 1
    Massey University – 1
    Unitec – 1
    Victoria University – 1
    Awatapu College – 1

    Papuan students in Auckland sort donated food
    Papuan students in Auckland sort donated food for their colleagues stranded in New Zealand while completing their studies. Image: IAPSAO

    The students have rallied and are working hard to try to rescue their situation as they are optimistic about completing their studies. The Green Party has taken up advocacy on their behalf.

    The Papuans are communicating with the NZ International Students Association, NZ Students Union and NZ Pasifika Students.

    Community groups such as the Whānau Hub in Mt Roskill, Auckland, have assisted with food and living funds. A givealittle page has been set up for relief and has raised more than $6500 so far.

    But far more is needed, and an urgent extension of their student visas is a must.

    Papuan Governor Lukas Enembe talks with students
    Papuan Governor Lukas Enembe (centre in purple shirt) talks with students in Jayapura. Image: Jubi

    ‘Grateful for support’
    “We’re so grateful to all Kiwis across the country for their generous support for us at our time of desperate need,” says communication coordinator Laurens Ikinia of the International Alliance of Papuan Students Associations Overseas (IAPSAO) and who is a postgraduate student at AUT.

    “We’re also grateful to all the tertiary institutions and universities for understanding the plight of the West Papuan students.”

    Papuan students are speaking today on the issue at a Pacific “media lunch” in a double billing along with Fiji’s opposition National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad at the Whānau Community Centre in Auckland’s Mt Roskill.

    Today's "media lunch" featuring Fiji and the Papuan students
    Today’s “media lunch” featuring the forthcoming Fiji general election and the West Papuan students. Image: Whānau Community Hub

    Just last Monday, many worried parents and families of students affected by this sudden change of scholarship policy gathered to meet Papua Governor Lukas Enembe in Jayapura to plead their case.

    Hopefully, Indonesian Ambassador Fientje Maritje Suebu, ironically also a Papuan, will read this appeal too. The situation is an embarrassment for Indonesia at a time when the republic is trying to foster a better image with our Pacific neighbours.

    Minister Faafoi, surely New Zealand can open its arms and embrace the Papuan students, offering them humanitarian assistance, first through extended visas, and second helping out with their financial plight.

    Waaa waaa waaa.

    Dr David Robie
    Editor
    Asia Pacific Report

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Failed by the state while alive, and failed by the state in death

    Content warning: this article contains descriptions of murder and mentions of rape

    As Sabina Nessa’s killer was jailed for life, Priti Patel used the sentencing to further her own agenda. The self-promoting Home Secretary tweeted that tackling violence against women and girls was “central to my Beating Crime Plan”. But as Sabina’s sister, Jebina Islam, pointed out, the family has received no support at all from the government.

    She argued:

    Lack of support from yourself and Boris Johnson just shows how ‘important’ it is to tackle male violence to you guys.

    Sabina was horrifically assaulted and murdered by a man in September 2021. Her death is just one example of how the state has failed Black and Brown women and girls, both in life and after their death.

    Shukri Abdi

    Let’s take a few examples. There’s 12-year-old Shukri Abdi, who drowned in a river in June 2019. She was failed by the state at all levels. Just one day after her death, before they had even properly investigated, Greater Manchester Police released a statement ruling out suspicious circumstances. In fact, the Detective Inspector warned the public of the “dangers of playing near or swimming in rivers”, implying that Shukri, who couldn’t swim and wouldn’t go near rivers, had just been playing. Shukri had been bullied at school, and was last seen with a group of children by the river. The school launched their own internal investigation into the bullying, which the family stated was completely inadequate.

    In December 2020, a coroner concluded that Shukri’s death was an accident. Meanwhile, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) released a report dismissing every single one of Shukri’s mother’s complaints, stating that the police’s lack of action was not racially motivated.

    In January 2021, the lawyers of Shukri’s mother launched a civil action against the police, stating that Greater Manchester Police had failed on many levels in the investigation, and that the police were institutionally racist.

    Maz Saleem, part of the Justice4Shukri campaign, said at the time:

    The family has maintained the firm position that they have been unfairly treated by GMP from the outset due to their status as a refugee family.

    Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry

    There’s also the case of sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, who were stabbed to death in a park in Wembley in June 2020. Their family had to search for the women themselves after receiving no immediate help from the Metropolitan Police. Their mother, Mina Smallman, said of the police:

    I knew instantly why they didn’t care.

    She continued:

    They didn’t care because they looked at my daughter’s address and thought they knew who she was. A black woman who lives on a council estate.

    When the police did finally come to the scene, officers took selfies of themselves with Bibaa and Nicole’s dead bodies. Mina said:

    If ever we needed an example of how toxic it has become, those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead black girls and send them on. It speaks volumes of the ethos that runs through the Metropolitan Police.

    In October 2021, an IOPC investigation into the force’s actions found that the level of service by the Met was “below the standard that it should have been”. These words will, no doubt, have added insult to injury for the grieving family.

    Blessing Olusegun

    And then there’s Blessing Olusegun. The 21-year-old was found dead on a beach in Bexhill on 18 September 2020. No-one has been charged with her murder. Sussex police treated the case as “unexplained” but not suspicious, with a postmortem stating that she died by drowning.

    Blessing’s mother said:

    We maintain that the circumstances of her death were suspicious and should have been treated as such by the police.

    She is working with a legal team to do:

    everything in our power to find the answers we are looking for.

    Sending messages about rape

    Speaking out about the handling of her daughters’ murders, Mina Smallman says she has been gaslit by the police. But if we look at just a few examples of police racism and misogyny, it will perhaps come as no surprise that Black and Brown women and girls are consistently failed by the state.

    Back in 2018, the IOPC began the Operation Hotton investigation into police officers’ conduct at Charing Cross police station. In January 2022, it issued a “learning” report to the Met, highlighting:

    Inappropriate behaviour by officers, including, racism, misogyny, harassment and the exchange of offensive social media messages.

    The IOPC report stated that officers attended a festival dressed as known sex offenders and a molested child, and found “numerous messages” in various police WhatsApp groups “about rape and ‘raping’ each other”. One police officer even sent messages saying:

    ““I would happily rape you”; “if I was single I would actually hate fuck you” and “if I was single I would happily chloroform you”.”

    The IOPC refused to name one ex-police officer, who:

    repeatedly used a racially offensive term during a Christmas social event while off-duty and his phone was subsequently found to contain offensive images and comments about women, people from ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.

    Another ex-police officer was found to be:

    exchanging inappropriate messages about women, drugs and domestic violence

    They were also accused of:

    sending texts containing offensive and inappropriate language, including some of a racial nature.

    Then, there’s at least 194 women who have been murdered by the police and prison system in England and Wales. Back in May 2021, Channel 4 News reported that 129 women had come forward in the last two years to report that their police officer partner was abusing either them or their children.

    Racial disparity

    Of course, we can’t ignore the fact that when a white woman or girl is murdered, the state and the media are more likely to pour their resources into a case. The Canary’s Sophia Purdy-Moore has pointed out that:

    As of February 2020, the Met Police has spent over £12m on the then 13-year search for Madeline McCann. But Aisha Ahmed from Minority Matters says that when it comes to investigating missing young people from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds, police “claim to be under-resourced”.

    Perhaps the best known example of racial disparity is the case of Sarah Everard, who was murdered by a Met police officer. The mainstream media and the public were, rightly, outraged by Sarah’s murder, and it made front page news for weeks. But as I asked at the time, where was the outrage and grief for missing and murdered Women of Colour?

    Don’t be fooled by empty promises

    As Priti Patel continues to use the murders of women like Sabina Nessa to further her own publicity, we must make sure we’re not fooled by the Tories’ empty promises to eradicate deeply-rooted misogyny and racism in the country. Patel has stated that she is:

    listening to women and girls up and down the country.

    But at the same time, she is responsible for passing new laws that actually make women less safe. She is also giving some of the country’s most violent men – police officers – inexhaustible new powers through both the police bill and the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act, which was passed in 2021.

    It is essential that all of us shout out loud to get justice for women and girls like Shukri Abdi and Blessing Olusegun. It is vital that we fight impending new police powers which will no doubt affect Black and Brown communities the most. Enough of white silence: we all need to be allies.

    Featured image via Pour Paris, resized to 770 x 403 px, licensed under Wikimedia Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. 

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Why The Conversation will focus on policy over personality in Australian election campaign

    COMMENTARY: By Misha Ketchell, The Conversation

    The bell has been rung, the shadow campaign is now official, and Australia heads to the polls on May 21. As the government enters caretaker mode, Australia enters a highly consequential period of democratic deliberation, but not for the reasons you might think.

    It suits politicians — and many in the media — to portray a federal election as a grand job application process in which voters comprise the selection panel. But that’s really only half the story.

    Political commentator Sean Kelly has written a convincing book on how Scott Morrison turned the 2019 election into a choice between him and the then Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

    Morrison won when Australians were more attracted to his persona than that of his opponent. Policy played a small part, notably when bold proposals on the Labor side became a lightening rod for fear.

    This time around we are again likely to see a focus on leadership eclipse policy debate. Morrison enters this campaign behind in the polls and as an unusually unpopular prime minister, but with an unshakeable faith he can turn it around.

    Labor knows Morrison is on the nose, and will be perfectly happy to cast the election to a referendum on their leader Anthony Albanese versus an unpopular PM.

    If we let this happen it will be a poor outcome, no matter who wins. The great drawback of democracy is that while voters get to decide who forms government, we have little power to set the agenda.

    Wasting a precious chance
    Yet if we can’t have a proper policy debate during a campaign, we waste a precious chance to talk about the things that matter most to us.

    The US journalism academic Jay Rosen takes a keen interest in Australian media. For for many years, he has been critical of Australian media’s over-reliance on polls and tendency to treat covering politics like calling a horse race.

    Rosen says this means the media allows the politicians to decide what gets talked about. Important topics get neglected as the spin-doctors steer the discussion to narrow areas where they think their party might have an advantage.

    With this in mind, The Conversation is determined to cover this election differently. We are going to talk about what what matters most to us — the policies that affect our lives and the future of the planet.

    As a first step, we are going to set our own citizens’ policy agenda in collaboration with our readers. Please help us by filling out our #SetTheAgenda poll.

    Once we know more about what you’d like to see on the agenda, we will report back on what you’ve said and tap into the deep expertise of the thousands of academic experts who write for The Conversation.

    We will bring you coverage with a clear focus on the major problems we face as a society, and try to provide evidence-based solutions that the experts think could actually work.

    Final ingredient
    The final ingredient is the best coverage of the politics of the campaign from one of Australia’s most respected political correspondents, Michelle Grattan, backed up by the economic nous and insight of Peter Martin.

    Michelle will be writing regularly throughout the campaign and you can subscribe to her politics podcast for in-depth interviews and informed commentary

    We’re also bringing back the much-loved ABC radio presenter Jon Faine for Below the Line, an election podcast with political scientists Anika Gauja and Simon Jackman from the University of Sydney and La Trobe University’s Andrea Carson.

    As always, we will do everything in our power to be evidence-led and non-partisan. In a media environment manipulated by vested interests and saturated with opinions, we are committed to covering issues chosen by you and hosting a genuine debate that focuses on the public interest.

    Please take advantage of this opportunity to have your say and contribute to our efforts to ensure the democratic discussion is calm, compassionate, accountable and fair.The Conversation

    Misha Ketchell is editor and and executive director, The Conversation. 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.

  • Arming Ukraine is one thing – but we need to think about where the weapons will end up

    The UK is considering supplying more military equipment to Ukraine. This time it is armoured vehicles, as the war moves towards what foreign secretary Liz Truss has said is a “new and different” phase. And she may be right. But a word of caution here. History tells us many things and one of them is this: weapons aren’t static. They move, they vanish, and they reappear – often in the hands of people that shouldn’t have them.

    Sierra Leone

    In 1999, following an intervention in Sierra Leone, eight soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment were captured by a violent militia named the West Side Boys. They were eventually rescued by troops from The Parachute Regiment and the SAS – one of the latter was killed in the raid.

    And what did they find in the militia’s ruined camp? A British Self Loading Rifle (SLR), once standard issue to the UK military, which had been used in the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972. Declared destroyed many years before, the rifle had somehow found its way into the hands of an obscure West African insurgent group. By what route, nobody seems to know. But it shows us how arms are much harder to keep track of then we might think. It was reportedly identified by its serial number.

    As one of the officers in charge of the rescue operation said in his subsequent memoir:

    It was used on Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972 when 13 protestors had been shot — and it had been declared destroyed when the Saville Inquiry into the shootings had asked for it.

    This was a single weapon. But there are many examples of complete arsenals going missing – and turning up where they shouldn’t.

    Gaddafi’s armouries

    Let’s take a look at the effects of NATO’s 2011 war in Libya. As early as 2013, experts and NGOs were reporting that military weapons from Gaddafi’s armouries were making their way across the Sahel. For example, arms were transported all the way to Mali, where an insurgency still rages fuelled by Libyan military hardware.

    A UN panel warned that the “proliferation of weapons from Libya continues at an alarming rate”:

    Cases, both proven and under investigation, of illicit transfers from Libya in violation of the embargo cover more than 12 countries and include heavy and light weapons, including man-portable air defense systems, small arms and related ammunition and explosives and mines.

    But the US also has a habit of losing substantial amounts of arms. In fact, it lost billions of dollars worth just last year.

    The Taliban

    The West finally pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021. Or, more accurately, they cut and run, leaving the country they had occupied for 20 years to the Taliban. But they didn’t take everything with them.

    The figures are hard to pin down but the implications are clear. As The BBC reported in August 2021:

    Between 2003 and 2016, the US unloaded a huge amount of military hardware on the Afghan forces it fought alongside: 358,530 rifles of different makes, more than 64,000 machine guns, 25,327 grenade launchers and 22,174 Humvees (all-terrain vehicles), according to the US Government Accountability Report.

    This is before we count transport aircraft, attack helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. Some estimates of the value of the equipment now in the hands of the Taliban run into billions of dollars.

    Daesh in Iraq

    The spectacular advance of Daesh (ISIS/Isil) in Iraq and Syria in 2014 captured the world’s attention. Parts of the Iraqi army simply collapsed. It left behind US-supplied military equipment which the insurgent group then commandeered. By 2015, reports were suggesting that Daesh had even acquired US tanks and armoured personnel carriers, as well as Humvees and artillery pieces.

    In 2017, Newsweek reported that large parts of the ISIS arsenal had been been taken from US shipments to other rebel groups In Syria.

    Newsweek cited a report from the NGO Conflict Armament Research:

    The United States and Saudi Arabia supplied most of this materiel without authorization, apparently to Syrian opposition forces. This diverted materiel, recovered from IS forces, comprises exclusively Warsaw Pact–caliber weapons and ammunition, purchased by the United States and Saudi Arabia from European Union (EU) member states in Eastern Europe.

    Ukraine

    On 28 March, Liz Truss told the Commons that the UK was

    doubling our support with a further 6,000 missiles, including next-generation light anti-tank weapons, and Javelin anti-tank weapons.

    She continued:

    We are equipping our Ukrainian friends with anti-aircraft Starstreak missiles. We are also strengthening NATO’s eastern flank, deploying troops to Bulgaria, and doubling the numbers of troops in Poland and Estonia.

    Flooding Ukraine with arms and military equipment carries a certain appeal for a particular kind of politician. Governments can be seen to be doing something. Funnelling arms seems like a good option which sits below the threshold of nuclear escalation.

    Post-war

    But that does not mean there aren’t risks. And Ukraine is different to Iraq and Afghanistan in an important respect. In the latter countries weapons fell to people who they weren’t intended for. In Ukraine, evidence suggests we are placing weapons into the hands of units like the Azov Battalion. A unit which contains card-carrying Neo-Nazis and is integrated into the national military.

    This is not an argument against a degree of  military support. I, for one, recognise the right of Ukrainians and other occupied people to resist. But the character of the Ukrainian resistance is complex and multi-faceted. When the war ends, and we all hope that will be soon, what happens to the weapons? Do they come to be a decisive factor in a post-war Ukraine?

    When we decide to send additional arms to a war-zone, we need to think about repercussions. Because more often than not these decisions come back to haunt us down the line.

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

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.