Content warning: this article contains material some readers may find distressing
On 14 March, the City of London & Hackney Safeguarding Children Partnership published its Local Child Safeguarding Practice Review. The review details two Metropolitan Police officers’ strip search of a Black schoolgirl – known as Child Q – at her Hackney secondary school in 2020.
The review condemns officers’ degrading treatment of the child throughout the search, which they conducted on school grounds without supervision by an appropriate adult. This horrific case of state violence against a schoolchild shows that we must take urgent action to get police out of schools.
A series of safeguarding failures
According to the review, teachers referred the 15-year-old Child Q to police, alleging that she smelled of weed.
Teachers – who are responsible for safeguarding pupils – left the child alone with police officers. They allowed police to conduct the search without supervision, and they failed to call the pupil’s mother.
In Child Q’s words:
Someone walked into the school, where I was supposed to feel safe, took me away from the people who were supposed to protect me and stripped me naked, while on my period.
The review explains that police stripped the child and forced her to expose her “intimate body parts”. They made the child – who was on her period at the time – remove her sanitary pad.
Child Q’s mother told the review that officers made the child “bend over [and] spread her legs… whilst coughing”. On concluding the degrading search, police refused to let the child use the toilet before returning to an exam. Officers didn’t find any drugs on the child.
Reflecting on the trauma caused by the incident, Child Q said:
I don’t know if I’m going to feel normal again… But I do know this can’t happen to anyone, ever again.
“Undignified, humiliating and degrading”
The review concludes “that Child Q should never have been strip searched”. Highlighting the integral role that racism played in the dehumanising search, it states “that had child Q not been Black, then her experiences are unlikely to have been the same”.
In a letter to the review, the child’s aunt said:
I cannot express to you how aggrieved I am with the school and the police enforcement officers for exposing Child Q to such an undignified, humiliating, and degrading exposure.
The review notes the role that “adultification bias” played in teachers’ and officers’ mistreatment of Child Q. Adultification is “where adults perceive Black children as being older than they are”. This bias is a product of racist stereotypes which are used to justify the exploitation, abuse, and criminalisation of Black children.
Expressing ‘heartbreak’ for the child and her mistreatment, grassroots coalition No More Exclusions co-founder Zahra Bei told The Canary:
It’s appalling but it’s not surprising that the school dealt with this child and the situation as a criminal matter as opposed to a safeguarding matter. As it says in the report, she was seen as the risk instead of being at risk. And that is what fundamentally needs to change for Black children. Their childhood, their vulnerability, their needs, their humanity has to be recognised in its fullness.
Not an isolated incident
Child Q’s dehumanising experience is an extreme example of the routine humiliation, harassment, and targeting that marginalised children and young people experience at the hands of police in their schools and communities. According to the review, police strip searched 25 other children in Hackney over 2020/21. Most of these were drug-related searches. Police found nothing on 22 of these children.
This reflects the Met’s increasing use of the degrading practice, including against children. As The Canary reported in February, a Freedom of Information request submitted by criminology researcher Tom Kemp found that:
the force carried out over 9,000 strip-searches on children in the last five years, including more than 2,000 under-16s.
Data shows that Met police disproportionately use section 60 stop and search powers against children – particularly those from Black and racially minoritised backgrounds – despite overwhelming evidence that the practice does not prevent crime.
Reflecting the state’s tendency to enact violence against marginalised young people, police disproportionately use tasers and spit-hoods against Black and racially minoritised children – some as young as 10-years-old.
After decades of reform in education and policing, little has changed. In many cases, reform serves to mask or legitimise harmful practices.
Today, schools systematically push Black pupils out of mainstream education and into pupil referral units, alternative provision, and – ultimately – prisons. Educators enact this through ‘zero tolerance’ policies which punish Black and minoritised pupils for wearing colourful hijabs or natural afro hair.
Schools disproportionately and excessively exclude pupils for ‘persistent disruptive behaviour‘. This vague, subjective description could include anything from ‘kissing teeth’ to answering back.
Factors such as a culture of low expectations and an ahistorical, Eurocentric curriculum also serve to ensure that schools alienate marginalised learners.
This draconian and discriminatory school environment feeds the UK’s ‘school-to-prison’ pipeline. As a result, young Black and racially minoritised people now make up more than half of children in prison in England and Wales today.
No police in schools
It’s in this context that the No Police In Schools campaign – led by grassroots groups Kids of Colour and the Northern Police Monitoring Project (NPMP) – raised local community concerns over the increasing presence of police in Manchester schools in 2020.
Speaking to The Canary in 2021, NMPM and No Police in Schools member Dr Laura Connelly said:
Our own community consultation of over 500 people in Greater Manchester shows that SBPOs [school-based police officers] have a range of negative consequences that are felt most acutely by those from working-class and Black and ethnic minority communities.
She added:
We are deeply concerned that police will bring into the school setting the institutional racism and police violence already experienced in over-policed communities.
More police and more police powers
Despite the evidence that police do not create safety in our schools and communities, the state seeks to expand the institution’s reach and powers.
The government’s response to the controversial Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities includes pledges to further increase police contact with schoolchildren. The response – published just two days after the Child Q review – states:
To help build trust within communities, it is important that the police engage with young people at an early age.
This initiative includes the introduction of ‘Mini Police’, a framework in which officers would engage with primary school children to teach them about “personal safety”. Police officers’ abuse of Child Q demonstrates just how dangerous this could be.
The government is also planning to increase police powers through its draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The state’s active encouragement of the UK’s school-to-prison pipeline is perhaps best exemplified by its introduction of ‘secure schools’, as set out in the bill.
Child Q’s experience of state violence in school demonstrates the harm that carceral and punitive measures inflict on the most vulnerable in society.
As the No Police In Schools campaign has highlighted, marginalised young people and communities need investment, not policing.
We are in the midst of a cost of living crisis and a global pandemic – both following years of austerity. This calls for urgent investment in essential services such as healthcare and affordable housing.
Successive governments cut funding for youth services by 73% in the decade up to 2020. Rather than police expansion, we should be seeing resources directed towards infrastructures of care like youth workers, community centres, and schools.
Join the fight to get police out of schools
Parents, educators, young people, and community members must channel our collective rage to resist police violence and racism in our schools and communities. The horrific assault of Child Q underscores the urgency of this undertaking.
The state and its institutions do not – and will not – protect us. This isn’t a case of ‘a few bad apples’. The system can’t be fixed because it isn’t ‘broken’. It deliberately traumatises and criminalises society’s most disadvantaged and marginalised young people by design.
Now is the time to say no to police in schools and the expansion of police powers. Say no to the degrading practice of strip search – especially against children. And say no to all policies and practices that surveil and criminalise marginalised young people.
We must demand an end to short-sighted punitive approaches to complex social issues, and work to create a just society that ensures children’s safety, dignity, and freedom from all forms of violence.
17 March is St. Patrick’s Day and Ireland’s national holiday. Most Irish people call it ‘Paddy’s Day’. From my own Irish perspective, I don’t always look forward to it if I’m honest. In fact, there’s quite a lot I hate about it. This includes flag-waving nationalism; propaganda telling us ‘Ireland is open to the world’ when so many refugees in Ireland are treated so inhumanely, and the unquestioned commercialisation of the holiday. I’d need another article to explore all that so I’ll park these important topics for now.
But there are many upsides. It opens up, especially since Brexit, a discussion on unifying the north and south of Ireland. So, I feel compelled to make my position clear on this. Well, clearish. I guess what I’m really doing here is thinking out loud. And I’m also asking Irish people to think out loud. If you really do see Paddy’s Day as a national holiday, why not start a conversation about the kind of Ireland you want? Is an island united as one political entity enough for you? Or do you want something that’s truly inclusive?
Because at a political and mainstream media level, this conversation is already underway. And if we leave it to these guys to answer that question, we might find ourselves living in a united Ireland alright, but it may not be the one we imagined. It might just be one that replicates the injustices of the past and present.
Do I want Irish unity, yes or no?
During my childhood years and teens it was a straightforward ‘yes’. These days, in short, it’s a ‘yes but’. I used to support a united Ireland without thinking too much of what that would look like. ‘Brits Out!’, I thought. What else mattered? And given the misery inflicted upon Ireland by the ‘Brits’, that was a reasonable position. But these days, thankfully, I think a bit more broadly than that.
As Ireland was partitioned in 1922, it had, obviously, been united at one stage. But that was unity under British rule. That glaringly obvious fact was actually an eye-opener for me. Because it highlighted to me that simply uniting the island as one was not my goal. I certainly don’t want a united Ireland under British rule. And I would feel the same if unity could only be achieved by an independent united Ireland joining the British Commonwealth.
Likewise, or maybe even more so, a united Ireland free of British rule but characterised by the inequality and deprivation we currently experience is also unacceptable. What is the point of uniting all 32 Irish counties (26 in the south and 6 in the north of Ireland) if we don’t end the inequality of the neoliberal Irish state? A united Ireland can only have meaning when it’s also free and fair. A place to live, as stated in the 1916 Proclamation of Independence, that:
guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
A campaign for Irish unity that isn’t seriously working towards this aim isn’t worth a penny candle. It would in fact be unity for unity’s sake. And who would that serve? Of course unity for unity’s sake does come with the bonus of allowing us poke fun at the British establishment as its precious kingdom falls apart, but if we’re serious about building a fair society, we need to do a lot better than that.
No to monarchy
In the conversation currently underway, some argue a united Ireland in the commonwealth would represent a “gesture of goodwill” to unionists. The commonwealth is important to the unionist tradition in the north of Ireland. But commonwealth membership would apply to the whole island, and the majority of the island want nothing to do with it. That bit I’m crystal clear about. But that’s not me dismissing unionist culture. That’s me abhorring the undemocratic, wasteful nature of monarchy – not to mention the crimes of its empire.
Just over two years ago, I also wrote about Irish unity. Back then I referred to an Irish unity talk I’d been to. It was, predominantly, people from the Irish republican or nationalist tradition who organised it. One of the speakers at that talk suggested a united Ireland might, again, as a ‘gesture of goodwill to unionists’, have a royal family. But coupled with the fact that most Irish people want nothing to do with monarchy, that argument relegates republicanism to little more than a bargaining chip. As if to say ‘yeah, we’ll push this republicanism thing as far as we can, but if it gets in the way of the ultimate goal – a united Ireland – we’ll dump it’. This is a classic example of unity for unity’s sake.
Membership of a monarchical commonwealth is a backward step. The south of Ireland left that behind more than 70 years ago. And that’s just about as close as I’d like to be to that imperialist institution.
No to neoliberalism
That’s not to say the south of Ireland, in its current state, is a model for independence. It’s not. As I touched on earlier, it’s a neoliberal state with growing inequality. Since the pandemic, certain media outlets have reported on how well the Irish economy weathered the economic storm brought on by the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. But it’s all nonsense. Most of that reported economic wealth comes from tax dodging multinationals routing large amounts of their business through Ireland.
Moreover, our public services are a shambles. The poor state of our health system was underlined during the pandemic. Public transport development projects are shelved while road-building projects get the green light. And while Gross Domestic Product (usually just called ‘GDP’ – an indication of a country’s wealth) in Ireland is high, so too is personal debt. In fact, we have one of the highest debt levels per person in the world. Moreover, Ireland’s financial heartland – where a number of these multinationals reside – exists side by side with abject poverty.
No to religious domination
And how have we done when it comes to “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”? I’d say, both north and south of the border, we haven’t even paid lip service to it. Since independence in 1922, the south of Ireland has had a long and shameful history of abusing women and children. This abuse, in part, became known as the Magdalene Laundries scandal. These Catholic-Church run laundries were effectively prisons for women, from 1922 until 1996, who had children outside of marriage or for girls they labelled as “troubled”. They suffered untold abuse at the hands of the Church while the Irish state looked on. So much so, the UN Committee Against Torture had to tell the Irish government to establish an inquiry into the treatment of these women and girls.
Every time people discuss the topic of Irish unification, I hear my father’s words ringing in my ears. As far back as the early 1980s, he said Britain would never agree to a united Ireland because it feared Ireland “would become another Cuba” – a threat to its closest neighbours. That may sound somewhat conspiratorial, but it may not be completely off the mark either. And he added – in some ways more worryingly – that instead of uniting Ireland, “we could lose all 26 counties”. He believed this could happen as Irish politicians, so eager to say ‘we were the ones who unified Ireland’, would agree to all sorts of concessions to unionism. Which is why I find all this talk of joining a commonwealth and ‘goodwill gestures’ so troubling.
Should the 32 counties of Ireland ever become one, in any form, then I will of course celebrate that moment. But a united island without fairness and equality, or with a monarchy, is quite meaningless. So my celebration would be brief. So on this day of Irish days, I want Irish people to think long and hard about the kind of united Ireland they want to live in. And that starts by looking at the kind of Ireland we already have.
With recent polling showing National edging ahead of Labour for the first time in two years, Jacinda Ardern’s previously strong support has eroded rapidly since winning a remarkable outright majority at the 2020 general election.
But the dip in electoral fortunes is only part of the story. It’s probably not an overstatement to say Ardern is presently one of the most reviled people in Aotearoa New Zealand, attracting vitriol that violates the bounds of normal, reasoned political debate.
During the recent illegal occupation of Parliament grounds, the apparent hatred was fully evident. There were ludicrous claims the prime minister is a mass murderer, and demands she be removed from office and executed for “crimes against humanity”.
Even on the supposedly professional social networking site LinkedIn, false claims that Ardern is a “tyrant” or “dictator” have been increasingly commonplace. For those making such claims, factual, constitutional, electoral and legal realities seemingly hold no weight.
So, what fuels these levels of antagonism? I suggest three factors are at play.
A protester with a fake arrest warrant in Christchurch. Image: The Conversation/GettyImages
Context matters How a leader is judged and what they can achieve is never simply a reflection of their individual characteristics and abilities.
Rather, as leadership scholars have long emphasised, the expectations of followers and the wider political, economic, social and historical context influence both how they are judged and their ability to achieve desired results.
In Ardern’s case, the public’s main concerns right now — food and fuel prices, rental and home ownership costs, and the effects of the omicron outbreak — are beyond the direct control of any political leader. Some will require years of transformative effort before significant improvements are seen.
A paradox of leadership is that while followers will often hold unrealistic expectations that leaders can solve complex problems quickly, they are also quick to blame leaders when they fail to meet those unrealistic expectations.
Ardern is caught in the maw of these dynamics, and that’s one of the factors fuelling the attacks on her.
Covid controversies The second obvious reason lies in the covid-related policies — including vaccine mandates, crowd limits and border controls — that have disrupted people’s lives and been heavily criticised by vested interests such as expat New Zealanders and various business sectors.
Anti-mandate protests, in particular, have become a front for wider anti-vaccine movements and extreme right-wing conspiracists. While the prime minister must balance restrictive policies with the greater public good, detractors are not bound by such considerations.
Ironically, by demonstrating a firmness of resolve to act in the nation’s best interest — something leaders might normally expect praise for, and for which Ardern has won international admiration — leaders become open to accusations of being inflexible and unresponsive.
Echoed by opposition politicians and some media commentary, these elements combine to feed a sense of growing frustration.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon … up in the polls and a good fit for traditionalist voters? Image: The Conversation/GettyImages
Old-fashioned sexism and misogyny But these first two factors alone, while significant, don’t explain the full extent of the violent and hateful rhetoric directed at Ardern, albeit by a minority. Rather, it’s clear this is rooted in sexist and misogynistic attitudes and beliefs, further amplified by conspiratorial mindsets.
Research shows both men and women with more traditional views desire “tough”, “bold” and “authoritative” leadership. A man displaying traditionally masculine behaviours, who is an assertive risk-taker, dominating and commanding others, is their ideal leader. This aligns with an assumption that women should follow, not lead.
Ardern’s emphasis on traditionally feminine ideals, such as caring for vulnerable others, and her strongly precautionary covid response run counter to what traditionalists respect and admire in leaders.
What’s known as “role incongruity theory” further suggests that Ardern jars with what traditionalists expect of “good women”. Overall, the sexism and misogyny inherent in these traditionalist beliefs mean Ardern is treated more harshly than a male prime minister pursuing the same policies would be.
Worryingly, the 2021 Gender Attitudes Survey (carried out by the New Zealand National Council of Women) showed such traditional views about leadership and gender are on the rise.
Traditionalist myths Insults and abuse commonly directed at Ardern on social media reflect the generally gendered nature of cyberviolence, which disproportionately targets women. These insults translate traditionalist beliefs into sexist and misogynistic acts.
Referring to Ardern as “Cindy”, for example, infantilises her. Calling her a “pretty communist” not only reflects the sexist and misogynist view that a woman’s worth is measured by her appearance, but also suggests her looks disguise her real aims.
This plays on the traditional trope of woman as evil seductress. From there it’s a short leap to the conspiracy theories that depict Ardern as part of an evil international cabal.
Unfortunately, for traditionalists and extremists alike, the evidence shows that effective leaders do not conform to their ideal or play by their rule book. Instead, they tend to be collaborative, humble, team-oriented and able to inspire others to work for the common good — qualities women often exhibit.
Of course, Ardern’s performance is not beyond criticism. But a fair-minded analysis, free from sexist and misogynist bias, would suggest the hatred directed toward her says more about the haters than Ardern.
Three years on from the Christchurch terror attacks on 15 March 2019, Mahvash Ikram writes an open letter to her young son telling him one day he will learn how the Muslim community was targeted, but that shouldn’t scare him from going to a mosque.
Dear son,
You’re not yet two, but you’ve already been to the mosque several times. You don’t understand what happens there, but you love to copy what everyone does. You already know how to say Allah-o-Akbar, and it has become an essential part of your ever-growing vocabulary.
Some would say Muslims start early with their young and I agree wholeheartedly.
So, here’s your first lesson — never be ashamed of your beliefs.
But, remember your vocabulary also includes salam, which means peace. So, practise your faith in peace.
Not long from now, you will understand the concept of standing in prayer behind the imam.
And that’s when we will take you to the mosque for your first ever Friday prayer, Jummah.
We will most likely go as a family, and maybe a few friends will come along too. I will make a big deal out of it. Mothers are embarrassing in all cultures — especially your mum, just ask your older sister.
A white shirt
We will dress you in new clothes, probably a white shirt that will be a bit tight around your pudgy little tummy. It will no doubt get stained with your favourite lunch, which will be ready for you when you come home.
Soon you will learn Friday prayer is a bit of a celebration for Muslims — clean clothes, a hearty home-cooked meal and lots of people to meet at the mosque. It will be an important part of your social calendar, second only to the two big festival prayers.
I look forward to all of it, except one thing — one day you will learn about the March 15 terrorist attacks.
You will learn someone targeted innocent members of your community for their faith.
Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch … strewn with flowers and offerings honouring the victims of the terror attack there on 15 March 2019. Image: Alex Perrottet/RNZ
And that’s your second lesson, sometimes you will be treated unkindly for your beliefs. You are not alone, there are other communities that suffer the same fate.
Remember — this has nothing to do with you. You are not responsible for a fault in another person’s head.
Trust me, it will be a rude awakening — just like it was for the rest of our country. It is often called the end of Aotearoa’s innocence. Lots of people, including children, were killed and injured that day.
It still hurts
One of those who died was a three-year-old who went to the mosque with his older brother.
Another child was shot but survived. Lots of children lost their parents too. It still hurts.
Tributes and flowers left outside Al-Noor Mosque in Christchurch after the terror attacks. Image: Isra’a Emhail/RNZ
Most grown-ups around you are trying to make sure something like this never happens again in Aotearoa and around the world.
Sometimes we fail, but we are trying.
Hate is an ugly emotion, too big for one’s body. When it takes over, it makes people cruel. They say and do things that can seriously hurt for a very long time. The worst part is these people don’t even realise how horrible they are.
You will also hear of people who practise your faith, but carry a similar hatred. Stay away from them. They, too, destroy families. Denounce them openly.
People may call you names, they may provoke you to fight back and say your religion teaches violence. It is not true. Ignore them.
Keep this verse of the Quran close to your heart and have patience with what they say and leave them with noble (dignity).
Don’t be scared
Don’t let all of this scare you from going to the mosque.
In fact, when you are a bit older I encourage you to go to all sorts of places of worship, whether it’s a mosque, a temple or a church, you will find tranquility and calm.
Don’t be afraid to know others and learn about their views, it is how we rid the world of hate.
Our religion teaches us to respect all other humans regardless of their faith, race, ethnic origin, gender, or social status.
I understand all this information might make you a bit nervous. It is a lot to take in for a little boy your age. But some grown ups just never got on to it and look at what that’s done.
So, let’s get started. After all, we Muslims do start a bit early with our young.
All my love,
Xoxoxo
Mummy
Mahvash Ikram is on the staff at Radio New Zealand. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) a national, independent non-party political feminist lobby group working to ensure the rights of women are protected. Iola Mathews, OAM, is a co-founder of WEL and recently wrote this piece for The Age. It is republished with full permission. Read the original here.
Fifty years ago, on February 27, 1972, the Women’s Electoral Lobby was formed in a Carlton lounge room. That led to WEL’s survey of candidates for the federal election and the publication of its famous ‘form guide’ which helped propel Gough Whitlam to power later that year.
Now a new generation of WEL women are finalising a ‘Party Policies Score Card’ on women’s issues for the forthcoming federal election, due by May this year. The results will be publicised two weeks before the election.
The survey will build on the growing calls for women to be put at the centre of the nation’s politics since the March4Justice in Canberra in 2021, and put pressure on the Morrison government, which has come under fire from prominent women such as Grace Tame, Brittany Higgins and Julia Baird.
In a nice coincidence, March4Justice is holding events across the country on February 27 this year. Like WEL, it is campaigning for women’s equality, but with a particular focus on ending gendered violence.
WEL’s national convener Jozefa Sobski says the scorecard is an opportunity to make women central to the election. “The Coalition and Morrison have a woman problem,” she says, “we have analysed the issues and offer solutions.”
At the last federal election in 2019 WEL produced a similar scorecard. Sobski says there is little point interviewing candidates any more because they are provided with a standard response from head office. Instead, WEL will assess the Coalition, Labor and the Greens based on their public policies and campaign announcements. They may also examine the policies of key independents.
The scorecard will rate the parties on a range of topics, including their commitment to:
50 per cent female representation in parliament
Implementing the 28 recommendations of the Jenkins Report on workplace culture in parliament
New funding for the next National Plan to end Violence Against Women and Children 2022-2032
Funding for 300,000 new social housing properties and 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade
A national transition to free early childhood education and care
Remedies for gender-related undervaluation in pay.
The 1972 WEL questionnaire arose from an article in Ms magazine that published a survey of US presidential candidates and their attitudes to women’s issues. The late Beatrice Faust AO, a writer and political campaigner, called together nine women in her Carlton lounge room to see if they could create an Australian equivalent.
This short film was made nice years ago ‘Celebrating the Women’s Electoral Lobby’s 45th anniversary of making women count in Australia.’ Production: Matadora Filmmakers
The women were hand-picked for their skills. Sally White and I were journalists with The Age, Carmen Lawrence (later premier of WA) was a psychologist, there were sociologists and a librarian.
WEL spread quickly to Canberra and Sydney and by the end of the year membership was up to several thousand, with branches in all states, Darwin and Norfolk Island. That November the form guide was published in The Age.
Then prime minister Billy McMahon scored 1 out of 40, while the Leader of the Opposition, Gough Whitlam, got 33. In general, the Labor candidates did much better than the Coalition’s, and that helped them win votes when the results were distributed in each electorate.
In those heady days of the “second wave” of the women’s movement our lives changed forever, and we formed lifelong friendships. Our poster said Think WEL before you vote, and the song of the moment was I Am Woman, by the Australian singer Helen Reddy.
When Whitlam became prime minister in December 1972, he immediately started implementing reforms for women. Over the next three years he acted on practically every reform outlined in the questionnaire.
Coverage of the women voters’ guide in November 1972.CREDIT:THE AGE
WEL women went on to positions of power and influence in politics, the public service, business, academia and the community sector, spreading reforms for women in new ways.
Among them were the late Susan Ryan AO, who became minister assisting the prime minister on the status of women in the Hawke government, and Marie Coleman AO, head of the Social Welfare Commission and still active today in her 80s as founder and adviser to the National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW).
In the 1980s, the state branches joined together as WEL Australia and affiliated with the International Alliance of Women (IAW).
More recently, WEL was revitalised in NSW when it received two large bequests and was able to hire part-time paid staff. It became more visible at the NSW and national level and is driving the work on the 2022 Election Scorecard.
The early activities of WEL have been recorded in Making Women Count: A History of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Australia, by Professor Marian Sawer with Gail Radford, and in the 2020 film Brazen Hussies, directed by Catherine Murphy, about the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Professor Judith Brett is currently writing a biography of Beatrice Faust.
Feature image: WEL–Darwin members modelling T-shirts, 1974. L to R, Lucille Kidney, Leith Cameron, Lenore Coltheart and Maureen McDonald (Cleary). Photo: Lenore Coltheart
Kill the Bill protester Jasmine York has been sentenced to prison after putting her body on the line to defend women from police violence.
She’s one of 82 people who were arrested – most of them for riot – following a demonstration in Bristol against the draconian police bill. York has been sentenced to nine months, half of which will be served in prison. Meanwhile, 14 others have already received prison sentences for taking part in the protest.
Dubious arson conviction
A jury found Jasmine guilty of arson. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) insisted that during the demonstration Jasmine pushed a rubbish bin towards a burning police car, and the bin added fuel to the fire. But Jasmine insisted she was using the bin to try to create a barrier between her and the police. Crucially, there was no evidence whatsoever that the bin in question ever caught fire or fuelled anything. Despite this, she’s going to prison.
The Bristol Anti-Repression Campaign (BARC) is made up of a number of Kill the Bill defendants and their supporters. It said of the sentencing:
We’re proud of Jasmine, who tried hard to protect other women from the police and was severely beaten by them herself. We’re glad that she was found unanimously not guilty of riot, and also not guilty of a more serious form of arson [with intent to endanger lives] in her trial last month.
Protecting women
The CPS has spent ample resources prosecuting Kill the Bill defendants. It has painted them as an angry “mob” that worked together to beat up police officers and set fire to police vehicles.
In his sentencing, judge James Patrick stated:
You were very well aware of damage caused to police equipment which is paid for by the community, for the benefit of the community. Rather than standing by, you played your part by continuing the lawlessness.
Yet in her week-long trial, the jury saw ample evidence of the police themselves behaving unlawfully. They saw evidence of officers cracking the edges of their shields onto people’s heads, and officers hitting and kicking protesters while on the ground. The jury saw photos of Jasmine’s dark bruises at the hands of the police. Her defence barrister Russell Fraser emphasised that “time and time again” Jasmine put her own body in harm’s way to protect others.
During her trial, Fraser said:
The one consistent thing [Jasmine] does is that she comes to the aid of other women. Consider the woman thrown back into the crowd. She moves across the line for that reason. There’s not many of us who would do that sort of thing, you might think.
Protesters stand outside court in solidarity with Jasmine York. Photo via BARC
Cracking down on anyone who resists state repression
The judge summed up his sentencing by saying:
Your offending played a part in a very serious incident that caused lasting damage to public and private property. I would fail in my duty if I didn’t impose an immediate sentence. You will serve half of the nine months in prison.
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that our increasingly fascistic state is keen to make an example of the Bristol residents who took part in the demonstration. After all, scenes of the Bristol unrest were broadcast around the world. They drew international attention to both the government’s new laws and to police brutality. The state is desperate to keep its citizens in line and to terrify them into obedience. And the best way to do this is to hand down harsh prison sentences.
BARC argued:
We recognise that the legal system is designed to maintain inequality, protect the police, and prevent political dissent. We know that the justice of the courts is a tool the state uses to preserve and defend itself.
Indeed, Jasmine is just one of fifteen who’ve been made an example of by receiving prison sentences following the Kill the Bill demonstrations. Back in December, the same judge gave Ryan Roberts a massive 14-year sentence.
BARC said:
Although we were hoping for a non-custodial sentence [for Jasmine], this wasn’t unexpected – the repression following Kill the Bill protests has been harsh. The police and Judge Patrick are trying to send a message to anyone who takes a stand. Just last week, Mariella was sentenced to 5.5 years in prison.
Mariella Gedge-Rogers was found guilty of riot after being brutally attacked by police on the same demonstration. She was kneed to the ground by an officer, dragged around by another, and held down by three more. As The Canary reported:
Mariella is a Woman of Colour. She said that being “kneed to the floor” was especially frightening in the light of the murder of George Floyd, who died of suffocation as a result of Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck.
Armoured thugs
It’s telling that none of the police officers who were caught on footage attacking people are facing any accountability whatsoever for their brutal actions. They continue to keep their jobs while our friends go to prison.
Meanwhile, the wider public barely questions whether it’s legitimate that an armoured and trained gang can brutalise communities and beat up protesters. It’s widely accepted – especially among white, middle class communities – that this gang’s use of violence is legitimate, and that it can be trusted to carry arms.
2022 will see many more Kill The Bill trials, and potentially many more people going to prison. We can expect the state to put a spin on all the trials, depicting the police as a force that was attacked and fearful for officers’ lives. Don’t fall for this rhetoric – the police, the court, and the prison system are all in place to crush our spirit. But as BARC says:
We wont go quietly and this is not the end. Collective self defence is our greatest weapon!
President Vladimir Putin is not a military general. He is a modernist leader, a trained spymaster and strategist who understands that war is a continuation of politics by other means (Clausewitz). Accordingly, if we want to grasp Putin’s motives we should refrain from trying to assess Russia’s military campaign in terms of ‘strict military objectives.’ We should instead look at the military campaign as a political instrument that is set to mobilize a global and regional geopolitical shift and on a mammoth scale.
It is clear that Putin’s army is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties. It uses siege tactics as opposed to the barbarian American ‘Shock and Awe’ doctrine. Furthermore, the Russian military works hard not to dismantle the Ukrainian military. Instead it encircles cities and is cutting out the Ukrainian army in the East and South of the country. The Russian military has dismantled Ukraine’s ability to regroup, let alone counter attack. Western military analysts have agreed that clear evidence of the Ukrainian army’s growing disability is that Ukraine’s army didn’t manage to seriously damage the 60 km Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv despite the fact that the convoy stood still for more than 10 days. In the last 24 hours, Russia has made it clear to the West that any Western military supply to Ukraine will be treated as a legitimate military target. In other words, the elite Ukrainian army in the East is now a defunct military force; it can defend the cities, it can mount guerrilla attacks on stretched Russian military logistics but it cannot regroup into a fighting force that can alter the battleground.
Putin’s army, as military experts agree, enjoys massive firepower. It is hardly a secret that Russia’s artillery is a deadly force and there is no force that can match it anywhere in the world. The military rationale for this is plain. The USSR never trusted the quality and the loyalty of its foot soldiers. While it counted on the soldiers’ mass impact, their sheer numbers, it also invented the means, the technology, the tactics and the doctrine to win the battle from afar in preparation for the masses to move in. It was Red artillery that knocked down the 3rd Reich Army. Similarly, flattening enemy cities is something the USSR and modern Russia are famous for. Russia enjoys this power, but it has refrained, so far, from deploying this ability in Ukraine. Russia has displayed this capability rather than deploying it. According to military analysts, Russia hasn’t even begun to utilize its superior air power other than assuring its total air superiority over Ukraine.
The Russian army’s tactic has been to mount pressure on cities’ outskirts, demonstrating Russian military might and then opening corridors for humanitarian convoys. And this is the trick. Russia is creating a flood of refugees to the west. Due to the Ukrainian government ban on men 18-60 leaving the country, we are talking about women and children. So far there are about 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees but this number could increase dramatically. And the question follows: will Germany be happy to accept another million refugees that aren’t a working force? What about France and Britain, the USA, Canada, all those countries that pushed Zelensky and Ukraine into a war but were quick to leave the Ukrainian people to their fate?
Sooner or later, Putin believes, Europe will accept his entire list of demands and will lift the list of sanctions, and may even compensate him for his losses on oil sales all in a desperate attempt to stop the tsunami of Ukrainian refugees. By the time the guns cool down, many Ukrainians may actually prefer to stay in Germany, France, Britain and Poland. This will lead, at least in Putin’s mind, to a demographic shift in the ethnic balance in favor of the Russian ethnic groups in Ukraine. Within the context of such a shift, Putin will be able to dominate the situation in his neighbour state by political and even democratic means.
Putin’s plan is not new. It already succeeded in Syria.
When the West realised that Syria was on foot to Europe, it was very quick to allow Putin to win the battle for Assad at the expense of America’s hegemony in the Middle East. Putin now deploys basically the same tactics. He may be cruel or even barbarian but stupid or irrational he isn’t.
The main question is how is it possible that our Western political and media elite are clueless about Putin and Russia’s moves? How is it possible that not one Western military analyst can connect the dots and see through the fog of this horrid war? The reason is obvious: no gifted people see a potential career in military or public service these days. Gifted people prefer the corporate world, banks, high tech, data and media giants. The result is that Western generals and intelligence experts are not very gifted. The situation of our Western political class is even more depressing. Not only are our politicians those who weren’t gifted enough to join the corporate route, they are also uniquely unethical. They are there to fulfill the most sinister plans of their globalist masters and they do it all at our expense.
I have little doubt that an experienced politician like Angela Merkel wouldn’t have let the Ukraine situation escalate into a global disaster. She, like Putin, was properly trained for her job, understanding the deep distinction between strategy and tactics. She, like Putin, was trained to think five steps ahead. As far as I can tell there is no one in the West who understands Putin, who can read his mind. Instead they attribute to the Russian leader psychotic characteristics in a desperate attempt to hide the depth of the hopeless and tragic situation the West inflicted on itself and on Ukraine in particular.
Meanwhile Putin is taking the most spectacular measures to protect his life and his regime. We in the west find it ‘laughable,’ but Putin knows very well that the only way the West can deal with its own incapacity is to eliminate him and his regime one way or another.
The New Zealand government last week unveiled the creation of a new public media entity that will incorporate RNZ and TVNZ. It will pave the way for digital innovation as well as adding new capability and services.
This is a big shift and is a lot to get your head around.
In particular, the public media focus of the new entity is a watershed.
New Zealand has had various combinations of public and publicly-owned commercial media entities in the past, but this takes the public media remit to a new level.
The new entity is designed to ensure New Zealand has one well-resourced, comprehensive public media entity that can weather the ongoing disruptions caused by the almost unbridled power of the FANGS (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google).
Over recent years the media sector has been in flux, with commercial models under strain and audiences fragmenting and often favouring the products provided by the FANGS. This has contributed to increased misinformation and polarisation.
The government hopes the new entity will be strong and flexible enough to adapt to those challenges in a way a stand-alone RNZ and TVNZ would not be able to achieve.
Four key building blocks
To understand what the government is trying to do it is useful to focus on four key building blocks it is putting in place.
First, the new public media entity will be exactly that — an organisation that is centred on public media services that inform and connect the nation, celebrate our culture and identity and equip people to participate in our democracy.
Commercial activity will play an important role and will be required to support this public media focus.
Second, the entity will operate under a public media charter that will enshrine in law its editorial independence. The Charter will be the north star for the organisation, requiring it aspire to and deliver the best attributes of public media.
The draft charter that is proposed in the Cabinet paper looks promising. This, more than anything else this, will ultimately determine the direction of the new entity, its tone and culture and the services it provides.
Third, the policy places a strong emphasis on the new entity’s obligation to support and recognise the “Māori Crown relationship”. This is another big change. Indeed, the purpose of the new entity will require it to contribute to a “valued, visible, and flourishing te reo Māori me ngā tikanga Māori”.
This is vital as the new entity, from day one, needs to capture what makes Aotearoa New Zealand unique, including Te Tiriti. The new entity’s board will include at least two members with Te Ao Māori and tikanga Māori expertise.
And fourth, the new entity will be required to collaborate with other media and support the overall health of the wider media system. This recognises the critical importance of sustaining a plurality of media sources and perspectives in the years ahead.
Trusted media underpin democracy
Trusted, independent news and current affairs underpin our democracy. The only way to ensure trust in the media is to ensure people have a range of sources and perspectives to choose from.
The new entity will need to support that diversity in meaningful ways, for example, by training the next generation of reporters, producers, presenters, and programme makers for the benefit of the wider industry.
Public media institutions around the world have been on the back foot recently.
In many countries publicly-owned and funded broadcasters have been reined-in, leaned on and co-opted to serve political ends.
This is happening to a shocking degree in Hong Kong, Turkey, Slovenia,and Hungary, and in southern Africa as authoritarian regimes flexed their muscles.
But even in Australia and the UK it has been tough for the ABC and BBC with attempts to question the pivotal role played by feisty, independent public media in a time of crisis and heightened polarisation.
This all points to the value of strong public media to our democratic processes. Both RNZ and TVNZ carry strong reputations internationally. The rebuilding of our public media mandate will enhance that.
Much is still to be determined, including funding levels, and no doubt there will be intense public debate when the draft legislation is opened for public submissions.
RNZ is up for the challenge and will work hard to contribute our valued services and our public media ethos and expertise to the new entity.
The bottom line will be ensuring all the people of New Zealand benefit.
Paul Thompson is chief executive and editor-in-chief of Radio New Zealand. He is also president of the international Public Media Alliance. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. It was first published on the Stuff website.
Papua New Guinea’s police commissioner, David Manning, addressing the International Women’s Day celebrations this week, let it be known that violence against women is becoming a serious disease.
Yes, we agree. It is a growing threat to women and children, family unity and community harmony.
On the same token Sir, may we also point out that some of the women and children that suffer from this disease actually live in the confines of police, army and correctional service barracks.
The wives of soldiers, cops and warders are not immune to this disease. Most, if not for Tik Tok, suffer silently.
It is a national disease that needs to be addressed at all levels in our country. And the country’s security forces better start taking this message seriously. Violence against police wives must stop, must desist against army wives, and cease against CS wives.
Peace and family harmony must be restored in your homes before you go out and deal with the bigger picture in the community. You might think your uniform gives you ultimate power over your wife but your wives are the custodians of your homes and children.
Respect your wife and treat her well. If your home is safe and secure, your commitment and focus on delivering law and order to all corners of the country will be fulfilled peacefully.
Expressing disgust at thuggery
This week, we join the public in expressing our disgust at continued violence and thuggery by police against members of the public.
This in itself is another serious disease that you mister commissioner, need to stamp out. When violence continues unabated, it goes to show that something is wrong, some of the practices and procedures you are putting in place, are weak and unworkable.
A young man, the son of a cop, in the prime of his life, almost had his life snuffed out by three allegedly drunk cops on February 27.
These Fox Unit policemen were arrested on Wednesday and charged with the cowardly attack on schoolboy Samuel Naraboi that left the 20-year-old in a coma at the Intensive Care Unit at the Port Moresby General Hospital for a week.
Realising they were wrong and there is no escape for them, they surrendered to their commander and were brought in and processed.
As the NCD and Central Divisional Commander Anthony Wagambie Jr lamented: “For this incident, whatever the circumstances were, the level of injury inflicted on the young man is not warranted at all and this is way beyond.
“I would also like to make it known that this does not reflect the majority of hardworking police personnel. Police have been constantly reminded about ethical conduct and performing duties within the rule of law.
‘Rebuilding public confidence’
“We are trying our best to rebuild public confidence in the Constabulary, and such action by individuals only hinders the progress.”
The last sentence catches our eyes and ears and we agree with your commander Wagambie Jr. A few rotten apples are dragging down the police force.
The majority of sworn-to-oath hardworking policemen and women are getting the flack for the bad deeds of a few rotten cops.
You need to put your big foot down Commissioner. We suggest, you sack every violent rotten cop who doesn’t understand their roles and responsibilities in policing, law and order.
They are the ones bringing the force into disrepute.
On 9 March 2021, the government published its draconian policing bill. In the twelve months that followed, we’ve seen protests and uprisings across the country.
Now as the bill sneaks its way through the parliamentary system, it’s time to ramp up our opposition. It’s time to become ungovernable.
What’s happening in parliament?
The Canary has provided extensive coverage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill – from its first inception, to the protests that swept the country, to the bill’s journey through the parliamentary system. Following a series of defeats in the Lords, the bill was back in the House of Commons on 28 February for consideration of the Lords’ amendments. The bill next goes through what is known as the ‘ping pong’ stage whereby it flips from one house to another.
Many people celebrated after some truly awful protest amendments were defeated in the House of Lords. These amendments included widening police powers for stopping and searching protesters and new offences for locking on. Because these amendments were made in the Lords, they were defeated for good. Parliament doesn’t have the power to reinstate them.
But other changes made in the Lords are back in the legislation; that’s because they were in the original bill. These include the provision allowing the police to impose conditions on protests that are too noisy, and one-person protests. And on 28 Feburary, MPs voted to reinstate these sections.
Other provisions in the bill, such as the new laws to criminalise Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities, are still in the bill and weren’t rejected by the Lords.
In other words, despite many people celebrating victory when the amendments were defeated, the legislation back in the Commons is pretty much untouched from what we took to the streets over in March 2021.
As Netpol coordinator Kevin Blowe highlighted to The Canary:
This outcome was entirely predictable: there was always little chance that our far-right government was willing to listen to common sense.
It seems increasingly likely that the Policing Bill will introduce a number of new ill-defined, inconsistent and probably unworkable police powers.
The potential impact on protesters
Despite tinkering around the edges, the harsh reality is that with Boris Johnson’s majority, the original bill is likely to eventually become law. When it does, the powers for the police to impose conditions will increase. The bill also lowers the threshold for arrest and prosecution for breaching these conditions. New wording means that a person “ought to know” what the conditions were. Currently, the prosecution has to prove that a person knew the conditions.
This small change in wording is critical. For example, in 2013, the Metropolitan Police arrested 286 mostly anti-fascist protesters. Demonstrators were opposing a march by the far-right English Defence League. People were arrested for breaching the conditions imposed on the protest, but the Met was forced to pay over £700,000 in compensation to 156 of those arrested. Crucially, while the Met didn’t admit liability, the protesters argued that they didn’t know about the conditions imposed on the protest. Had the police bill been law, those arrested might now have criminal records for taking to the streets to oppose fascism.
Legal challenges
However, the bill becoming law doesn’t mean we can’t legally challenge any conditions the police impose. Conditions on protests still have to be compatible with human rights legislation. In October 2019, the police arrested hundreds of Extinction Rebellion protesters after imposing a condition that effectively banned all related protests in the capital. Following a legal challenge, the High Court quashed the order.
As solicitor Jules Carey from Bindmans argued:
The ban on the XR protest was hastily imposed, erratically applied and has now been unequivocally declared unlawful by the High Court. The police have powers to impose conditions to manage protests but not to ban them. This judgment is a timely reminder to those in authority facing a climate of dissent; the right to protest is a long standing fundamental right in a democratic society that should be guarded and not prohibited by overzealous policing.
So it’s inevitable that when this bill becomes law, there will be important and necessary legal challenges to its enforcement.
The limits of relying on institutions
It’s also vital that we continue to challenge this bill throughout its progression through parliament. After all, the work of campaigners ensured that the even more draconian provisions didn’t become law. And it’s equally vital that we challenge police abuses of power in the courts. Every victory is important. Every victory has an impact. And, crucially, we must celebrate every victory.
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t recognise and critique the limits of these institutions. We cannot rely on them to act in our best interests, and we certainly can’t rely on an unelected elite in the House of Lords to uphold our rights. The Lords’ refusal to take action and remove the watering down of conditions on protest or the criminalisation of GRT communities explicitly shows this.
It’s also important to remember that a court victory for an unlawful arrest doesn’t mitigate the trauma people face from dealing with excessive policing. In the case of the anti-fascist protesters, the Guardian reported that people:
were humiliated as they were prevented from using the toilet for hours and were not allowed to get food or water. Later they were taken to police stations around London and released, some of them in the middle of the night.
No amount of compensation can ever repair the mental and/or physical damage inflicted by the police abusing their powers. We need practical solidarity to stop them from abusing these powers in the first place.
Don’t believe the hype – we can still protest
As bad as this legislation is, it isn’t going to stop our ability to protest. And while Blowe states that:
All our experience points to senior police officers eagerly wanting to start using new powers as soon as possible, perhaps as soon as Extinction Rebellion’s forthcoming action in April.
He also emphasises that:
It is important, however, that we move away from the idea that this will ban protests completely.
This is essential. We can and must still protest. And we must avoid rhetoric that scares people from protesting.
Practical solidarity
Instead of just relying on institutions, we need to find ways to make this bill unworkable. We need to be ungovernable.
Sisters Uncut has already started this work. It launched CopWatch patrols in response to the police bill, making:
all marginalised communities – Gypsy, Roma and Travellers, sex workers, Black and brown people, women and anyone protesting – less safe. …
We must resist together. The police are the perpetrators and we must keep each other safe.
This solidarity work is particularly important for GRT communities who could see their homes seized under the new legislation. We need to work with, and take the lead from, these communities to develop the best ways to offer practical solidarity and resistance to these powers.
Blowe also highlighted the need for resistance:
Everyone alarmed by this attack on our rights must offer [genuine] solidarity to the campaigners this government wants to criminalise the most – groups adopting direct action and civil disobedience tactics and those noisily challenging state and corporate power.
As long as police maintain the pretence they act “with public consent” and claim to respect our rights, senior officers are vulnerable to political, practical and legal resistance on human rights grounds. At what point does a protest become too noisy? How will officers demonstrate that protesters “ought to have known” about imposed conditions?
Together we have the ability to make the leadership of British policing think twice about using the new powers they lobbied so hard for.
The bill will probably become law. But every single one of us can act in solidarity with affected communities. Our combined efforts can and will make this bill unworkable. We will become ungovernable.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on March 9, 2022. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Russian President Putin has claimed that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine to “denazify” its government, while Western officials, such as former US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, have called this pure propaganda, insisting, “There are no Nazis in Ukraine.”
The post-2014 Ukrainian government’s problematic relations with extreme right-wing groups and neo-Nazi parties has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war, with Russia exaggerating it as a pretext for war and the West trying to sweep it under the carpet.
In the context of the Russian invasion, the post-2014 Ukrainian government’s problematic relations with extreme right-wing groups and neo-Nazi parties has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war, with Russia exaggerating it as a pretext for war and the West trying to sweep it under the carpet.
The reality behind the propaganda is that the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off the 2014 coup and then by redirecting it to fight separatists in Eastern Ukraine. And far from “denazifying” Ukraine, the Russian invasion is likely to further empower Ukrainian and international neo-Nazis, as it attracts fighters from around the world and provides them with weapons, military training and the combat experience that many of them are hungry for.
Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and its founders Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy played leading roles in the US-backed coup in February 2014. Assistant Secretary Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt mentioned Tyahnybok as one of the leaders they were working with on their infamous leaked phone call before the coup, even as they tried to exclude him from an official position in the post-coup government.
As formerly peaceful protests in Kyiv gave way to pitched battles with police and violent, armed marches to try to break through police barricades and reach the Parliament building, Svoboda members and the newly-formed Right Sector militia, led by Dmytro Yarosh, battled police, spearheaded marches and raided a police armory for weapons. By mid-February 2014, these men with guns were the de facto leaders of the Maidan movement.
We will never know what kind of political transition peaceful protests alone would have led to in Ukraine or how different the new government would have been if a peaceful political process had been allowed to take its course, without interference by the United States or violent right-wing extremists.
But it was Yarosh who took to the stage in the Maidan and rejected the February 21, 2014, agreement negotiated by the French, German, and Polish foreign ministers, under which Yanukovich and opposition political leaders agreed to hold new elections later that year. Instead, Yarosh and Right Sector refused to disarm and led the climactic march on Parliament that overthrew the government.
Since 1991, Ukrainian elections had swung back and forth between leaders like President Viktor Yanukovych, who was from Donetsk and had close ties with Russia, and Western-backed leaders like President Yushchenko, who was elected in 2005 after the “Orange Revolution” that followed a disputed election. Ukraine’s endemic corruption tainted every government, and rapid public disillusionment with whichever leader and party won power led to a see-saw between Western- and Russian-aligned factions.
Ukrainian voters turned their backs on the extreme right in the 2014 post-coup elections, reducing Svoboda’s 10.4% share of the national vote in 2012 to 4.7%.
In 2014, Nuland and the State Department got their favorite, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, installed as Prime Minister of the post-coup government. He lasted two years, until he, too, lost his job due to endless corruption scandals. Petro Poroshenko, the post-coup President, lasted a bit longer, until 2019, even after his personal tax evasion schemes were exposed in the 2016 Panama Papers and 2017 Paradise Papers.
When Yatsenyuk became prime minister, he rewarded Svoboda’s role in the coup with three cabinet positions, including Oleksander Sych as deputy prime minister, and governorships of three of Ukraine’s 25 provinces. Svoboda’s Andriy Parubiy was appointed chairman (or speaker) of Parliament, a post he held for the next 5 years. Tyahnybok ran for president in 2014, but only got 1.2% of the votes, and was not re-elected to parliament.
Ukrainian voters turned their backs on the extreme right in the 2014 post-coup elections, reducing Svoboda’s 10.4% share of the national vote in 2012 to 4.7%. Svoboda lost support in areas where it held control of local governments but had failed to live up to its promises, and its support was split now that it was no longer the only party running on explicitly anti-Russian slogans and rhetoric.
After the coup, Right Sector helped to consolidate the new order by attacking and breaking up anti-coup protests, in what their leader Yarosh described to Newsweek as a “war” to “cleanse the country” of pro-Russian protesters. This campaign climaxed on May 2 with the massacre of 42 anti-coup protesters in a fiery inferno, after they took shelter from Right Sector attackers in the Trades Unions House in Odessa.
After anti-coup protests evolved into declarations of independence in Donetsk and Luhansk, the extreme right in Ukraine shifted gear to full-scale armed combat. The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for fighting its own people, so the government formed new National Guard units to do so.
Right Sector formed a battalion, and neo-Nazis also dominated the Azov Battalion, which was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an avowed white supremacist who claimed that Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. It was the Azov battalion that led the post-coup government’s assault on the self-declared republics and retook the city of Mariupol from separatist forces.
The Minsk II agreement in 2015 ended the worst fighting and set up a buffer zone around the breakaway republics, but a low-intensity civil war continued. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Congressman Ro Khanna and progressive members of Congress tried for several years to end US military aid to the Azov Battalion. They finally did so in the FY2018 Defense Appropriation Bill, but Azov reportedly continued to receive US arms and training despite the ban.
In 2019, the Soufan Center, which tracks terrorist and extremist groups around the world, warned, “The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network… (Its) aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion’s overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy.”
The Soufan Center described how the Azov Battalion’s “aggressive networking” reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others.
Violent foreign extremists with links to Azov have included Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 worshipers at a mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand in 2019, and several members of the US Rise Above Movement who were prosecuted for attacking counter-protestors at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Other Azov veterans have returned to Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and other countries.
Despite Svoboda’s declining success in national elections, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups, increasingly linked to the Azov Battalion, have maintained power on the street in Ukraine, and in local politics in the Ukrainian nationalist heartland around Lviv in Western Ukraine.
After President Zelensky’s election in 2019, the extreme right threatened him with removal from office, or even death, if he negotiated with separatist leaders from Donbas and followed through on the Minsk Protocol. Zelensky had run for election as a “peace candidate,” but under threat from the right, he refused to even talk to Donbas leaders, whom he dismissed as terrorists.
During Trump’s presidency, the United States reversed Obama’s ban on weapons sales to Ukraine, and Zelensky’s aggressive rhetoric raised new fears in Donbas and Russia that he was building up Ukraine’s forces for a new offensive to retake Donetsk and Luhansk by force.
As elsewhere, the failures of neoliberalism have fueled the rise of right-wing extremism and racism, and now the war with Russia promises to provide thousands of alienated young men from around the world with military training and combat experience, which they can then take home to terrorize their own countries.
The civil war has combined with the government’s neoliberal economic policies to create fertile ground for the extreme right. The post-coup government imposed more of the same neoliberal “shock therapy” that was imposed throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Ukraine received a $40 billion IMF bailout and, as part of the deal, privatized 342 state-owned enterprises; reduced public sector employment by 20%, along with salary and pension cuts; privatized healthcare, and disinvested in public education, closing 60% of its universities.
Coupled with Ukraine’s endemic corruption, these policies led to the profitable looting of state assets by the corrupt ruling class, and to falling living standards and austerity measures for everybody else. The post-coup government upheld Poland as its model, but the reality was closer to Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s. After a nearly 25% fall in GDP between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine is still the poorest country in Europe.
As elsewhere, the failures of neoliberalism have fueled the rise of right-wing extremism and racism, and now the war with Russia promises to provide thousands of alienated young men from around the world with military training and combat experience, which they can then take home to terrorize their own countries.
The Soufan Center has compared the Azov Battalion’s international networking strategy to that of Al Qaeda and ISIS. US and NATO support for the Azov Battalion poses similar risks as their support for Al Qaeda-linked groups in Syria ten years ago. Those chickens quickly came home to roost when they spawned ISIS and turned decisively against their Western backers.
Right now, Ukrainians are united in their resistance to Russia’s invasion, but we should not be surprised when the US alliance with neo-Nazi proxy forces in Ukraine, including the infusion of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons, results in similarly violent and destructive blowback.
Let justice work Yet another piece extolling the virtue of the Australian government getting involved in the Assange case (“Time is right for Morrison to step up for Assange,” December 16). This man is involved in a complex legal fight, being prosecuted and defended by the most senior legal minds, and being heard before the highest courts in the land. What would be the relevance of a prime ministerial letter to the court suggesting that the man be set free on the basis of him being an Australian citizen and demonstrating we don’t much care for the British justice system?
— Letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, 17 December 2021
Assange has an army of supporters across the globe. Their support has had little to no tangible impact on Assange’s fate. How can this be?
Among the rest (the majority) are the indifferent and those who are hostile to various degrees, precisely because the US and the UK have captured him and put him on trial. Assange has to be guilty of something or other. After all, these countries are pivotal leaders of the “free world”!
Then there’s Assange’s run-in in Sweden. Sweden, as we all know, is pure as the driven snow. Assange must be guilty of whatever the Swedes are charging him with. His skipping bail on the Swedish charges to the embassy of some banana republic confirms his probable guilt.
It’s all a matter of black and white. Do the Assange supporters not much care for the British justice system and, after a millennium of organic evolution, its evident majesty?
The letter writer, by virtue of him being a reader of the Sydney Morning Herald (in contrast with the Murdoch trash media) would no doubt consider himself right-thinking – morally concerned and reasonably well-informed.
He may be vaguely familiar with the fact that the US has a few peccadilloes to its credit, invading and/or overturning governments that aren’t to its taste. Perhaps they deserved it! But one first has to break through the dense fog of the “freedom and democracy” epithet that is the US’ calling card.
It is possible, unless actively researching the issue and having access to a decent library, that he sees what he knows as aberrations and is not aware of the extent of such interventions. But even the moderately curious would discover (the late) William Blum and thus his succession of books on a common theme. The text of Rogue State (2002 edition) is even available on the web.
After galloping ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population and violent appropriation of vast tracts of Mexican land, the Yanks moved onto a highly profitable war with Spain and the world was their oyster. It’s now in their DNA and appears incurable. “Manifest destiny” is its coat of arms.
Best not to know these petty details, as the US is our protector Down Under against evil everywhere, now embodied in the gigantic Yellow Peril threat from the North.
Nor is Sweden lily-white. Sweden (with Finland) did not join NATO (unlike Norway and Denmark/Iceland/Greenland), in spite of consistent pressure from the US after World War II – the US seeking Scandinavian bases for ready access to Soviet territory. Sweden (with Finland) remains outside NATO but has long been a fellow traveller, its military increasingly embedded with NATO and the US – thus joining in belligerent military exercises.
There is the curious case of the assassination of political giant Olaf Palme in February 1986. Officially, the case remains unsolved. The trail of Lee Harvey Oswald patsies has run dry. Diana Johnstone, in her 2020 memoir Circle in the Darkness, airs another possibility (Ch.17). It is not out of the question, she notes, that the killing could have been the work of Sweden’s security police “whose notorious hostility to the late Prime Minister Palme made them prime suspects, if not as perpetrators, then as accomplices of the friendly security forces of another country”.
The celebrity noir novelist Stieg Larsson was at the Palme murder scene the next day to map the terrain in his then journalistic capacity as illustrator. Years after Larsson’s death in 2004, his friend Jan Stocklassa discovered a massive cache of documents collected in pursuit of the assassination. Stocklassa published a book in 2018 based on Larsson’s material and it has been in the relevant authority’s hands since. The investigation continues at breakneck speed …
Sweden participated in the CIA’s post-9/11 “extraordinary rendition” program, facilitating the secretive global movement of abducted supposed terrorists to other countries for interrogation. Sweden has recently announced that it is sending anti-tank weaponry to Ukraine as one “democracy” to another.
Swedish authorities ignored Assange’s offers to be questioned, both initially in Sweden and subsequently in England. Assange’s then lawyer, Mark Stephens, described Sweden as “one of the lickspittle states” of the US. Sweden bears primary responsibility for Assange’s almost 10-year long incarceration.
As for the UK, here is that blessed nation that brought civilisation to the uncivilised (the “White Man’s Burden”), of which we (white) Australians are representative and exemplary beneficiaries.
The lie that is the UK’s “civilising mission” is better submerged than that of the US’ history. Britain might have brought the unifying elements of the English language, the common law and the trains to India. But at what cost in how many millions of lives, local economies and societies dismantled, and ending in the holocaust surrounding the 1947 partition.
But before India there is Ireland – a masterpiece of centuries-long repression and grievous exploitation.
As Britain loses its empire, it lashes out on its way to seeming global irrelevance, not least in Kenya and Malaya.
Four standout rearguard ops are the 1953 coup in Iran over oil, the 1956 invasion of Eqypt over the Suez Canal, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 alliance with Sarkozy’s France in the overthrow of Gaddafi and the destruction of Libya.
In the first, the US was aiding Britain. By 1965, Britain had been reduced to playing satrap for Washington with the occupation of the Chagos Archipelago and subsequent handing over for occupation by the US. True to its new role, in 2003 Britain conspired with the US to invade Iraq and supplied 18,000 troops to show the Iraqis who was boss by destroying the country. The “suicided” David Kelly was a casualty on the home front of this aggression.
Establishment journalist David Hayes noted in April 2013 (reflecting on a decade after the Iraq invasion) that: “After all, martialism in Britain is self-replenishing: since the late nineteenth century, 1968 is the only year that no British soldier has died in action.” This self-replenishing martialism is also reflected in Britain’s preposterous commitment to upgrading its Trident nuclear “deterrent” and to the construction of two mega aircraft carriers.
Increasingly, Britain’s attempted ongoing global reach has been directed through underground black ops. Representative is Britain’s joining with the CIA by 1964 in Ghana in secretly undermining Nkrumah (deposed in 1966). A significant black op involved, from 1965, the undermining of Indonesia’s Sukarno (who opposed Britain in Malaya) and support of the Suharto coup and associated large-scale massacre. Britain has provided material support for Israel’s illegal occupation, in spite of the terrorist foundation of that state on the spilling of British blood (notably in the blowing up of British HQ in the King David Hotel, July 1946). Recently, Britain has provided significant support to the terrorist-aligned “White Helmets” group in Syria.
Britain is also active indirectly into arms supply (juicy profits for BAE) for rogue nations (as in Saudi Arabia’s relentless mass murder in Yemen).
Time-scarce and/or disbelieving readers looking for a general roundup of Britain’s ongoing nefarious global ambitions will find it in Mark Curtis’ 2003 Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World. Add Curtis’ 2010 Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam. Subsequently, Curtis (with colleagues) has maintained the exposure with the online site Declassified UK.
Then there’s Russia. For centuries, Britain has had Russia / the Soviet Union / Russia in its sights. Britain did a sterling job in brushing off the Soviet Union’s extended push for collective security against Hitler, via the persistent and long-suffering Maxim Litvinov (vide Michael Jabara Carley’s 1999 1939: The alliance that never was and the Coming of World War II). Rather, let Hitler direct his military might at the Russians themselves. Kill two birds …
The long obsession of British Intelligence (sic) with Russia is pilloried by John Helmer here (October 2020). This parry is in the context of the much-publicised “novichok” poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March 2018 near Skripal’s home in Salisbury. Helmer has pursued the Skripal story forensically in myriad articles on his site. The British authorities have it that the evil Russians poisoned the ex-double agent and daughter (and Dawn Sturgess by accident) with a deadly poison. The unfortunate Sturgess is dead, with some health- and lifestyle-related factors plausibly responsible. The Skripals, however, are very much alive, spoiling the script. They are being held prisoners – they have been “vanished” by the Brits and not by the Russians – so that they cannot tell their side of the story.
Again, the establishment journalist David Hayes is instructive. His comments refer to the character of the 2003-04 Hutton Inquiry (the death of David Kelly and the media), the 2004 Butler Review (WMD-related “intelligence”), the 2009-11 Chilcot Inquiry (the Iraq invasion in general), and a 2010 strategic and defense review – A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty.
As part of the methodology of elite British governance, [these documents are] impressive to behold. But it is also a performance in which all involved are conscious of their core function, namely to record, criticise, recommend, move on – while leaving everything fundamentally as it is. …
… Britain’s inquests on matters of state tend to remain circumscribed, not just by their terms of reference but also by the informal formalities of the elite political culture. It’s also because much of the past – empire and all that – is still too uncomfortable to examine closely. …
The [2010 strategic and defense] review says that “Britain’s interests remain surprisingly constant,” and that “in order to protect our interests at home, we must project our influence abroad” via “continued full and active engagement in world affairs.” For Britain’s leaders, the desire to “punch above our weight” (as Douglas Hurd put it in 1993) is a given. Britain, it seems, both needs and can have it all.
In short, Britain continues to seek to “punch above its weight” and damn the consequences for its victims.
Of which Julian Assange, kept in confinement in a high-security prison on trumped up charges and in a cage during court proceedings.
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury was first performed in 1875. There we hear from the bench:
“Though all my law is fudge / Yet I’ll never, never budge / But I’ll live and die a Judge! / It was managed by a job! / It was managed by a job! / It is patent to the mob / That my being made a nob / Was effected by a job.”
Trial by Jury was a victimless farce. The farce that is the Assange series of trials is of enormous consequence. Not only is Assange’s life at stake, but the integrity of the British legal and judicial system in its entirety.
Facing the preposterous Vanessa Braitser, Assange’s defense team should have early broken into song. Without doubt, W.S. Gilbert’s thinly-veiled reality script was not invented out of thin air. In Assange, the dénouement of the British judicial system has been a long time coming.
What does Her Maj think of all this? She must have an inkling of the dark side but formally retains her monarchical detachment. Yet Her Maj has just knighted the war criminal Tony Blair! I read somewhere that 63 per cent of those polled were against, and that an opposing petition had collected more than 1 million signatures. On a par with the record demonstrations that opposed Blair’s war dance at the time.
Of course, we know, courtesy of the dogged work of Australian historian Jenny Hocking, that Buckingham Palace participated knowingly in the dismissal of Australian Prime Minster Gough Whitlam in November 1975. Royalty directly involved in cloak and dagger and knife in the back activity in one of the Crown’s most faithful dominions.
The imminent dubbing, on order, of Tony Blair might have been an appropriate occasion for the Queen to call it quits. But no, the show of splendour, whatever it hides, must go on. The British Monarchy as lipstick on a pig?
The US is essentially a criminal enterprise. Ditto Great Britain.
This reality generates an existential crisis for us right-thinking Anglos. We can’t accept it or live with it. We are mercifully a part of the “good guys” team, at permanent war with the “bad guys” team. Period. Our sense of ourselves, our entire being, our world of ideas and truth (fed daily by the media and sources that we trust) is entirely rooted in the good guys – bad guys duality.
It’s a massive case of cognitive dissonance. In August 2021, Jonathon Cook gave us an extended tour of the significance of this malady with respect to the reality of climate change and attendant massive environmental degradation. And of those vested interests that want to keep us in our security bubble in ignoring the impending catastrophe.
But cognitive dissonance reigns supreme in our stance regarding global conflicts. We don’t want to know.
This has been confirmed in spades in Western popular uproar (nurtured by our respectable media) against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, wanting to know nothing of the background to that invasion. Fortunately the current Australian Government has our well-being at hand. It is acting to prevent “the driving and disseminating false narratives about the ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine …” and sanctioning the purveyors of such. There are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine by order. We can sleep easy.
Hence the indifference or antagonism to Assange. To accept that Assange might be a victim of the “good guys” team of which we are members is to throw overboard everything that defines us.
The truth, alas, is that, as Walt Kelly’s Pogo lamented, the enemy is us. The crime of Assange is that he holds a mirror to the ugly side of ourselves.
Offering predictions about what will follow the Russia-Ukraine conflict is probably a foolhardy exercise but here a few thoughts that might engender further speculation and discussion.
First, after the Ukraine crisis is resolved we’re likely to see a self-congratulatory period in Washington over its temporarily forcing Western European nations into a closer integration with U.S. imperialism, guaranteeing more European purchases of U.S. weapons and giving an immediate boost to Pentagon spending. The United States will portray the Russian Bear as intent on gobbling up more European countries and every effort will be made to ignite Cold War, Phase 2. These efforts will fail and much to the consternation of the American oligarchy, the dissolution of a unipolar world will continue apace. In fits and starts, perhaps for 2-3 years, Europe will gradually move away from the United States as mutually beneficial relations with Russia and especially with China, prove irresistible. European big business is not inclined toward class suicide and as international relations analyst Michael Hudson has asserted, there’s a limit to how long they will forego the immense opportunity costs — the costs of lost opportunities — of trading with Russia as the price for their continued obedience and vassalage to U.S. geo-strategic ambitions. Meanwhile, Washington will step up its frantic push to militarily encircle China, its primary foe.
Second, acclaimed scholar Alfred McCoy predicts that the United States as the world sole superpower will be eclipsed by China by around 2030. This projection is confirmed by several hard-headed, objective analyses, including the accounting firm PxC (also cited by McCoy) now calculate that the Chinese economy will be 60% larger than the United States by 2030. The period leading up to this rough demarcation line will be exceedingly dangerous because, as opposed to some past empires, it’s far from certain that United States will make a graceful exit from center stage, There is the possibility that in its death throes, the American empire, like the thrashing, violent extinction of Tyrannosaurus Rex, will take down much of the world with it.
Third, those living in the belly of the beast are likely to witness their rulers attempting to employ surrogates as boots on the ground to resist changes in the existing world order, perhaps commencing when Russia and China began trying to expel U.S. bases near Taiwan and in the South China Sea. These tactics will not succeed in stopping China from attaining, at least, parity with the United States. Barring the unthinkable introduction of advanced weapons systems, the call may go out again for U.S. troops to be dispatched to faraway places. Should that happen, one hopes that a strong, rekindled anti-war movement arises with the prominent organizing slogan, “No More Deaths for Nothing.”
Finally, and closely connected, is the fact that except for weapons stocks and a few others, the diminution of U.S. global power will cause an ever falling profit margin for big capital, including potential financial losses for the wealthiest, most powerful segments of society. This will, in turn, require an attempt to impose savage austerity measures that will fall largely on the working class. Private economic interests and their bilateral enablers in government will try to conceal that the roots of the economic crisis lie in neoliberal capitalism and specifically, its need to maintain the U.S. empire. In service to this escalating and corrosive logic of austerity, elites will reach into their seemingly bottomless trick bag and pull out racist dog whistles, appeals to fiscal discipline and personal sacrifice, while castigating the “entitlement mentality.” Flag-waving nationalism aimed at Russian and especially “The Chinese Threat,” will assume a high profile.
We know that austerity politics is class politics and here they will be inextricably woven into the politics of an empire in free fall. Much depends on whether ordinary citizens of the country finally come to realize that the welfare of the well-being of the capitalist class is inimical to their own well-being. And whatever remains of the actual left will have ample opportunity to help connect all the dots and participate in the radical changes that must follow.
“I have never had that fear before that I might get physically hurt,” says Patrice Allen, a Ngati Kahungunu and Newshub camera operator based in Wellington.
“You’re going down there, you don’t know what it’s going to be like. A person from Wellington Live got beaten up.”
Māori Television’s press gallery videographer David Graham (Taranaki Whānui and Waikato) started working as a news cameraman in Wellington in 1989. He was there for the seabed and foreshore protests, and “in the 1990s it was Moutua and Pakitore,” he recollects. “But this is the most volatile one I have seen.
“Back then we [the media] were part of the show. They wanted us to be there. Now we are a part of the ‘axis of evil’, along with the police and government.”
Up against your own
“Now there are Pākehā calling you kūpapa [Māori warriors who fought on the British colonial troops side during the New Zealand Wars in the 19th century],” he says. He has just returned from filming with his phone in the crowd, and has heard protesters say things. Nasty things.
“Stuff like ‘you should be ashamed of yourself. You should be ashamed of your whakapapa!’”
“I just don’t engage,” says Graham. “And I am not a random man with a camera here. I actually have whakapapa back to this marae on my father’s side,” he says, referring to Pipitea Marae where Taranaki Whānui laid down Te Kahu o Raukura as a cultural protection over the surrounding land that includes the Parliament grounds.
The protesters had lots of livestreams and many of them kept filming media camera-ops who were filming them. (Below: David Graham finds himself in one of the live feeds while a protester in the crowd heckles him.)
A standup by Maori Television’s Parliament videographer David Graham captured on protester’s social media grab. Image: Māori Television
Allen feels the mamae is stronger when it comes from your own people.
“He was a big dude and he was really getting in my face. I was not feeling very safe. And I thought, ‘how can I diffuse this?’” So she asked them where they were from.
“And they were like where are you from? What are you?”
“Oh, Ngati Kahungunu, just over the hill in Wairarapa,” she replied. The man said something targeting not just her but also her iwi. “And that just broke my spirit,” says Allen.
“It was one of the days I went home and cried.”
‘We’re the enemy now’ “We are the enemy now,” says Allen. “And there is nothing you can do or say that will change their minds.”
Her teammate Emma Tiller thinks the camera can be a beacon in the crowd. “As soon as you put it up, everyone knows who you are. And they hate you.”
And even though security cover has become standard practice for all news camera-ops filming in the crowd, there are times she feels vulnerable. “It’s hard to think back to protests when we were out there. We didn’t have security with us. It didn’t even cross our minds.
“But now who wants to risk the violence?” she says.
“They have thrown things at the police. If they can do that to them, what can they do to us?”
The Speaker’s balcony is empty today … a far cry from Wednesday, March 2, when it was packed with camera operators and reporters (below) as police cracked down on the occupation and cleared Parliament grounds. Image: Māori TelevisionThe balcony was allocated by the Speaker of the House to media workers as a safe space. David Graham (left) and Patrice Allen (third from left). Māori Television
“The last time I had security was when I was filming in East Timor,” says Allen. It was a long time ago, she adds, and at a time and place when there were terrorists around.
“It’s really bad because it’s made it ‘us and them’, media against protesters, and it’s not supposed to be like that.”
‘Difficult to turn off’
Sam Anderson, 22, is TVNZ’s camera operator at the press gallery. “It has been difficult to turn off,” he says “ I have been there [on the Speaker’s balcony] from 9am to 6pm just streaming the whole day.
“It’s all you are doing – copping the abuse, being yelled at, having your morality questioned.
“I sometimes hide behind the pillars from the frontliners who can yell all day.
“And throw that in with reading all the signs around you,” says Tiller.
“And they yell at you. And you go home and you can’t switch it off.”
Throughout the protests, the signs have been as much anti-“mainstream” media as they have been anti-government. Image: Māori Television
Anderson’s teammate, Sam von Keisenberg, was on that balcony on February 11 when police made many arrests. Shortly after they arrested someone at the forecourt and the crowd was yelling at the police, a lady pointed a finger at him and said “You! You are a paedophile protector!”
“At first I was like, ‘that’s new’. But then she said it 50 times, as loud as she could, just at me.”
He pulled his camera off the tripod. “It was getting to me”, he says. “I have children. I would never protect a paedophile.”
His colleague asked him where he was going. “Just to punch some lady in the face,” he said under his breath. “And I walked out and just went to the bathroom.”
Sweeping generalisations
“Sometimes you have to take a step back,” von Keisenberg says.
“I had never experienced hate [directed] at me before,” RNZ video journalist Angus Dreaver says. Especially this type, he says, where they think media are traitors, and they want them to know.
“Four months ago, I was doing kids’ TV.”
Dreaver thinks the generalisation works both ways. While the protesters see the mainstream media as a monolith and sweep them with one giant brush, “it’s important for us, conversely, not to see them that way.”
Von Keisenberg believes there were more moderates in the crowd than extremists. “I always felt there were enough people around me,” he says. And that made him feel safe in the first week when he was filming undercover, knowing that “if things did get violent, there would be some moderate ones who would stop them”.
He saw that in action, too. In his forays of the first week, when he joined the crowd unmasked to avoid attention. He saw a man there in his 70s wearing a mask.
“The first thing he said to me was that he was immunocompromised, which is why he was wearing the mask.”
“It’s fine, mate. It’s a freedom rally, do what you want,” von Keisenberg said. But another protester came up and “tried to pull his mask off and started berating him, saying he had no identity. The mob mentality started and people around the gate joined in and started giving him grief.”
Von Keisenberg intervened. “Oi! chill out man. It’s a freedom rally, he’s free to wear a mask!”
“A woman close by turned around and said, ‘Yeah, come on guys! leave him alone.’ And they did.”
Mainstream media
When people tell von Keisenberg that they don’t watch mainstream media, his follow-up is, “Well then, how do you know we are ‘lying’?”
“They say, ‘we get our news from Facebook, which is different’. Yeah, different, because there aren’t many rules around it,” von Keisenberg says.
“Mainstream media is held more to account than social media,” Allen says. “But they think the opposite.”
Some of Dreaver’s acquaintances have shared his photos on Instagram, in posts that read “Mainstream media are liars”. “Bro, that’s me!”, he says.
Trying to remain objective in the face of constant harassment is a real challenge.
“I am almost hyper-aware of that, where I am trying to capture the mundane and relax as much as the heightened states,” he adds. “And I am trying to not let my anger affect the pictures I take or how I cover it.”
But for camera operators, the task ends once they take the picture. “We only aim for clear sound and sharp, steady pictures,” Graham says. “The rest of the stuff is for other people to decide what to do with.”
Anderson thinks there are differences in perspectives within newsrooms. People who have watched the protests from a distance or from their desks often take a kinder view of the protesters, he says.
“But me and the other camera ops, we copped a lot of abuse over three weeks. We just have a more bitter taste in our mouths for this crowd.”
The PM in ‘disguise’
There have been the fun moments, though, Anderson admits. There have been “raves” with young people dancing on the frontlines and he found himself almost filming to the beat. And there was a protester who thought he was the prime minister in disguise.
A Reddit thread with a screenshot of a protester’s post. Image: Sam Anderson screenshot
“Now that is one theory I know is not true,” says his teammate von Keisenberg. But how does he know for sure?
“Because I have seen both of them in the same room at the same time.”
And von Keisenberg has had his fun moments in the crowd, too. In one instance when he was filming undercover, a woman went on the stage and started talking into the mic about electric and magnetic fields (radiation) and how crystals could block them.
“Bullshit!” von Keisenberg turned around and shouted.
“We are here for the mandates,” he added, not snapping out of character, and for the benefit of those around him who were listening to the woman speak.
A potential for volence
“The vibe changed every few days, and that was because people kept coming and going,” von Keisenberg says. “But there were always the elements who were there for whatever happened on day 23.”
One camera op I spoke to said there had been a “potential for violence” right throughout. And when someone like Winston Peters visits the crowd and says “the mainstream media have been gaslighting you for a long time,” it gives them validation, and lends credibility to their theories.
But for those on the ground gathering news amid a hostile crowd, it exacerbates the possibility for harm.
Added to this potential of violence is the constant anticipation of things to come. “You have to be always prepared for when something will happen,” as Tiller puts it. “And that is exhausting.”
Emma Tiller describes her experience of the Speaker’s balcony as, “You feel like you have to be prepared for if something is going to happen, and that is exhausting.”
Emma Tiller on the Speaker’s balcony … “You feel like you have to be prepared for if something is going to happen, and that is exhausting.” Image: Sam James/Newshub
“The day things turn to custard, you want to be there on the ground,” Graham said to me a few days before the police operation. “You don’t want to be at home watching it on TV.”
And turn to custard it did; the threat of violence became reality on day 23. While the “battle” raged between the police and the protesters, the media people found themselves being targeted.
Dreaver was in the crowd by the tent where a fire had started. “A Mainstream! We have got a Mainstream here,” a woman who spotted him started shouting.
Brandishing a camping chair, she told him to, “get out of here! Out! Out!” The riot police were advancing behind him and he stood his ground.
“She started hitting me on the back with it,” he said. “She didn’t have a lot of speed but it was still a metal chair.”
“It hurt a bit,” he reckons.
“Get out of here,” demands the woman who attacked Dreaver with a chair. “Just go” shouts a man standing beside her. Screengrab from RNZ’s video story.
“Get out of here,” demands a woman who attacked RNZ’s Angus Dreaver with a chair. “Just go” shouts a man standing beside her. Image: RNZ screengrab from video story.
‘Not everyone’
“There were some protesters who were trying to stop the violence. Even right at the end,” says Dreaver, recollecting how when some people were breaking up bits from the concrete slabs to get smaller throw-able chunks, another person tried to physically get in the way and stop them.
“But the other guys had a metal tent pole and whacked him over the head with it.”
Throughout the three weeks of protests, there had been repeated calls from the protesters asking the media to talk to them. On the morning of day 23 when I was filming from the Speaker’s balcony, a TV reporter had just finished a live cross into the bulletin.
A man’s voice rang out from among the crowd, on the PA, inviting the media on the balcony to “come down and talk to real people and report the truth.” The same voice went on to berate us for wearing masks, behind which we were allegedly smiling smugly.
Less than a minute after the initial invitation, he followed up with another call to step down so he could put a fist through the mask.
“Why don’t you come down to talk to us? Because getting bashed with a chair was always inevitable,” says Dreaver. “It’s crazy it took so long.”
Protesters whacked another protester with a tent pole as he tried to stop the violence. “It didn’t look as though it injured him, because the tent poles are quite light, but it looked quite gnarly,” Dreaver says.
Protesters whack another protestor with a tent pole as he tries to stop the violence. Image: Screengrab from RNZ video story
The aftermath
Parliament’s grounds have been reclaimed. All but one street around the buildings is now open to the public. On Sunday, Te Āti Awa held a karakia to reinstall the mauri of the land. There is currently a rāhui over the Parliament grounds.
It is time for healing. And moving on.
“I was feeling sad last week. And then I look at Ukraine and realise there are bombs going off next to all these journalists and camera operators,” Dreaver says “I got hit with a camping chair and I am going to sit around and complain about it?”
The effect of these protests linger though. Graham spent last Friday a week ago filming the hau kainga at Wainuiomata on high alert, and trying to keep the protesters from entering and setting up camp on their marae, as have other hapū around the capital.
The crowd has dispersed but not vanished, and neither has their kaupapa.
“I have seen some of their kōrero online,” Graham says. The mandates might be gone soon, but “there will be other stuff,” he reckons.
“It’s definitely not over.”
Rituraj Sapkota is Māori Television’s videographer in Parliament’s press gallery. Republished with permission from Te Ao Māori News.
Under bourgeois democracy, there prevails a specific kind of interrelationship between political society and civil society, between the moment of force and the moment of consent. Governmental apparatuses are tasked with penetrating the masses from without, in order to impose capitalist ideologies on them and organize people in the forced, artificial unity of intermediate bodies. The consent thus obtained is itself over-determined by coercion. As Antonio Gramsci writes in §47 of Notebook 1: “Government by consent of the governed, but an organized consent, not the vague and generic kind which is declared at the time of elections: the State has and demands consent, but it also “educates” this consent through political and trade-union associations which, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class.”
While the ruling class does shape and maintain consent in civil society, the latter also possesses a relative autonomy from political society. This derives from the internal mechanisms of the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic project: to gain consent, the ruling class has to interact with the many demands arising from the class conflicts that are constitutive of capitalist society. In this process, the collective structures of civil society are given a bivalent character. On the one hand, they serve as the instruments through which the elite exercises consensual power. On the other hand, insofar that the bourgeoisie has to maintain a power equilibrium through the extension of concessions to subalterns, the organisms of civil society also function as the principal vehicle for the actions of these oppressed. The specific composition of this duality can change depending on the course of class struggle.
In the words of Michele Filippini, while the two-pronged function of civil society institutions remains invariant, “the prevalence of the one over the other in their everyday course of action, or rather, the political capacity to subordinate one interest to another through hegemonic action” is subject to the dynamics of resistance. That is why these structures can be “‘made to operate’ both as organic mechanisms rebalancing the power system and as an independent expression of subaltern, potentially revolutionary demands.” However, the relative autonomy of civil society does not mean that socialist activism can be reduced to a gradual process of winning cultural influence in one sphere of society after another. Politics cannot be reduced to pedagogy. The differences between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks can help illustrate this point.
Alan Shandro writes: “[their] contrasting approaches to the struggle for hegemony yielded opposing readings of the soviets: both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks knew them as organizing committees for a general strike, but where the former conceived of them as the site of a kind of proletarian model parliament, Lenin attributed to them the potential of embodying an alliance of workers and peasants and assuming state power. Thus in 1905, where the Bolsheviks sought to organize insurrection through the soviets, the Mensheviks supposed that a focus on insurrection would undermine the process of working-class self-education”. In other words, Bolsheviks gave a concrete character to proletarian education by considering it as part of the contestations involved in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, which could either result in the destruction of Tsarism or a transition dominated by a landlord-bourgeois coalition.
The Russian experience explains that civil society is intimately tied with relations of force. It can’t be understood as a “battle of ideas” in which the working class has to merely present its own ideology to bring about a revolution. On the contrary, civil society has to be considered as an unequal terrain of ideological war, constituted by the ruling class with the help of various hegemonic apparatuses. Consent, in other words, in an effect of the materiality of state institutions. The structural presence of these material apparatuses is ignored by those socialists who vainly search for an external vantage point from which they can launch a struggle for the educational emancipation of the proletariat. In contrast, Lenin – to use Shandro’s words – “conceived the “self-knowledge of the working class” …as inherently bound up with a theoretical-practical understanding of every class and stratum in society; he situated the hegemonic political project, correspondingly, in the context of a strategic matrix of struggle around state power. The independent activity of the working class is expressed by impressing its interests upon the course of class struggles.”
Since civil society is an extension of the state – conditioned by the exigencies of the mode of production – it can’t be considered as an unproblematic area of socialist struggle. Instead, we need to comprehend how the private ensembles of civil society are internally linked to the politically confined system of the modern state; a viewpoint that overlooks these linkages will eventually come up against the limits of the bourgeois state. These limits are established by the many institutional complexes possessed by the state. In §83 of Notebook 7, Gramsci notes: “Public opinion is the political content of the public’s political will that can be dissentient; therefore, there is a struggle for the monopoly of the organs of public opinion – newspapers, political parties, parliament – so that only one force will mold public opinion and hence the political will of the nation, while reducing the dissenters to individual and disconnected specks of dust.”
A viable socialist perspective has to recognize the fact that unless the state is taken over by the proletariat, elements of resistance and mass movements in civil society will remain embryos, susceptible to fragmentation and dispersion. So, while the consciousness of the subaltern is contradictory, split by the diverse rhythms of the opposing class projects found in civil society, the coherence and submissiveness of the subject is ultimately guaranteed by the juridical-political practices of the state. The Left, instead of trying to escape from this reality of state power, has to sap it through a concrete movement of contradictions that identifies the vulnerabilities of the state. As Peter D. Thomas argues:
It is…not a question of subtracting the deformations of the existing political society in order to reveal a hard core of ‘politics’ in the Real, be it in social antagonism, civil society or an indeterminate place beyond it. On the contrary, in so far as the hypostatized forms of the bourgeois political really do determine the conceptual space in which politics in this social formation can occur…it is much more a case of determining the particular forms of practice, even and especially in their conditions of subalternity to or interpellation by the existing political society, that are capable of rupturing its material constitution from within.
To sum up, if full-fledged consent is to be gained for the socialist project, the proletariat must occupy and transform the political society. In one of his articles for the Italian socialist weekly “The New Order”, Gramsci said that a revolution ceases being an “empty bladder of demagogic rhetoric…when it embodies itself in a type of State, when it becomes an organized system of power…the guarantee of permanence and of the success of every social activity”. But this focus on the seizure of power should not reach excessive proportions. Otherwise, the Left will lose sight of the need to engage in pedagogical work on the terrains of civic, social and cultural life. Therefore, the struggle for the control of political society has to be combined with the cultural struggle in civil society.
The Russia Sanctions Bill will allow additional sanctions against Russia, including the ability to:
freeze assets in NZ;
prevent people and companies from moving their money and assets to NZ to escape sanctions imposed by other countries; and
stop super yachts, ships and aircraft from entering NZ waters or airspace.
Passing the law under urgency this week is justified due to Russia being one of the UN Security Council member states, allowing it to use its veto power to block any proposed UN sanctions.
But this is a sad development, and a break with 30 years of diplomatic history. Since 1991, New Zealand has worked within the UN framework and largely based its sanctions regimes around what the UN has mandated.
Over Ukraine, New Zealand has taken some small and supplementary steps against Russia, such as travel bans and export controls over technologies that may have military value. But this has been inadequate compared with the actions of its allies, and the rapidly worsening situation.
NZ must align with allies To create a new sanctions regime outside the UN system, New Zealand will need to take into account various important factors, including the law’s scope and how it fits with the actions of its allies.
Above all, the legislation must recognise this is a unique situation and must not create a precedent that enables other actions outside the UN system. The new law must expressly state why the urgent actions are justified and the objectives it wants to achieve, and it should have a sunset clause whereby it will lapse on a set date unless expressly renewed.
The law must be effective, proportionate and targeted. Anti-Russian hysteria must be avoided. Due process, fairness to those involved, and compliance with existing international obligations, must be uppermost.
Detail must be applied to the creation of a cross-party sanctions committee and a monitoring group. The evidence used to justify sanctions should come from secure and robust sources, which should be as transparent as possible.
Coordination with friends and allies is uppermost. It’s not a question of how large New Zealand’s sanctions are, but rather that they are consistent with those of other countries. If there are inconsistencies, these risk being exploited both politically and economically.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the U.S. and its allies are having a “very active discussion” about banning the import of Russian oil and natural gas in the latest escalation of their sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. https://t.co/qk2wtRvSS6
Military aid an option In a normal situation, a “laddering” process for sanctions is used: sanctions start softly (sporting or cultural events, for instance) and escalate (with some diplomatic restrictions) towards increasingly harsh trade restrictions prohibiting goods, from luxuries to near essentials.
Exclusion from airspace, maritime zones and even travel restrictions for ordinary citizens may be added to the mix, as Russia is increasingly isolated from the wider world. With events moving so fast already, New Zealand is already halfway up the ladder.
Military aid needs to be an option, too. The goal is to help the Ukrainians fight for their own freedom, without putting foreign “boots on the ground”. A distinction between lethal and non-lethal aid (such as body armour, communications equipment, food and medical kit) will need to be made.
Again, the question is not one of scale but consistency with friends and allies. The symbolism of such support is important. Supplementing the efforts of Australia, for example, would be useful.
The new law may also need to cover those New Zealanders who want to fight in Ukraine — on either side. New Zealanders without dual Ukrainian citizenship are unlikely to be given prisoner of war status if they’re captured.
Fighting the Russian invasion of a sovereign country is not an act of terrorism, and some may be willing to fight without significant financial incentives. The government should make the rules clear — again, consistent with friends and allies.
Risk of unintended consequences Despite what Vladimir Putin has suggested, sanctions are not an act of war. They are an unfortunate but sometimes necessary non-military strategy aimed at changing or ending a country’s harmful actions.
But even if New Zealand and other like-minded countries apply maximum pressure through sanctions, there is no guarantee Putin will change his policies.
Sanctions have the best chances of success when a country’s leadership feels affected by the pressure of its own citizens — or in Russia’s case, its oligarch class, as the prime minister hinted.
So, sanctions may work better with Russia than North Korea. But there is also a risk, if Putin starts to feel this pain, that he will respond in unexpected ways.
The only real certainty is significant collateral economic damage — for Russia and the world, including New Zealand. Everyone will see or feel the impact as economic and diplomatic relationships hit turbulence. Right now, however, there is no viable alternative.
In Turkey, International Women’s Day is not celebrated only at corporate breakfasts and morning teas. It is celebrated on the streets and at night by marching, dancing, and chanting. At Feminist Night Marches, celebration also means resistance, writes Burcu Cevik-Compiegne.
This year marks 20 years of Feminist Night Marches in Turkey. On 8 March International Women’s Day, women take to the streets in major cities to march, sing, dance and repeat their iconic slogan: “If you ever feel hopeless, remember this crowd”.
“If you ever feel hopeless, remember this crowd”
This is a simple yet powerful slogan, as it is not uncommon to feel hopeless in this country. At a time when femicide and transphobic crimes have skyrocketed, it is easy to succumb to feeling powerless. In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combatting violence against women and domestic violence.
The Istanbul Convention, as it is known, saves lives by laying out the framework to deliver justice and support to women who have suffered gendered violence. When a presidential decree can undo years of work overnight – which is essentially what happened when Turkey withdrew from the Convention – it automatically raises the question: what is there to celebrate on the International Women’s Day in Turkey?
Celebration takes on a different meaning in the context of contemporary Turkey. An increasingly authoritarian rule has systematically attacked women’s rights and freedoms in an attempt to shape society made up of families after its own image, featuring an unrestrained, vindictive and self-righteous male head of the household. The role that is defined for women in President R. T. Erdogan’s so-called New Turkey is one of the dutiful wife and mother.
Against this background, claiming the streets and the night to perform their spiteful joy is a powerful response to neoconservative familism that aims to confine women to home, and their social and public life to the daytime only.
Women take to streets at night on every 8 March to express a range of views and emotions. In the current political environment, the power of their actions cannot be overstated.
The two emotions that stand out are anger and hope. Yet it is joy that links these two together and sets the atmosphere of the Feminist Night Marches. When women are told not to laugh out loud in public by top government leaders and they are arrested for insulting the President by jumping to the rhythm, a joyful celebration at night on the streets gains a whole new meaning; it becomes resistance.
The Night Marches do not use joy to tone down anger or smoothen the rough edges of feminism in a bid to make it more palatable. Women use music, dance and humour to create an atmosphere where they feel united, strong and untamed in equal measure. The witty and dark sense of humour that comes through the placards is not to please the outsiders. One often used slogan suggests “We don’t want a dictator, we want a vibrator”. Another advocates for “three orgasms per week” rather than the three children recommended by President Erdogan. These slogans intend to shock the sensibilities of the mindset that ties women’s sexuality to reproductive and marital duties.
This resistance hasn’t gone unnoticed. The authorities’ response to Feminist Night Marches is loud and clear. Every year, the security forces put in place blockades to prevent women from marching, using intimidation and arrests as dissuasive measures. The very same women who ordinarily feel threatened on those same streets become perceived as a threat to an order that oppresses them.
The legitimacy of authoritarian rule depends on the polarisation of society, and the creation of constant crises. In a highly polarised society, like Turkey where difference can be a matter of life or death, Feminist Night Marches do not just tolerate, but instead embrace and celebrate difference. Run by a coalition of diverse organisations, the press releases are broadcast in four of the most common native languages spoken in Turkey (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and Armenian).
Women can be seen carrying their placards in their native language, joined by the rainbow-coloured flags of the vibrant LGBTQI+ communities. Women proudly proclaim their identities as Muslim feminists, socialists or sex workers. Along with the Pride marches, Feminist Night Marches is arguably the only regular event that has achieved and nurtured such solidarity. And that in itself is worth celebrating!
Feature image: The feminist night march was organized to protest violence against women and defend women’s rights. Turkey Istanbul Beyoglu March 8, 2021. Picture: Shutterstock
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day. It’s 2022. Yet we’re still a long way from women’s emancipation. And the war in Ukraine has amplified this more than ever. Because when it comes to war, women are infantilised. Our ability to defend ourselves is equated with the vulnerability of children.
But even worse, this is done without hesitation or critique.
Women and children first
In the mainstream media, story after story reflects the ‘women and children first’ narrative. Whether it’s reporting on people leaving the country or bomb attacks, women are put in the same breath as children.
This has been exasperated by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy banning men from leaving the country. In the rush to put Zelenskyy on a pedestal, there’s been little criticism of this frankly obscene mandate. No one, ever, should be forced to fight on behalf of any state or organisation. But even setting this fact aside, there’s been a general acceptance that Zelenskyy’s priorities are right.
It’s 2022. But a woman’s role as a mother and victim is still enforced in nearly every news bulletin reporting on casualties or refugees. There is no dialogue around fathers leaving with children while their mothers stay and fight. Surely, by now, we should have reached the stage where the message is ‘parents and children first’?
And that’s not to say that powerful women aren’t represented in the conflict. Whether that’s BBC journalists Lyse Doucet and Orla Guerin reporting from the conflict, or women Ukrainian MPs such as Kira Rudik staying to fight, women’s strength is, to some degree, represented:
Our #women are going to fight as hard as our #men. Because bullets don't really care which hands are firing them. And bravery has no gender.@TheSunhttps://t.co/zn9qFNz2C9
Rudik is right, “bravery has no gender” (though the Sun sexualising women fighters is a whole other article). But when news bulletin after bulletin repeats the ‘women and children’ mantra, this message is undermined. It shows that we’re still stuck in the mindset of female vulnerability.
Women as fighters
Our past and our present is full of women fighters. But with the exception of Boudicca and possibly Joan of Arc, it’s unlikely many of us encountered them in our history lessons. In more recent history, women have fought on the frontline in the Mexican revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Sri Lankan civil war, and the French Revolution, to name just a few examples.
However, in recent years, it’s the women of the YPJ (women’s protection units) in Rojava (north east Syria) who’ve shown the power of women fighters. And the Kurdish Freedom Movement more generally has shown the power of a movement for direct democracy that places women’s liberation as one of its central tenets.
Women are disproportionately affected by war, especially through gender-based sexual violence. But this should make their role in conflict even more vital. The YPJ, for example, focuses on education as much as combat. As YPJ commander Zanarin Qamishlo described in 2021:
the Women’s Protection Units had an impact, both from the military point of view and how to develop it to protect the people or from the social side, and how to influence the authoritarian masculine mentality to change it and push it towards justice and equality, and how for women to become a strong and beneficial will that can break the shackles of outdated customs and traditions.
Qamishlo continued:
It changed the stereotyped image of women’s military organizations, as the female fighters presented battles to liberate cities and villages from ISIS mercenaries, took up arms, and not only fought the enemies, but fought the male mentality that permeates the details of life.
Celebrating women warriors doesn’t mean glorifying war
Celebrating women’s role in combat does not and should not mean glorifying war. It’s not about saying everyone or anyone can or should fight. But there are times when fighting back is necessary, and it’s about time we all recognised that women are just as capable on the frontline as men.
As women, we need to reclaim our history and our present as warrior women. Generations of white men have tried to teach us that women don’t fight; that our role is in the home or dressing wounds. History tells a different story.
So this International Women’s Day, let’s reclaim our history and our power. Let’s stop using the phrase ‘women and children’ to depict vulnerability. The patriarchy has spent generations telling us we’re weak. It’s time to fight back.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
— Ernest Hemingway, 1946
Imagine you’re in an escape room with strangers. Each of you holds a key that can unlock several padlocks to the final door that lets you out. You’re so close to finishing, and you can’t wait to leave. Then something peculiar happens — you turn around and find these strangers rolling on the floor, aggressively attacking each other. Why? Because one left their coffee cup too close to the centre of a table.
This imaginary scenario is ludicrous and nonsensical, and we have no issues calling it such. Most of the humans on this planet have the basic knowledge of (roughly) how to work together, achieve a goal and communicate any issues that arise. Even amongst larger populations, we’ve seen disputes solved through organised meetings and popular assemblies. This is not to say violence or conflicts don’t arise amongst your average crowd, but they are often for concrete, immediate reasons that are not difficult to explain.
Yet when it comes to war, we seem to accept thinking of it as an unfortunate and necessary evil that is bound to happen through natural means. There’s a moralistic ethos about certain wars that bring about an urgency to be as knowledgeable about the issue as possible – pick a national side and support it, without actually questioning the institutions that brought it about in the first place. For some wars, we aren’t even meant to know or understand why it happened or is happening. We’re meant to read the news, trust the leader and hope our country wins, all whilst acknowledging that we aren’t experts in world affairs – thus it’s likely too complex to concern ourselves with.
Oftentimes, this blind support of war is spearheaded with the grim and very legitimate argument that people (average, everyday people) are dying as a consequence, thus it’s argued the quickest way to end a war is either for it to be fought to its conclusion or for a peace agreement to be achieved.
With countless amounts of people consistently perishing as a result of these horrific conflicts throughout history, why haven’t more people denounced the very institutions that bring these armed atrocities into existence? As a society, most people are against war and violence, yet many take no issue at all to borders, militaries, prisons, leaders and poverty. Why are the deaths of those lost in war used as a muzzle to silence any critical examination of the factors that allowed those lives to be taken so easily?
The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge. There have been countless anti-war speeches, essays, songs, rallies, etc., that have all passionately and pointedly expressed a rejection of war, states, borders and an embracing of peace. The media and history books, however, have filtered out these thoughts and ideas, allowing mostly watered-down, vague anti-war messaging to reach the general public. And let’s make no mistake about it – to be anti-war is to be anti-state.
Throughout the First World War, many citizens in both Britain and the United States were convicted or deported, either for conscription or for “anti-war propagandising”. In the USA, the Sedition and Espionage Act of 1917 criminalised any form of written or verbal dissent to the war effort, with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes asserting in 1919 that anti-war rhetoric was as dangerous as shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.
These days, anti-war rhetoric certainly doesn’t result in the same consequences that it used to, so long as it remains one needle in a haystack of the many opinions shared over the internet. From copious TikTok takes all the way to online academic journals, there’s a consistent way in which war is talked about that is numbing, generic and similar to analysing a sporting match. The lives and opinions of those affected in battle are nearly all but disregarded outside of YouTube clips and live streams. Nuanced populations are reduced to flags, and the conflicting leaders assume their roles as the perceived “good guy” or “bad guy”. Such is the artistic razzle-dazzle of ‘statecraft‘– a term coined by British Academic Jim Bulpitt to make sense of Thatcher-era government in Britain.
We, societally, have never been given a choice whether or not to consent to war, policing, borders, monarchies or governments, and yet when these elite institutions squabble over arbitrary power, it’s rarely ever the tyrants that are themselves actually sent into battle. As Tolstoy wrote, “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
Before becoming too philosophical, let’s maintain that innocent lives are being lost in Ukraine at the hands of an imperialist tyrant. Examining these institutions with a critical lense does not excuse or defend the atrocious actions of Vladimir Putin. Since the invasion on the 24th of February 2022, over 1,800 Russian anti-war protesters have been arrested. Thousands continue to take to the streets, demanding an end to the war against Ukraine. Sadly, there are still an odd amount of people in leftist circles who seem to turn a blind eye to imperialism, or at times even excuse it, so long as it comes from an enemy of the USA.
This line of thinking not only costs lives, but once again lazily reduces entire populations to their geo-political governments.
One must remember that nation-states do not represent the people within them. They are not our avatars, nor are they our “home team”. Nation-states are cages. Borders are threats. Citizens of each nation are subject to whatever course of action elites decide to take.
A lot of care and attention goes into ensuring the general public aren’t focused on this.
Nationalist propaganda can be found in many parts of the world. Since moving to the UK, many people I’ve spoken to have been astonished that, as an American kid, I pledged my “allegiance” to not one, but two flags every morning at school, namely the American and Texas flags. Similarly, I struggle to comprehend all the pomp and circumstance that still enshrines a British monarchy in a modern world that has largely moved on from such traditions. For an even further dynamic, my own mother, being born in socialist Cuba, had to pledge in school to ‘be like Che’.
From an American perspective, war has always been a messy subject. Many of us remember the arguments ensuing for and against the invasion of Iraq. Whilst most of us look back at the era in agreement that it was an utter catastrophe, some tend to forget that there was a time when being against invading the Middle East would attract accusations of hating America and ”not caring about 9/11”.
Despite being treated and talked about as if they are mutually exclusive, war as a concept directly parallels government. Both concepts are seen as inevitable, and both are despised by some whilst heavily romanticised by others. Both the state and wars are supposedly meant to protect us, when, in fact, they actively harm all involved. Both war and the state call to young people who want to prove themselves either as politicians or soldiers and assure them they can ‘make a difference’, when actually, they’re used to uphold the status quo. War harms entire ecosystems and cultures, as does the state. Historically speaking, questioning the need for government can lead to backlash and condemnation, as does questioning the need for war.
We owe our solidarity not to either of these institutions (or any institution, for that matter), but to the everyday people who are affected by these battles. People who we have far more in common with than their power-hungry leaders. It’s well worth pushing back on this notion that being anti-war only consists of a surface-level plea to end armed conflicts. War and the state have so much in common because they are one in the same. War is statism at its catastrophic worst. It’s critically important to support its victims in any way possible whilst never losing sight of the factors that give tyrants the power to harm thousands of people at a time.
It’s an immense privilege to never have experienced war up close and personal. This privilege is too great to be quietly thankful for and mind one’s own affairs. We’re a connected global community, entrapped by bureaucratic institutions fixated on power, consumption and domination. Whether it’s Russia, China, the USA or Europe, we should no longer hold our anti-war resistance for when there is an armed conflict, nor should we placidly accept that war will always be a factor in society. Rather let’s continue to illuminate its systemic causes and concur that war is an absurdity, forced on us by nation-states, and that neither are acceptable as we strive for a future based on logic, reason and caring community.
The people of Ukraine are “European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed” while Palestinians are Arab and have darker complexion. Lesson one: Empathy and recognition of pain and suffering is colour coded and race still matters in 2022.
Palestine, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Syria where violence is normal and death is “baked” into the culture while Ukraine is a “European city” that is modern and advanced and these things are not supposed to happen in this area. Lesson two: Western and European history is but a long series of erasures, amnesia and deeply held view of exceptionalism.
Volunteering to fight in defence of the Ukraine from outside is a heroic act, which indeed it is, but volunteering to resist settler colonialism and Apartheid is framed as “terrorism” by Western powers. Lesson three: Palestinians are demonised no matter what heroic acts they underake.
When an officer in the Ukraine blows himself and destroys a bridge to prevent the Russians from advancing then he is celebrated for this sacrifice. Lesson four: Palestinians are demonised for merely being Palestinians and any and all resistance are framed as terrorism.
Sport teams and famous sport figures can express solidarity and carry the Ukrainian flag, post messages on the electronic boards and demonstrate this on the play field, which are all very positive and players should have the right and ability to do it. However, Palestine is an exception when it comes to sport figures expressing any support for the Palestinians who are living under settler colonial occupation that structured with an embedded Apartheid system of racial-religious segregation. Lesson five: The sport administrative structure hands out fines and sanctions (red card) for anyone who expresses support for Palestine including on the occasion of fans hoisting Palestinian flags in the stands.
Calls for sending weapons to Ukraine so as to resist and fight Russian invasion and occupation is supported and expressed as a fundamental right for people facing such an enemy. Anyone who calls for supporting the Palestinians by sending military equipment or items to strengthen the resistance is criminalised and often imprisonment under the spacious law designation of material support. Lesson six: Palestinians don’t have the right to defend themselves but must accept to be occupied and the world community is committed to fund and extend all types of support to the settler colonial occupier.
For the Ukraine, international law advocates in Western world brought out the defence of the 4th Geneva Convention, brushed-up on definitions of war crimes and genocide but none of this applies to Palestine and Palestinians. One can add must of the Global South and the Muslim World suffer the same type of double standards when it comes to international law and 4th Geneva Convention. If you have a doubt for a moment then ask the Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians on this single point then we can have a large discussion. Lesson seven: Palestinians are made to live outside the scope of international law and the Western world delivers the weapons and instruments used by Israel to violate the 4th Geneva Convention and the Convention on Genocide. The Ukraine invasion made this very clear.
Media coverage rightly focused on the victims of the Russian invasion and the human stories with people taking weapons to defend their families, homes, and cities. Palestine always faces the media coverage that amplifies, humanises and centres the narrative of the settler colonial occupation, while erasing or often problematising Palestinian narrative in the often deployed euphemism of death during “clashes”, Israel having the right to defend itself or responding to rocket firing. Lesson eight: Palestinians are made to be the guilty party for wanting to live on their land and having the audacity to insist on it. Double standard and culpability of the Western world in furthering settler colonialism in Palestine.
Educational institutions across the Western World expressed solidarity with the Ukraine, again rightly so when a people face an invasion. Last April-May period, Israel launched a massive attack on the Palestinians on the holiest night of Ramadan, the 27th Night of Ramadan, then followed by a massive bombardment of Gaza. When faculty members, departments and students at universities expressed solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians, a steady stream of political figures, university presidents and media figures insisted that colleges and universities should not be politicised and to make sure that their internal policies prevent them from expressing such solidarity positions. Lesson nine: Palestine on college campuses always meets the administration, Zionist and settler colonial checkpoints that are structured to prevent solidarity with the Palestinians.
The push for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Russia are moving faster than the speed of light and often by the same set of characters that pushed for legislations to criminalise and punish the Palestinian BDS movement. Lesson ten: Palestine faces the constant double standard on the BDS front, free speech and constitutional rights. No clear evidence of double standard than to listen to the same individuals and groups who now are on the front line of seeking legislation to authorise BDS effort directed at Russia while on record opposing the Palestinian BDS Movement.
Professor Hatem Bazian is executive director of the Islamophobia Studies Center and a professor at Zaytuna College and lecturer in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Asian American Studies, UC Berkeley.
So what’s new about any of that? We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Death and destruction followed by sabre rattling, hypocrisy, inaction, and profit. As a journalist and as someone who has read countless media reports, I’ve seen this all too often. But for some reason, and I can’t fully explain why, this time round feels worse than any other conflict.
And while there are, again as always, glimmers of hope in terms of how people organise against conflict, I’m not entirely convinced I can say this feeling of mine is going to get better any time soon. At least it won’t get any better as long as the mainstream media (MSM) continues its focus on Russian president Vladimir Putin’s character as opposed to his appalling human rights record and NATO military expansion.
Mainstream media’s coverage
What I can say is, the MSM’s coverage of this war has greatly contributed to my mood. I don’t usually have access to Irish or UK MSM TV channels such as RTE (Irish state broadcaster) or BBC. Lucky me eh? But over the last few days I did have access. And I truly nearly lost my fucking mind. No joke, I really couldn’t believe it. I felt there was almost no difference between those channels and the shameless Fox News.
Because while the MSM has reported on the effects war is having on people on the ground in Ukraine, its analysis appears focused on Putin’s personality. Words such as “unpredictable” and “megalomaniac” have been used to describe his behaviour. The tánaiste (Irish deputy prime minister) Leo Varadkar called him the “Hitler of the 21st Century”. So it kind of makes you wonder how Putin was ever celebrated in the West.
Others have ventured a bit further than mere insults. They’re in fact trying to link Putin’s comments about the fall of the Soviet Union as one of his reasons for invading Ukraine. Now all of this may have some basis in truth, but it does sound over-simplistic to me. I mean if you can’t even get your head around a conflict in your own back yard (the North of Ireland), how come you’re a geo-political expert all of a sudden?
So it’s possible this analysis of Putin is inaccurate. Moreover, it ignores the very fact that Putin, just like most other world leaders I’m sure, doesn’t make decisions alone. He’s surrounded by a plethora of advisers and civil servants. In any case, the reality is that none of us – neither journalist nor political pundit – is inside Putin’s head. So this analysis is at best guess work.
Additionally, most global leaders are only able to get into power as a result of the financial support they receive. So, what financial interest could be served by avenging the fall of the iron curtain? Sorry, I’m not buying it.
I don’t believe Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine because he’s some kind of an ‘insane megalomaniac’. He’s been president of Russia, or in a leading role in governing Russia, since the turn of the century. I don’t believe it. What I do believe though, is his invasion is part of a strategy to reinforce Russia’s sphere of influence against NATO expansion. That’s far from a justification for invading and inflicting misery on people, but it goes some way to trying to understand it
We shouldn’t even call it ‘analysis’
At best, this focus on Putin’s character is glib analysis. But at worst it totally disregards the fact that NATO has been building up its military alliances on Russia’s borders since the very time it said it would do no such thing. Add to this the ridiculous social media takes praising a president – one time reality TV star, comedian and actor – as some kind of war leader. The captions and takes that pervaded social media read – “this is what true leadership looks like”. I’m sorry, but while some may find a guy like this easy to relate to because of his background in popular entertainment, believing the MSM’s hype about such a personality is a dangerous game:
This is what true leadership looks like. The bravery. The Ukrainian president has refused asylum in favour of fighting for his country. The bravery of this man and the Ukrainian people is breathtaking. The world is watching and will forever remember the resistance of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/iXMF2tZ8zj
There’s much that the MSM has not covered. There was little to no mention of NATO or the US’s involvement in the 2014 Ukrainian crisis. Hardly anything about racist attacks on People of Colour trying to flee the Russian invasion. Nor was there any tackling of outright Nazi-esque language, even if it was used in “emotional” circumstances, in MSM interviews. Quite bizarrely, the Telegraph tried to pin London’s Tube strikes on “Putin apologists”. Nothing at all to do with poor work conditions of course.
Let’s boycott ’em!
Instead of focusing on the root causes of this conflict, or any role the West may have played, MSM instead wants us to focus on Putin’s character. And, according to its analysis, he’s quite simply a monster. Well I guess there’s no negotiating with a monster is there?
My own response to this is, in the short-term, to limit the amount of MSM I consume and to be very selective about what I consume. More long-term I’m getting ready for an all-out boycott. We must never forget how we got to this point of war so the calls for peace must be louder than personal insults. Those genuine calls for peace, that MSM rarely air, need to go further than ‘can’t we all just get along’. They need to acknowledge the wrong of military expansionism, the wrong of this Russian invasion, and the need for people on the ground to democratically decide their own future.
Featured image via Unsplash/ Jørgen Håland – cropped to 770×403 pixels, free to use under Unsplash license
There are “two species” of refugee in Europe, philosopher Slavoj Žižek has warned. He was talking about a tweet – now deleted – from the government of his home country, Slovenia. The tweet attempted to draw a line between those fleeing the war in Ukraine from those who were fleeing wars in other parts of the world.
The tweet claimed:
The refugees from Ukraine are coming from an environment which is in its cultural, religious, and historical sense something totally different from the environment out of which refugees from Afghanistan are coming.
Describing this bizarre, racist position, Žižek wrote:
After an outcry, the tweet was quickly deleted, but the obscene truth was out: Europe must defend itself from non-Europe.
The evidence suggests this problem extends much wider, and goes much deeper, than just individual governments.
Blatant racism
Slovenia’s was just one – very open – example of a wider problem. Ukrainian refugees fleeing the criminal Russian invasion deserve our solidarity. So do Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Palestinians. The only fundamental difference between them is their place in a made-up racial hierarchy. And that is deplorable.
As one Twitter user pointed out on 3 March, it’s possible to have solidarity with more than one group of people at the same time:
I think whilst the appalling situation with Ukraine continues, as we see the unveiling of racism and bias rearing their heads as the UK (particularly) focuses on the white 'civilised' victims of war, that those refugees who remain unsupported STILL NEED SUPPORTING.
— Knight of the Mace Daddies (@HoydenSpark) March 3, 2022
Another was one of many sharing compilations of racist takes in the mainstream media:
People in #Ukraine are dying, have lost their homes, possessions & are fleeing as refugees.
Human tragedy in Europe is breaking my heart. Other thing breaking my heart is racism. White folks are killing white folks yet finding it hard not to be racist towards people of colour. pic.twitter.com/ZX0piJwCCU
In most cases these involved a level of surprise that war had come to “relatively civilised” country, not a place like Iraq or North Africa. Places we can only assume are ‘uncivilised’.
Little connection was made in these commentaries as to exactly why somewhere like Iraq, for example, has experienced years of war and violence. Did war magically appear in the Middle East? Or could it be connected to the US-led invasion in 2003? Or the centuries of colonialism beforehand?
There seems to be no space to look at this vital context in the mainstream commentary on Ukraine.
Shocking distinction
Žižek wasn’t the only scholar pointing out this contradiction. Professor of Middle East Studies Ziad Majed said the “magnificent solidarity and humanism” shown toward Ukrainians was vastly different to the “dehumanization of refugees from the Middle East”.
When you hear certain comments talking about ‘people like us’ it suggests that those who come from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Africa are not.
“Orientalist and racist”
The Arab and Middle East Journalist’s Association (AMEJA) also condemned the double standard. It listed many examples, including those in the viral video above:
AMEJA condemns and categorically rejects orientalist [racist against Asian people] and racist implications that any population or country is ‘uncivilized’ or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict.
AMEJA said these kinds of comment spoke to a deeper problem in Western media:
This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.
“Two species”
The outpourings of concern for refugees from Ukraine are justified and welcome. Russia’s illegal invasion, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is a war crime akin to the US invasion of Iraq and Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939:
Noam Chomsky on the Ukraine war:
‘The most crucial [fact] is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a major war crime, ranking alongside the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland in 1939, to take only two salient examples.’https://t.co/50P4GioOmi
For those of us who’ve opposed wars and supported refugees for longer than a week, our job is to point out that putting a flag in your profile picture isn’t enough. Because every refugee is worthy of our support, and all wars of aggression should be opposed.
This story originally appeared in openDemocracy on March 4, 2022. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
Here in the post-Soviet world, we have learned a lot from the Western Left.
By ‘we’, I mean communist, democratic socialist Left anarchist and feminist scholars and activists from Kyiv, Lviv, Minsk, Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, and other places that are plunging into the horrors of war and police violence.
Maybe the US has drawn the outline of this board game, but now other players move the chips and add their own contours with a red marker.
After our own Marxist tradition was degraded and marginalised, we read commentaries on ‘Das Kapital’ in English. After the Soviet Union collapsed, we relied on your analysis of American hegemony, neoliberal forms of capital accumulation, and Western neo-imperialism. We have also been encouraged by Western social movements such as anti-war protests, Occupy and Black Lives Matter.
We appreciate the way you have tried to theorise our corner of the world. You have correctly pointed out that the US has helped to undermine the democratic and economically progressive options of post-Soviet transformation in Russia and elsewhere. And you are right that the US and Europe have failed to create a security environment that includes Russia and other post-Soviet countries.
Amid Russia’s shelling of Kharkiv, however, the limits to what we can learn from you are clear.
Your knowledge was produced under the conditions of American hegemony, which has reached its limits at Russia’s blood-red lines. The US has lost its ability to represent its interests as common interests for Russia and China. It cannot enforce compliance using military power, and its economic leverage is shrinking. In spite of what many of you claim, Russia is not reacting, adapting or making concessions anymore. It has regained agency and is able to shape the world around it. Russia’s toolkit is different from that of the US. It relies on brute force rather than on soft power and economy. But brute force is a powerful tool, as you know from the US’s own behaviour in Latin America, Iraq, Afghanistan and all over the globe. Russia has mimicked the coercive infrastructure of America’s imperialism, if not its liberal democracy and free market.
But Russia’s mimicry of US imperialism does not mean dependence. Russia has become an autonomous agent. Its actions are determined by its own internal political dynamics, and the consequences of its actions are now contrary to Western interests. Russia shapes the world around it and imposes its own rules in the same way the US has been doing, albeit through other means. The Russian warring elites are able to turn their delusions into the facts on the ground, to make others accept them despite their will. Russia’s delusions are no longer determined by the US or Europe. They are not a reaction – they are a creation.
The world is not exhaustively described as shaped by or reacting to the actions of the US. It has gained dynamics of its own, and the US and Europe is in reactive mode in many areas. You explain the distant causes instead of noticing the emergent trends.
Having faced the unimaginable, I see how the Western Left has been doing what it does best: analysing American neo-imperialism and the expansion of NATO. But this is not enough: it does not explain the world that is emerging from the ruins of Donbas and Kharkiv’s main square. The world is not exhaustively described as shaped by or reacting to the actions of the US. It has gained dynamics of its own, and the US and Europe is in reactive mode in many areas. You explain the distant causes instead of noticing the emergent trends.
Thus, it strikes me how, when talking about the dramatic processes in our corner of the world, you reduce them to a reaction to the activity of your own governments and business elites. We have learnt all about the US and NATO from you, but this knowledge is not so helpful anymore. Maybe the US has drawn the outline of this board game, but now other players move the chips and add their own contours with a red marker. US-centric explanations are outdated. I have been reading everything written and said on the Left about last year’s escalating conflict between the US, Russia and Ukraine. Most of the analysis was terribly off, much worse than many mainstream explanations. Its predictive power was nil.
This is not to accuse the Western Left of ethnocentrism, but to point to its limited perspective. Overwhelmed with the fog of war and psychological stress, I cannot offer a better perspective. I would only call for help in grasping the situation in theoretical terms while incorporating insights from our corner of the world. ‘US-plaining’ is not helpful to us to the extent that you think it is.
We need to move beyond both the ruins of Eastern Marxism and our colonisation by Western Marxism. We will make mistakes on the way, and you may accuse us of nationalism, idealism and provincialism. But you should learn from these mistakes: now you, too, are also much more provincial.
You face the challenge of reacting to a war that is not waged by your countries. Given all the theoretical impasses I alluded to above, there is no simple way to frame an anti-war message. One thing remains painfully clear: you can help deal with the consequences of the war by providing assistance to refugees from Ukraine no matter what skin colour or passport they have. You can also pressure your government to cancel Ukraine’s foreign debt and provide humanitarian help.
Do not let half-baked political positions substitute an analysis of the situation. The warning that the ‘main enemy is in your own country’ should not translate into a flawed analysis of the inter-imperialist struggle. At this stage, appeals to dismantle NATO – or, conversely, accept anyone into it – will not help those who suffer under the bombs in Ukraine or in jails in Russia or Belarus. Sloganeering is harmful, as ever. Branding Ukrainians or Russian fascists only makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.
A new autonomous reality is emerging around Russia, a reality of destruction and harsh repressions, a reality where a nuclear conflict is not unthinkable anymore. Many of us have missed the tendencies leading to this reality. In the fog of war, we do not see clearly the contours of this new reality. Neither do, it seems, the American or European governments. But this new reality will leave the post-Soviet Left with even fewer organisational and theoretical resources. Without you, we will struggle to survive. Without us, you will be closer to the precipice.
Tell us the personal back story. Who are you? How did you become an activist concerned with equitable coverage of the clitoral anatomy? And what do you mean by “equitable”?
When I was 17, I stumbled upon false, stigmatizing information about labia minora published by doctors online while trying to learn what a clitoris was. I had never been taught about the vulva, clitoris, or labia minora in sex ed. After seeing labiaplasty advertisements and spurious claims that protruding labia minora are considered “unfeminine and embarrassing” and are caused by sexual activity, masturbation, male hormones, and aging, I felt ashamed that my labia minora stuck out. Because I also read that labiaplasty involved no risks to sexual function, I had surgery within days of turning 18.
A renowned OB/GYN surgeon, who has held multiple leadership positions and been given the highest awards by his peers, was recommended to my plastic surgeon father by the head of the OB/GYN department. He completely amputated my labia minora and severed the dorsal nerves in my clitoris in a clitoral hood reduction done without my consent, robbing me of clitoral sensation permanently. I say “permanently,” but they probably could have been repaired if the injury had been acknowledged early enough. Instead, I was told my loss of sensation was not possible and that I just needed to relax and/or fall in love.
I knew I was not crazy, so I taught myself the anatomy. I was studying pre-med biomedical engineering with a bioelectric focus, so I accidentally minored in electrical engineering as well. Nerves are a lot like wires. One class I took was focused entirely on nerves. I could say this all made me equipped to notice the gap in anatomy education. But the truth is it didn’t. What made me notice was simply curiosity, a willingness to question authority, and a determination to prove what happened to me was not all in my head.
Anyone can teach themselves what a nerve is. Anyone can look up studies of nerves in the clitoris. Anyone can see the nerves in the clitoris were missing from OB/GYN textbooks prior to 2019 and that they were missing from most anatomy textbooks as well. We focus so much on credentials, and people think if you don’t have the right credentials, you have no right to an opinion. But with enough intelligence and drive, anyone can teach themselves anything. When it comes to what is true or false, a commitment to providing evidence rather than asserting authority should be the basis for credibility.
By “equitable,” I mean that my goal is to get the anatomy of the clitoris covered in the same depth as that for other organs. For example, the nerves in the penis are always included in anatomy resources. The nerves in the clitoris are just as large. They are just as important. They should be included as well. That they aren’t is fundamentally a matter of censorship caused by taboo, as well as a denial of the importance of female sexual response to overall health and to relationships.
Jessica wants correct clitoral anatomy, including nerves, to appear in all medical textbooks. Pictures: Supplied.
I note you’ve previously said that in an ideal world cosmetic labiaplasty or any form of female cosmetic genital surgeries should not be done. Why have you come to this view? What’s your concern with sexual sensation and labiaplasty?
Cosmetic surgery is ethical if and only if there is informed and autonomous consent, a reasonable standard of care, and a reasonably low rate of functional complications. Maybe in an ideal world where these conditions are met, female genital cosmetic surgery would be ethical. However, in our actual world, these conditions are nowhere near met.
Labiaplasty surgeons call protruding labia minora “hypertophy.” This means “excessive growth” and implies pathology. By calling all protruding labia minora “hypertrophic” they use their medical authority to stigmatize and pathologize half the female population. This is misleading and thus coercive. ,
Additionally, labiaplasty surgeons set standards for what is considered “ideal” without any possible pushback from society at large due to modesty standards in everyday life. We don’t walk around with our vulvas visible. Vulvar aesthetics are not a common topic that comes up. There’s very limited ability to push back on standards surgeons set. In my opinion, this beauty standard isn’t even real. The labia minora develop during puberty and atrophy with menopause. They also engorge with arousal. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes no sense for an aesthetic that signals fertility and arousal to be considered unattractive.
Labiaplasty surgeons also publish blatant medical misinformation about labia minora. They publish, online and in peer reviewed medical journals and textbooks, that labial hypertrophy is caused by excess androgens, sexual activity, masturbation, and aging. They also associate labial hypertrophy with urinary incontinence and infections. None of these claims, which serve to stigmatize large labia minora, are backed by any evidence.
Labiaplasty surgeons also advertise labiaplasty and clitoral hood reductions with fraud. They claim labiaplasty is “rejuvenation” – that it will restore a youthful appearance. But smaller labia minora are not more youthful unless we are talking about actual children. 10 normative studies have shown no positive correlation between age and labia minora size. Surgeons similarly advertise that clitoral hood reduction can improve function, but there is no evidence, and the reality is it can result in loss of clitoral sensation.
Risks additionally are severely minimized and sexual function is not reasonably considered in literature on female genital cosmetic surgery. The top labiaplasty surgeon in the US, Dr. Gary Alter, has published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, the top journal in the world, that there is “no evidence” the labia minora are involved in sexual response. This is absolutely false.
The dorsal nerves of the clitoris were not mentioned anywhere in female genital cosmetic surgery literature until 2015, over a decade after mine were severed. Surgeons had simply not considered them. To this day, expert female genital cosmetic surgeons describe their course incorrectly on RealSelf in the context of misinforming patients about risks and gaslighting patients who have lost sensation.
Finally, unlike the case with other cosmetic surgeries like breast reduction and rhinoplasty, there are no training standards for female genital cosmetic surgery. Female genital cosmetic surgery is not covered, according to any standard set by governing bodies, in residency for either OB/GYNs and plastic surgeons. Realistically most surgeons performing these procedures are doing surgeries they were never trained to do on anatomy they were never taught.
Even if labiaplasty is performed as safely as possible, there will always be a removal of sexually sensitive tissue. The labia minora have the same types of nerve endings as the clitoris, engorge with arousal, and are actively involved in sexual response. Another thing few people talk about is how the labia minora mechanically facilitate stimulation of the clitoris. Back in 2007, one of the first things I searched for was “vulvar biomechanics.” There was nothing. There is still nothing. Why are surgeons operating on anatomy whose function medicine hasn’t bothered to understand?
Also, clitoral hood reduction is fundamentally clitoral surgery. Most of the clitoral hood is actually just the skin of the clitoris itself. The dorsal nerves of the clitoris are just beneath. But how many women would consent to clitoral hood reduction if they understood it to be a surgery on the clitoris?
Finally, given that female genital cosmetic surgery necessarily involves functional tissue, removing it for aesthetic purposes is ethically contentious even under the best conditions. What does it mean when women are asked to choose between prioritizing function and and prioritizing aesthetic with anatomy as intimate and as critically important to our quality of life as our vulvas?
I have seen teenagers comment that they would rather lose clitoral sensation that have an ugly vulva. And this raises concerns. Most people would not, for example, agree to letting patients consent to remove or even partly remove healthy limbs if they so choose. At the very least, I can imagine the public objecting to limb amputation advertisements.
Why do you focus on changing textbooks, rather than changing medical organisations? (Please also explain why you think medical orgs are resistant to change? (Note from Ginger: Remember this is a mainly Aussie audience, so our readers won’t necessarily know the big medical orgs in the US, so please be general)
I targeted professional medical organizations first and I couldn’t get them to acknowledge any problem with education or training. Leadership at the American Board of OB/GYN assured me there was no problem. They insisted I was mistaken about anatomy being missing. The American Council on Graduate Medical Education similarly assured me they looked into it and I was mistaken. They assured me OB/GYNs were in fact being taught anatomy that was nowhere to be found in their textbooks or journals. No one at the American College of OB/GYNs would even respond to me.
I now regret not also contacting leadership at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Board of Plastic Surgeons at that time, and I presently have been asked to not discuss them. But my memory is the anger and frustration I felt trying to solve the problem of getting OB/GYNs educated was exhausting enough as is. So I focused on OB/GYN first to keep things manageable for myself, as I personally was harmed by an OB/GYN.
I also tried meeting with the Chief Medical Officer and the Head of Patient Safety at a local hospital. The Chief Medical Officer ironically suggested I start a #metoo movement for women harmed by female genital cosmetic surgery. I told him that would never work. Back then, even I never thought I would share my story. I still haven’t gotten anyone else to do it. It is an especially intimate matter. The combination of bodily violation, permanent disability, sexual nature, and vulnerability to victim-blame makes this exceedingly difficult. However, that did influence my later decision to take my advocacy to social media.
I also contacted the Association of American Medical Colleges. I got nowhere with them. I contacted anatomy professors, residency program directors, and department heads. I contacted doctors who had shown some interest in the clitoris and female genital cosmetic surgeons who seemed more ethical than most. They were either cynical or uninterested. Those who agreed anatomy education needed to be improved didn’t know how to make it happen. I also crashed the Annual Meeting for the American College of OB/GYNs and passed out flyers, looking for OB/GYNs interested in getting clitoral anatomy disseminated. Discouragingly, that did not work at all.
I honestly had no idea what I was doing. It’s just that for 7 years, I’d needed to do something, and for the longest time, I put it off because I didn’t know how, and I was afraid of what would happen. I was afraid I would fail. And I was afraid if I did fail, that would mean the world thought my trauma wasn’t worth preventing. In retrospect, I was taking things too personally, as if my dignity as a human being were on the line, but that’s why I was so afraid. And that’s why once, I started, that meant doing anything and everything I could figure out to do. I made a lot of mistakes, and I would do things differently if I could start over now, but there is a lot to be said for just getting started, even if that means misstepping.
So contacting textbook authors was one strategy I tried that has worked well. At first, it didn’t seem like anyone listened to me. But I got better at writing emails requesting updates, and once updates came out, I could use the new updates to persuade other textbook editors to update as well. This was an indirect way to influence OB/GYN education. I also contacted OB/GYNs to see if anyone would be interested in publishing a study to get the anatomy into a major OB/GYN journal where OB/GYNs would read it. I published my study in a plastic surgery journal with my plastic surgeon father for this purpose as well.
While the most efficient way to get training and education standards changed is through professional medical organizations, their cooperation has been limited. The American Board of OB/GYN did finally add detailed clitoral anatomy to their maintenance of certification program last year. But it is only optional learning that counts towards maintaining board certification in OB/GYN. It is not required.
Although Jessica has made significant change when it comes to correct representation of clitoral anatomy, not everyone is pleased about her activism. Picture: Supplied
What responsibility to doctors have in all this?
Despite the American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics stipulating that doctors report irresponsible or harmful practice by colleagues, most doctors only feel responsible for how they treat their own patients. This is a problem because it makes it very difficult to get harmful standards of care changed.
Doctors practicing in negligent ways won’t want to recognize any error or fault. And doctors who see them practicing in negligent ways won’t want to speak up. Not speaking up when patients are harmed or when preventable risk factors are very obvious is very much a part of medical culture. At least here in the US, medicine is self governing and self policing. But there is a great deal of bias and willful blindness that makes this inviable.
If we look back in history, why is our societal interest in – and knowledge of – female anatomy so poor?
Widespread ignorance about vulvar anatomy stems from cultural suppression of female sexuality.
There is a belief that the vulva is not reproductive. Yet we know that the vulva, including the clitoris, is responsible for most female sexual pleasure. And we know that sexual pleasure is the number one reason human females have sex. Certainly not many human females would choose to reproduce outside of cultural systems of coercion if they did not experience pleasure. As such, organs responsible for our pleasure are fundamentally responsible for motivations to engage in reproductive behavior.
But there is this separation of female sexual pleasure from reproduction that is fundamentally a denial of female sexual agency.
Watching your social media, I see you are often having small and big wins, and gradually changing things (Congratulations!). How would you encapsulate the changes you’ve made? How far have we got to go?
Honestly, my goal is to just get the ball rolling enough that it will keep rolling without me pushing it. Depending on whether professional medical organizations in plastic surgery and OB/GYN will take action, it could be years before surgeons considered qualified to operate on vulvas can be trusted to know the surgical anatomy. It could be decades.
The reason I am so cynical is because, while getting textbooks updated will change education for the next generation of surgeons, it does nothing for the surgeons who are currently in practice and operating on vulvas. Unless professional medical organizations take action, currently practicing doctors will need to retire before we can count on a reasonable standard of care.
Recently I have been more focused on the preponderance of misinformation about vulvas and how this precludes informed consent. I have made very little progress with this. I have gotten the ASPS to stop calling labiaplasty “rejuvenation.” And I got the Aesthetic Surgery Journal to retitle their section on genital cosmetic surgery so they are no longer calling it “Genital Rejuvenation.” Like I said, this is fraud, and it is fraud that many major medical institutions, including Stanford Medical School, are engaging in.
What would complete success look like to you? How would this change medicine and women’s experience of it?
Complete success will be achieved when vulvas are treated like other parts of the body; when surgeons operating on vulvas know the anatomy involved, when there are training standards for vulvar surgeries; when anatomy of the clitoris is complete and correct in all anatomy textbooks, OB/GYN textbooks, urology textbooks, and female genital cosmetic surgery textbooks; when clitoral anatomy is considered general anatomy and taught to all medical students; when anatomy and physiology involved in female sexual response is as well studied as anatomy and physiology involved in male sexual response; when female sexual medicine has as much anatomic and scientific basis as male sexual medicine does; when stigmatizing misinformation about vulvas is no longer rampant; when surgeons are no longer advertising female genital cosmetic surgeries with fraud; where female sexual function is taken seriously and considered medically important.
My hope is that once these goals are reached, women will not lose sexual function due to the ignorance and incompetence of medical providers. I hope also that women who do suffer any loss of sexual function from any injury will be taken much more seriously than I was. The function of the vulva, including the clitoris, should be properly evaluated before doctors conclude sexual dysfunction has some psychological cause. This simply isn’t happening now. And it is gaslighting.
Someday, female sexual health, which includes that anatomic and physiological capacity for pleasure, will hopefully be considered a human right. Women will be as entitled, as patients, to seek help with sexual function as men are today. And sexual and reproductive functions will be considered overlapping for women as much as they are for men.
Your focus seems mainly on the US. Has your work impacted other countries too?
Ann Augur, who lives in Canada, is one of the top anatomists in the world. She edits three major anatomy textbooks, all of which will contain in-depth anatomy for the clitoris in upcoming editions. She is also behind the 4 new illustrations of clitoral anatomy that have been added to the Wolters Kluwer Female Reproductive System Posters.
Though I have not had luck with Gray’s Anatomy, published in the UK, my hope is that I’ve engaged enough with the chief editors of Gray’s Surgical Anatomy and Gray’s Anatomy: Anatomical Basis for this to have some impact on next edition.
Rohen’s Photographic Atlas of Anatomy is published in Germany. Because I have not been able to connect with them directly, I had an editor at Wolters Kluwer reach out. Originally, she seemed certain changes would be made. Now she just says they are being “considered.” It is a book of dissection photos, so cross your fingers that they will show dissections of the clitoris that are as complete as those for the penis in the next edition.
Many popular textbooks are used internationally and translated into other languages. For example, I changed Te Linde’s Operative Gynecology. I’ve noticed there is also a South Asian edition, but it has not been updated yet. The editors of Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy have also let me know they have updated several illustrations for their upcoming edition. And Netter is published in 16 languages and used all around the world.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Please share any illustrations of clitoral anatomy to help spread awareness and knowledge. What is shown and normalized cannot be considered so taboo it is censored from anatomy education. Also, please let women with labia minora that stick out that they are beautiful too. And please discourage supporting a field of surgery that has not bothered to take reasonable precautions to avoid genital mutilation.
All political parties have supported a motion in Parliament to recognise the “safe restoration of Parliament’s grounds” and the selfless service of emergency services.
Yesterday, riot police moved in and dispersed the protest against covid-19 restrictions, which had occupied the Parliament grounds for 23 days.
In response, protesters set fire to tents, scrub and other structures including a children’s playground. Police in turn used pepper spray and sponge bullets as protesters lobbed cobblestones, metal poles and other debris.
The police operation resulted in 89 arrests yesterday — 40 of the 600 officers involved were injured, with eight admitted to hospital.
Parliament’s regular question time was cancelled today with party leaders instead delivering speeches on yesterday’s chaos, before adjourning early. This is standard procedure after major events, such as the Christchurch terror attacks in 2019.
‘Acts of violence cannot stand’ – Ardern Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern began proceedings with the motion that the House recognise the safe restoration of Parliament’s grounds and the selfless service of our Police, Fire and Emergency Services, Wellington Free Ambulance, Parliament Security, and many others, in returning Parliament to the people.
The support of Māori wardens was also recognised in an amendment, at the suggestion of Te Pāti Māori.
“You were there throughout these events at a great risk to yourselves. Many of you were abused, some were injured, but you put your personal safety aside in order to look after others and for that we are very grateful,” Ardern said.
She expressed sorrow at what Wellingtonians endured, and the trampling of the mana of Taranaki Whānui. She said it was clear to her this protest was different from others as soon as it arrived.
Prime Minister Jacinda Arderns’s speech.
“There was an immediate focus on occupying the space. The rhetoric that came from the speakers they installed swung between benign to sometimes threatening. Many media who walked the grounds were either abused or in some cases chased away. It was a form of protest I did not recognise and I found it hard to reconcile it with the reality of what all New Zealanders had faced in this pandemic, and yet quietly got on with it.”
She said the demands of the protesters were hard to square with what others had suffered during the pandemic, including Labour MP Barbara Edmonds’ six-week-old niece who was recovering after a trip to hospital, having struggled to breathe after being infected with covid-19.
“And so my message today is simple, Mr Speaker, it is to condemn what happened here. Acts of violence cannot stand. It is to reinforce that this will always be a place where difference can be expressed and where that will be welcomed, but that should always be done with dignity and respect for the place upon which we stand.”
She said the pandemic felt hard right now, but it would pass; and vaccine passes, mandates and restrictions would also change.
“There is reason to feel hopeful, but for now, the smell of smoke has faded, the playground will be restored, and the people, our people, will return to their place.”
Protesters’ behaviour ‘was thuggery’ – Luxon Opposition National Party leader Christopher Luxon also thanked emergency services and others who responded, particularly the “immense bravery and selflessness of our frontline police officers”.
He said National condemned the protesters’ behaviour, saying it was “not peaceful protest or activism, it was thuggery“.
“Those scenes were the culmination of weeks of intimidation and aggression toward Wellingtonians. We will always respect people’s right to protest, it is quite rightly a basic tenet of our democracy … but something was off in this protest from the get-go. There was real animus in the atmosphere.”
Opposition National Party leader Christopher Luxon’s speech.
He said he visited officers last night to thank them, and heard how they had all manner of things thrown at them, resulting in broken bones for some. About 80 had only recently graduated, he said, and for one he spoke to it was only her second day on the job.
“Their tenacity in withstanding the protesters provocations and remaining calm, patient and restrained is a testament to their incredible skill and professionalism and we all owe them our sincere and heartfelt thanks.”
He called for a review of the relationships between police and Parliamentary authorities, including the Speaker, as well looking for practical measures to ensure the security of Parliament while not cloistering politicians away from electors.
And while it was not appropriate for lawmakers to have a conversation with lawbreakers on the forecourt of Parliament, they could not risk writing off the concerns of other New Zealanders, he said.
“It is reasonable to expect that Aucklanders who spent 15 weeks in lockdown last year, or business owners who have lost the ability to pay their staff or put food on their family’s table will want to hold the government accountable for its decisions and promises.”
Greens: ‘There is another virus’ Green Party co-leaders Marama Davidson and James Shaw each spoke. Davidson drew particular attention to health workers who had supported the pandemic response, including social workers and community leaders who would play a role in supporting social cohesion into the future.
She said it took courage for police to maintain as much of a de-escalation approach as possible while also being urged to do something to restore a peaceful environment for Wellington.
“That approach over the history of police here in Aotearoa, has unfortunately not been applied consistently and unfortunately there has been discrimination in the way that it hasn’t and has been applied. So I acknowledge yesterday as being a really positive step in the way we police in Aotearoa.”
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson’s speech.
Seeing people come to harm yesterday had rocked her, she said, and the violence was completely unacceptable, but it had begun long before.
She urged police to investigate those who were responsible for spinning out disinformation and hold them accountable, and urged protesters to think on yesterday’s events and hold themselves accountable.
“The biggest prevention of harm would have been for the protesters to go home, that much is very clear.”
Shaw commented on disinformation and conspiracy theories by reflecting on how he was attacked in the street in 2019, “by a man who yelled at me that I had to stop what I was doing at the UN before fracturing my eye socket with his fist”.
The reasoning for that could be one of two conspiracy theories, he suggested, both with “the same root cause”.
“Twenty-nine hours later 51 people were killed and another 40 injured at the hands of a white supremacist terrorist in Christchurch. It’s apparent that the terrorist spent a great deal of his time … in the dark recesses of the internet.”
Green Party co-leader James Shaw’s speech.
He also spoke of the attack on the US Capitol last year, which he said was aimed at destabilising society and creating conditions for authoritarians like Donald Trump and Vladmir Putin. He said doubts about vaccines and mandates were “seeded by the same actors” and led to hundreds of thousands more deaths when instituted as public policy overseas.
He said New Zealand, with its “breezy, she’ll be right attitude” had almost no immunity to this other virus, misinformation, and questions like “should Parliament have a wall around it, is it ever okay to play Barry Manilow” were just addressing the symptoms.
“Yesterday the grifters and the charlatans, the political opportunists and the white supremacists who were behind the protest melted away like cowards and abandoned the field to the desperate people who they had led astray.
“I can only hope that they will be held accountable for their part in all this and that we can find a way as a country to immunise ourselves against their malign impact.”
‘Can’t talk about civil liberties when you’re threatening others’ – David Seymour ACT leader David Seymour agreed with the motion, and used the time to criticise the protest, support the police, and to criticise the response and attitude of the government.
“There is a right to protest, but that right of protest does not extend to taking over the rights of other people around you. You can’t talk about civil liberties when you’re threatening others. You can’t talk about restrictions when you’re preventing small businesses in the area … from getting on and doing their business.”
ACT leader David Seymour’s speech.
Most protests understood that a society that observes democracy and the rule of law is worth preserving, he said, and the protest seen yesterday was different from those that had come before.
However, Ardern’s speech in response yesterday was disappointing, he said.
“So far as she’s concerned, everything is fine, the covid response is fine, it’s all because of foreign conspiracy theories driven by foreign websites. Well you know what? That sounds like a conspiracy theory in itself.
“Just to be clear, the world does have a big problem with misinformation … that doesn’t mean that everybody who has a concern is misinformed, and the problem with being unable to ‘internalise complex problems in our head’ to quote an old ad, is that we are failing to do that as politicians too.”
He also criticised the Speaker for calling the protesters ‘ferals’ and turning loud music on them.
“Where were you as the leader and custodian of this fine institution seeking a mature de-escalation. That’s what we should have seen.”
He said there were unacceptable behaviours in the protest, but also behaviours from people who felt they had been ostracised by society. A more “human response” to the pandemic from the government may not have created the seeds of “this unexpectable and despicable meltdown”, he said.
‘Colonisation … continues to divide us’ – Rawiri Waititi Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi expressed deep sadness and loss, saying the violence seen on the grounds yesterday was a manifestation of the colonial vision of those who had continuously oppressed the people through reckless laws.
“One of the key objectives of the formation of this Parliament was to kill the “beastly communism” of Māori — a quote made by a past Minister of this House: Christopher William Richmond,” he said.
Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi’s kōrero.
The whakapapa of this generational trauma could only be traced back to colonisation, he said.
“Colonisation has turned our worlds upside down and has rendered parts of the culture unrecognisable. It continues to divide us today because it feasts on our trauma, thus forcing us to disregard the very essence of who we are and who we once were.”
He said when mandates did lift, we “will still be left here fighting against the racist system that is still designed to kill our ‘beastly communism’. We will still be faced with Māori health inequities, Māori education disparities, Māori being the highest incarcerated peoples in the world. Māori will still make up 50 percent of the social housing waiting list and 67 percent of the tamariki in State care.
“We will still be over half of the people in emergency and transitional housing. And the Māori unemployment rate will still double that of non-Māori. That is the true plight that we as tangata whenua have been fighting for near on 200 years, and we will continue to fight once the mandates have been lifted”.
Threats, abuse and hate towards politicians was unacceptable, he said, and it was time to heal.
“It is time for us to dig deep into our ngākau to show the world who we truly are. We are an honourable people. We are tangata whenua. We are the people of this land and it is our responsibility to ensure everyone is safe.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
International Women’s Day 2022 – Morning Tea & Panel Discussion ‘Issues effecting women in sport – Equal Pay, Homophobia, cyber/media bias and hope for the future’
In the same breath that we celebrate all that has been achieved in women’s sport since the dark days of women being banned from playing, and even watching, sport – we are reminded about how much there is still left to do to achieve true equality for female athletes, coaches, administrators, match day officials and support staff across the board.
This divide was clearly represented by the Sport Australia media awards overnight. Sport Australia values safe and inclusive sport and yet “couldn’t separate” the entries for “Best Reporting of an Issue in Sport”:
The first winner, by SBS reporters covering the issue of female athletes fleeing Afghanistan for the safety of Australia, being targeted and killed by the Taliban. This piece sought to highlight the issue, while trying to avoid contributing to making the lives of those left behind more dangerous…
That award sat beside a piece which led to the reigniting of historic wounds, and for far too many people, abhorrent trolling and homophobic slurs across a range of sporting codes.
This took place in the same week that the US women’s football (soccer) team reached landmark $24m settlement in their 6 year equal pay battle, and the international sporting community stood alongside Ukrainian athletes and the Ukrainian people more broadly in condemning the invasion by Russia.
There is so much to talk about this IWD!
Come along on Tuesday 8 March at 10.30am in the Refectory to hear the panel discussion on ‘Issues effecting women in sport – Equal Pay, Homophobia, cyber/media bias and hope for the future’, followed by complimentary morning tea on the Concourse.
Proudly sponsored by UniSuper.
Panel members:
• Amy Kilpatrick, Incoming Director, 50|50 by 2030 Foundation
• Ginger Gorman, Editor of BroadAgenda |50/50 by 2030 Foundation
• Dr Catherine Ordway, Sports Integrity Research Lead, University of Canberra
Feature image: From Left to Right – UC Canberra Capitals player Abby Cubillo, Paul Gorris, Jade Melbourne, Alicia Froling, Carly Wilson, Gemma Potter and Kennedy Kareama. Picture: Davey Barber.
New Zealand’s leading daily newspaper today contrasted the “reckless self-expression” of anti-covid mandates protesters and the dangers confronting the people of Ukraine fighting for their survival as an independent nation in the face of a brutal four-day-old invasion by its neighbour Russia.
Critising the rhetoric by protesters against the so-called “draconian” and “authoritarian” covid-19 rules in this country, the New Zealand Herald today mocked the anti-mandates protest in the Parliament grounds in the capital Wellington entering its third week, saying “attacks on people and their freedom are real and dangerous in a country under Russian assault”.
The newspaper said public gatherings carried extra risk in a pandemic. However, while a rally to draw attention to a desperate invasion far away was “at least understandable, the anti-mandate protests [in Wellington and Auckland] seem to be more about reckless self-expression”.
In an editorial, the paper said “noticing contrasts between two different situations” could provide clarity.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has instantly put claims from a minority of people opposed to covid-19 restrictions around the world in perspective.
“These people have argued that common coronavirus health requirements during the pandemic are attacks on their personal freedom.
“They have talked and written about oppression, coercion and risks over complying with health measures meant to help people survive a frequently deadly and dangerous coronavirus.”
‘Particularly unpersuasive’
Now, said the Herald, these views “sound particularly unpersuasive”.
“As footage and reporting from Ukraine shows, oppression is having armoured vehicles from a neighbouring country roll down your roads.
“Loss of freedom is having to hide in shelters to avoid military strikes from the air or having to walk with your belongings to the border for safety.
“Risk is potentially dying or being injured when your apartment building is hit by a missile.”
What was happening in Ukraine was also what happened in less publicised conflicts around the globe, said The Herald.
“Its harrowing pictures and eyewitness accounts, its timing in the third year of the pandemic, and its unfolding impact, [have] shaken the world.
“Civilians, who if they were elsewhere might be only fighting off a covid infection, are having to handle improvised weapons in Kyiv or join 120,000 others who have already fled to neighbouring countries, according to United Nations estimates.”
Protests against Moscow’s aggression
Protests condemning Moscow’s aggression and expressing support for Ukrainians have taken place in New Zealand and in different countries, including in Russia where almost 3000 people have been arrested.
“In New Zealand, there have been protests against the war at the same time as ongoing demonstrations by people who see vaccination mandates, social distancing, vaccine passports and mask-wearing as an imposition on their rights,” said The Herald.
“There’s been a lot of rhetoric with covid-19 of ‘draconian” and ”authoritarian” rules,” said the newspaper.
“In reality, complying with some restrictions for a period of time, which have involved adjusting goals and behaviours and dealing with economic issues, has meant this country has survived a challenging situation pretty well so far compared with others.
“It has hit harder for some groups in society than others. Yet a lot of people are still finding it fairly easy to cope, with vaccination shots, boosters and masks, even with omicron case numbers soaring to dizzying heights and New Zealand’s death toll rising again.”
“Russian citizens know about authoritarianism. On Friday thousands of Russians bravely took to the streets to denounce their government’s invasion.
“Those citizens in Moscow, St Petersburg and other cities knew the risk they were taking and at least 2700 have reportedly been arrested.
Mass displays of dissent not tolerated
“President Vladimir Putin’s government does not tolerate mass displays of dissent. Opponents of the regime have been poisoned and killed. The country’s main opposition leader Alexei Navalny is imprisoned.”
“These rebels on Friday had a cause: objecting to war, the violation of a country’s sovereignty and the deaths, hardship, and displacement being inflicted.”
The newspaper said that anti-war rallies and anti-mandate protests took place in New Zealand on Saturday despite omicron cases hitting 13,000 and deaths from the pandemic reaching 56 — far lower than in most other countries.
“Police said officers outside Parliament were spat on. Protesters have been seen ignoring social distancing and avoiding masks and the Ministry of Health said people attending are coming down with covid.
“Hospitals around the country were reporting visits from people who had been at the Parliament site,” said the newspaper.
The Russian Federation has launched a full-scale attack upon Ukraine.
The World Socialist Movement is not concerned with the supposed rights and wrongs of this war, whether the niceties of international law were breached or if the sovereignty of Ukraine was disregarded. As workers, we are painfully aware that it will be fellow workers who will pay the blood price of the geo-political games played out by the Great Powers.
Ukraine isn’t the “democracy” that Western politicians and media like to give the impression it is. In fact, the political and economic superstructure of Ukraine is not very much different from that of Russia. So the argument that it is “democratic” while Russia isn’t and that “we” must support it to defend “democratic values” is false.
The history of conflicts between states has left a legacy of antagonism between different groups, so they identify with their “nation-state” and the interests of its rulers rather than with their fellow workers in other states. Ukrainian nationalism has an ugly history. Before WW1 what is now Ukraine was divided between the Austrian-Hungarian and the Russian Empires and after it between Poland and Soviet Russia. Lviv, the centre of the pro-West faction in Ukraine, was a major Polish city. During this period the Ukrainian-speakers were discriminated against by the Polish government. Under the Nazi-Soviet Pact the Polish part was annexed by Russia including Lviv. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941 many living in this part welcomed the Germans as liberators and many fought on the German side. Some served as concentration camp guards. The trouble for our fellow workers living in Eastern Europe is that history has dealt them a bad hand — no choice but to be dominated either by the EU-US or by Russia. It seems that the population of Ukraine is still divided over which, so providing both sides with pawns to play to further their interests.
Once again, it is incumbent upon ourselves to affirm that not a drop of working people’s blood should be shed in supporting either side of this capitalist conflict of which bloc can claim territory as part of its sphere of influence. Whether it is the Ukrainian nation or the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, it is not worth the sacrifice of our fellow workers’ lives. Who cares which parasitic class claims to own which patch of dirt?
Capitalism operates according to its own logic and confrontation among capitalists is a normal process that has been taking place since the emergence of the capitalist system.
The WSM condemns the attitude of all those prepared to see towns and cities littered with the corpses of hundreds or thousands of working men, women and children. For what? To prevent what would be in the main merely a change of rulers. Unlike others, we are willing to conceive of Ukraine losing its “independence” if it means that our Ukrainian fellow workers and Russian Donbas fellow workers are not sacrificed for such spurious concepts as “democracy” and “freedom”.
The World Socialist Movement issues our declaration of peace.
This story originally appeared in openDemocracy on Feb. 25, 2022. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
I am writing these lines in Kyiv while it is under artillery attack.
Until the last minute, I had hoped that Russian troops wouldn’t launch a full-scale invasion. Now, I can only thank those who leaked the information to the US intelligence services.
Yesterday, I spent half the day considering whether I ought to join a territorial defence unit. During the night that followed, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi signed a full mobilisation order and Russian troops moved in and prepared to encircle Kyiv, which made the decision for me.
Yesterday, I spent half the day considering whether I ought to join a territorial defence unit. During the night that followed, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi signed a full mobilisation order and Russian troops moved in and prepared to encircle Kyiv, which made the decision for me.
But before taking up my post, I would like to communicate to the Western Left what I think about its reaction to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
First of all, I am thankful to those Leftists who are now picketing Russian embassies—even those who took their time to realise Russia was the aggressor in this conflict.
I am thankful to politicians who support putting pressure on Russia to stop the invasion and withdraw its troops.
And I am thankful to the delegation of British and Welsh MPs, unionists, and activists who came to support us and hear us in the days before the Russian invasion.
This article is about the other part of the Western Left. Those who imagined ‘NATO aggression in Ukraine’, and who could not see Russian aggression—like the New Orleans chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Or the DSA International Committee, which published a shameful statement failing to say a single critical word against Russia (I am very thankful to US professor and activist Dan la Botz and the others for their critique of this statement).
Or those who criticised Ukraine for not implementing the Minsk Agreements and kept silent about their violations by Russia and the so-called ‘People’s Republics.’
Or those who exaggerated the influence of the far-Right in Ukraine, but did not notice the far-Right in the ‘People’s Republics’ and avoided criticising Putin’s conservative, nationalist and authoritarian policy. Part of the responsibility for what is happening rests with you.
Did it ever occur to Leftist critics of NATO that Ukraine is the main victim of the changes brought about by the NATO expansion?
This is part of the wider phenomenon in the Western ‘anti-war’ movement, usually called ‘campism’ by critics on the Left. British-Syrian author and activist Leila Al-Shami gave it a stronger name: the “anti-imperialism of idiots.” Read her wonderful 2018 essay if you haven’t done so yet. I will repeat only the main thesis here: the activity of a large part of the Western ‘anti-war’ Left over the war in Syria had nothing to do with stopping the war. It only opposed Western interference, while ignoring, or even supporting, the engagement of Russia and Iran, to say nothing of their attitude to the ‘legitimately elected’ Assad regime in Syria.
“A number of anti-war organisations have justified their silence on Russian and Iranian interventions by arguing that ‘the main enemy is at home,’” Al-Shami wrote. “This excuses them from undertaking any serious power analysis to determine who the main actors driving the war actually are.”
Unfortunately, we have seen the same ideological cliché repeated over Ukraine. Even after Russia recognised the independence of the ‘People’s Republics’ earlier this week, Branko Marcetic, a writer for American Left magazine Jacobin, penned an article almost fully devoted to criticising the US. When it came to Putin’s actions, he went only as far as remarking that the Russian leader had “signal[led] less-than-benign ambitions.” Seriously?
I am not a fan of NATO. I know that after the end of the Cold War, the bloc lost its defensive function and led aggressive policies. I know that NATO’s eastward expansion undermined efforts directed at nuclear disarmament and forming a system of joint security. NATO tried to marginalise the role of the UN and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and to discredit them as ‘inefficient organisations’. But we cannot bring back the past, and we have to orient ourselves on the current circumstances when seeking a way out of this situation.
How many times did the Western Left bring up the US’s informal promises to the former Russian president, Mikhail Gorbachev, about NATO (“not one inch eastward”), and how many times did it mention the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that guarantees Ukraine’s sovereignty? How often did the Western Left support the “legitimate security concerns” of Russia, a state that owns the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal? And how often did it recall the security concerns of Ukraine, a state that had to trade its nuclear weapons, under the pressure of the US and Russia, for a piece of paper (the Budapest Memorandum) that Putin trampled conclusively in 2014? Did it ever occur to Leftist critics of NATO that Ukraine is the main victim of the changes brought about by the NATO expansion?
Time and again, the Western Left responded to the critique of Russia by mentioning US aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq and other states. Of course, these states need to be brought into the discussion—but how, exactly?
The argument of the Left should be, that in 2003, other governments did not put enough pressure on the United States over Iraq. Not that it is necessary to exert less pressure on Russia over Ukraine now.
An obvious mistake
Imagine for a moment that, in 2003, when the US was preparing for the invasion of Iraq, Russia had behaved like the US has in recent weeks: with threats of escalation.
Now imagine what the Russian Left might have done in that situation, according to the dogma of ‘our main enemy is at home’. Would it have criticised the Russian government for this ‘escalation’, saying that it ‘should not jeopardise inter-imperialist contradictions’? It is obvious to everyone that such behaviour would have been a mistake in that case. Why was this not obvious in the case of the aggression against Ukraine?
If the US and Russia could reach an agreement and start a new Cold War against China as allies, would that really be what we wanted?
In another Jacobin article from earlier this month, Marcetic went as far as saying that Fox News’s Tucker Carlson was “completely right” about the “Ukrainian crisis”. What Carlson had done was question “Ukraine’s strategic value to the United States.” Even Tariq Ali in the New Left Review approvingly quoted the calculation of German admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, who said that giving Putin “respect” over Ukraine was “low cost, even no cost” given that Russia could be a useful ally against China. Are you serious? If the US and Russia could reach an agreement and start a new Cold War against China as allies, would that really be what we wanted?
Reforming the UN
I am not a fan of liberal internationalism. Socialists should criticise it. But this does not mean that we have to support the division of ‘spheres of interest’ between imperialist states. Instead of looking for a new balance between the two imperialisms, the Left has to struggle for a democratisation of the international security order. We need a global policy and a global system of international security. We have the latter: it is the UN. Yes, it has plenty of flaws, and it is often the object of fair criticisms. But one can criticise either to refute something or to improve it. In the case of the UN, we need the latter. We need a Leftist vision of reform and democratisation of the UN.
Of course, this does not mean that the Left should support all of the UN’s decisions. But an overall reinforcement of the UN’s role in the resolution of armed conflicts would allow the Left to minimise the importance of military-political alliances and reduce the number of victims. (In a previous article, I wrote how UN peacekeepers could have helped to resolve the Donbas conflict. Unfortunately, this has now lost its relevance.) After all, we also need the UN to solve the climate crisis and other global problems. The reluctance of many international Leftists to appeal to it is a terrible mistake.
After Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Jacobin’s Europe editor David Broder wrote that the Left “should make no apologies for opposing a US military response.” This was not Biden’s intention anyway, as he said multiple times. But a large part of the Western Left should honestly admit that it completely fucked up in formulating its response to the “Ukrainian crisis”.
My perspective
I will finish by briefly writing about myself and my perspective.
The events of 2014—revolution followed by war—pushed me in the opposite direction of most people in Ukraine. The war killed nationalism in me and pushed me to the Left.
Over the past eight years, the Donbas war has been the main issue that has divided the Ukrainian Left. Each of us formed our position under the influence of personal experience and other factors. Thus, another Ukrainian Leftist would have written this article differently.
I was born in the Donbas, but in a Ukrainian-speaking and nationalist family. My father became involved in the far-Right in the 1990s, observing Ukraine’s economic decay and the enrichment of the former Communist Party leadership, which he had been fighting since the mid-1980s. Of course, he has very anti-Russian, but also anti-American views. I still remember his words on 11 September 2001. As he watched the Twin Towers falling on TV, he said that those responsible were ‘heroes’ (he does not think so anymore—now he believes that the Americans blew them up on purpose).
When the war began in Donbas in 2014, my father joined the far-Right Aidar battalion as a volunteer, my mother fled Luhansk, and my grandfather and grandmother stayed in their village which fell under the control of the ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’. My grandfather condemned Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution. He supports Putin, who, he says, has “restored order in Russia.” Nevertheless, we all try to keep talking to each other (though not about politics) and to help each other. I try to be sympathetic towards them. After all, my grandfather and grandmother spent their whole life working on a collective farm. My father was a construction worker. Life has not been kind to them.
The events of 2014—revolution followed by war—pushed me in the opposite direction of most people in Ukraine. The war killed nationalism in me and pushed me to the Left. I want to fight for a better future for humanity, and not for the nation. My parents, with their post-Soviet trauma, do not understand my socialist views. My father is condescending about my ‘pacifism’, and we had a nasty conversation after I showed up at an anti-fascist protest with a picket sign calling for the disbanding of the far-Right Azov regiment.
When Volodymyr Zelenskyi became president of Ukraine in the spring of 2019, I hoped this could prevent the catastrophe that is unfolding now. After all, it is difficult to demonise a Russian-speaking president who won with a programme of peace for Donbas and whose jokes were popular among Ukrainians as well as Russians. Unfortunately, I was mistaken. While Zelenskyi’s victory changed the attitude of many Russians towards Ukraine, this did not prevent the war.
In recent years, I have written about the peace process and about civilian victims on both sides of the Donbas war. I tried to promote dialogue. But this has all gone up in smoke now. There will be no compromise. Putin can plan whatever he wants, but even if Russia seizes Kyiv and instals its occupational government, we will resist it. The struggle will last until Russia gets out of Ukraine and pays for all the victims and all the destruction.
Hence, my last words are addressed to the Russian people: hurry up and overthrow the Putin regime. It is in your interests as well as ours.
Following here is an assignment: Find some object you hold near and dear. Something that can leap you into a backward narrative. Something to hold you as a memoir writer, going back, reflecting back. That thing, you can hold or touch. You find meaning in it. And, that object holds stories. Try and do this under ten pages.
I plugged the community/continuing education class I designed for the local community college, Oregon Coast, CC, here, at the local twice-a-week rag: “The art of remaking-retelling a story” (Newport News Times)
I’m big on writing narratives. Almost every person I have met and spent time with has told me their story. That story is sometimes a series of disconnected events. Many times people open up, and tell me about significant emotional events (SEE’s) that changed their lives, one way or another.
And, it’s never that simple, no, the death of a child or a newfound love. Change occurs over time, and that event changes through the sieve that is memory. How I was when confronted by federalies in Chiapas 40 years ago is a different story and memory landscape now compared to then, when I was telling all my buddies/compas about that event at Palenque.
So, below, I took the assignment I gave the 7 students to heart. Except, I was angry, I was riffing off of something completely unrelated to the assignment at first: I was asked to review a new novel, in manuscript form, from a fellow who is getting it published. And, man, after reading 200 manuscript pages of the 350 total, I was ready to punch out the world.
Without giving away the author and the press, here is that email to one of my editor friends:
Howdy — I really do hope you didn’t tell the author I was a “for sure thing” to review his novel. I’m sorry to say that what I’ve been reading thus far (200 pages) I can’t really do any good as a positive reviewer. I know we crossed this bridge before, me having major hiccups with the work of another book (that other novel, remember) . . . and I know you all have this book in the line-up.
But, shit, guys, I just can’t get into the book at all. I am not going to give you a big rush of negative comments about the bad dialogue, the incongruent characterization, the cut-out characters, and the dead-end plot, and the absolutely wrong way to start a book, and all the dialogue to move along a story, and the lack of verisimilitude. Look, I know I am just a flunky out here in Oregon, but I have been in the fiction game, even with all the rejections over the years, for a very long time. I’ve taught fiction, too. And, I am a deep reader of fiction. I was not expecting Ivan Doig or Jim Crumley or Tom McGuane or Robert Stone, you know, but, seriously, I can’t find anything literary about the book, and I can’t find much to say that would make a review helpful for him or as a way to highlight your new Press’ addition. You know I want to help you all, but there isn’t a decent poetic or literary hook in it, nor is there a hellava plot, nor is there a helluva cast of characters. There is no electrical charge in the writing.
I hate to do this to you since you both have been good at going with my stuff, and publishing my work in the past. I just wouldn’t be able to pull this one off, without it being just a marketing promo, and I know you do not want that from me. I am sure Mr. S has a following and a slew of people ready to read this book. That bodes well for potential sales, for sure.
I want to be honest and upfront, since I respect you both. I am not your man in Havana for this project. While I have reviewed a hundred books for the El Paso Times years ago, I remember Leslie Ulman giving me a Pam Houston book to review, since she was a guest at UTEP, that is, a visiting author. A friend of hers, as well. I know my clear look at and pugnacious reviewer’s response to that book, once it hit the newspaper (and was syndicated out further afield), caused some rumbling and grumbling with Leslie and Pam, but shit, I didn’t do a hatchet job on it — just some cogent and pithy writing myself as reviewer to point out some of the westerny sort of overkill.
Mr. S’s book is what it is — you all have him on contract and you all have it planned for publication. I just do not want to do a heavy heavy heave ho of my own principles as well as disregarding my own history as a writer and reviewer by attempting something positive. I could have a hell of a fistfight with the book, but that’s not what you all are after.
I see K is on the jacket with kudos. He seems to be your man, really, for this assignment.
I’m not being snarky or elitist or any of that, as you well know me.
It’s not a good book, guys. Not well written. It’s canned dialogue. Cliche. Off the mark. Boring. Not going anywhere. And, yes, he was a journalist, but I can tell you these folk in the book are not real, and as you know, fiction has to be more than pedestrian recording of events. One of the rules is to not move the plot and story and tension with dialogue. That’s most of the book. So much is bad in the book.
Yet, there is that adage that one person’s cup of tequila is another person’s buttermilk. I gotta stick with tequila. Others love the heavy tasteless milk.
Thanks for thinking of me.
Good luck with it and to him.
It’s not just a slam dunk me writing that criticism above. Really. I’ve been hawking my long form, that is, novels, short story collections, essay collections, for a very long time. New York agent named Jack Ryan, and he went to bat for, and he was also waylaid by many a female editor who thought my stuff was too male, too regional, too dark. The list goes on. Cancel culture 1986-2010.
So, really, putting out a review of this book was not possible for me without really eviscerating the words, the plot, the entire book, which for me would be a public spiritual homicide. That’s not in my inner core, though I can be super critical and pugnacious when it comes to, well, beautiful people, or those who have made it and are resting on their laurels.
Here, a quick note from the editor in response to my decline —
Paul,
This is the most magnificent decline I have ever read! So glad you are here to keep us honest.
Others had troubles with the book too.
For some reason, I just liked the narrator, but overall that’s probably not enough.
So it goes. This world we live in, the one we always have lived in. Lives interrupted, derailed, denuded, and of course, enhanced by surviving.
Funny how my students are opening up after just three sessions, sharing all manner of things that they want to add to their larger memoir. Here, a bit of Memoir 101:
Memoir vs Autobiography Basics
1. Autobiography usually covers the author’s life — the entire life up to the point of the writing, while memoir focuses only on a part of the author’s life.
There are going to be exceptions to every point on this list, but generally speaking, autobiography aims to be comprehensive, while memoir does not. Autobiographers set out to tell the story of their life, and while some parts will get more detail than others, they usually cover most or all of it.
I do use Mary Karr’s work, the Art of Memoir, in the class. And, Tritine Rainer’s Your Life as Story.
Here, just one slice of the definition and connotation:
Okay, so here we go with my two-hour entranced writing which fit my class’s assignment. I had to write about Montana (where the guy’s book was set), to get it — that bad manuscript read — off of my chest or at least partly out of my system. And I sent it to the editor, and he came back with this:
Loved the essay.
Reminds me of the time my girlfriend Lois and I drove from Tucson to the coast in a lark. We picked up a hitchhiker in Big Sur. We dropped him off at a compound of Hobbit cabins in the hills above the surf where his father – Stephen Stills’ dope supplier – gifted us the most potent weed I’d ever smoked. One puff and I fell down on the ground paralized. He said he wanted to give me a couple bags in thanks for bringing his son home, but I was paranoid with the paralysis. Lois helped me walk to his cabin where we would get our “reward.” He opened a wooden trunk that I was sure held a shotgun that would start a Manson-like killing spree beginning with Lois and me. Instead we got three or four bags of this wild dope that later in our circle in Tucson was called “killer weed”and taken out and smoked on only the most sacred occasions.
Okay, then, you the reader now have me the writer in your sights. Enjoy the flow of memoir, in this “literary” essay. God help us all!
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Grizzly Country, a .44 magnum, a Thrown- Away Suitcase, a Cleveland Woman’s Life Scattered
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
— opening line, The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
“Did you hear? Catina is going to Mexico with some guy with long hair and earrings in both ears in his old pick-up truck. Can you believe that?”
Not the best opening line for a book but I couldn’t get it out of my head all the way up to that Last Good Kiss bar in Missoula where James Crumley had invited us to sip Patron.
My girlfriend’s North Dakota cousin’s words couldn’t top this: An orange Samsonite suitcase was the gaping open evidence of some meth-ed out former boyfriend who snatched the dark-haired woman in a Montana town and found a lonely path frequented by bruins in order to dump her body along with all her earthly belongings somewhere in that dark dripping night in Big Sky country.
Okay, not Jim Crumley prose, but I wasn’t writing it, just thinking it after we found the two high school yearbooks wet from the afternoon drizzle. The mud that led to our dry campsite held a couple of dozen color snapshots spread around like flattened lives. There was a cool leather fringed leather jack, two pairs of jeans laid out like a running ghost. The lacey underwear I saw first. Half was left in the suitcase, the other half flung around where the case spilled open.
We were twenty miles from Missoula, after heavy tequila toasts with Crumley, and we were in THAT pre-Mexico pick-up truck with the small camper snuggly attached holding all our gear. We wanted to have a campfire, hot coffee and flapjacks in the morning.
It was getting dark, and bear prints were around this mess of scattered things in a woman’s life. Two pink bras, a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, a bunch of personal letters in envelopes bound by hair bands. This was 1985. There were no cell phones. We were out in the boondocks. It was just me and my girlfriend. We both were friends of Crumley since he was both a professor and my thesis advisor at UT-El Paso of all places.
We had been in his classes, and we taught alongside him as graduate students. He wanted the thrill of Juarez and the West Texas mountains. He was a heavy drinker, liked coke and he dated students. I was able and ready to get him the white stuff. He liked my wild man freedom. He was especially curious about my work in a refugee center helping Central Americans – mostly Guatemalans – get political asylum.
The word was he got sacked (not rehired for his year-to-year visiting writer contractor) because some students complained old Dancing Bear Jim came to the workshops three sheets to the wind. That was 1984, before #metoo. There were accusations of dating graduate students, not a no-no, but at UTEP, with a prude of a president, these rumors were enough to get the writer fired.
My girlfriend, Catina, wasn’t really freaking out at the sight of the splayed suitcase. She had a few theories about why this woman’s personal belongings were about. There was a domestic violence sort of vibe I could feel, the light was diminishing in May, and large snowflakes floated down from the purple sky. I was more paranoid than Catina. I knew I had to be the asshole that might have to pull out both guns and get our asses out of some fucking Gary Gilmore situation. Back then, in my 20s and 30s, I courted such things, literally and in my mind.
“You know, it looks like this girl just tossed this suitcase out as if she was jettisoning part of her life. You know, high school years, busted friendships. Fuck, high school can be like a mind fuck. The shitty girls and the rape-minded motherfucking football players. I guarantee, this girl did not just have the one suitcase. But this one, with photos and journals and letters, that’s my theory. One life gone, a new life in Montana. Maybe Canada. There’s no foul play.”
I liked the way Catina plotted out a story from her personal point of view. I would have never thought of a scenario so close to the female perspective.
We came to Crumley, to get my thesis approved, and now, here, after drinks and buffalo burgers, to see bears. Hell, wasn’t that the irony, Dancing Bear and all, his novel? Make no bones about it, we saw two brown bears when we approached the muddy road down into this killer of an empty campground. Grizzly Campground was the name. It was part of Rock Creek, located in the Ranch Creek drainage. Several campsites bordered the creek, and we picked this one. We had it all to ourselves, and we were high and drunk, and we wanted to pitch a tent, and then this scene unfolded like ball lightning in our veins, right there where we were about to pitch our tent.
I still had a revolver and lever action pair of weapons on my mind. The four-inch buck knife on my leg, well, just for cutting apples and cheese.
We barely touched some of this girl’s things, and we agreed to not rifle through the personal notes and journals. Not just yet. As I said, I had two guns in the camper, and Catina had camped with her Colorado family all over the west her whole life. We were not afraid of wild things. Just men with uppers, booze and sinister thoughts in their blood.
We were in awe of the ferns, the boggy smell reminded me of my mom’s birthplace in British Columbia. Then there was that amazingly metallic and citrus odor in the air, fresh conifer growth. And the water heartbeats of a nice clear creek hitting boulders. We could see the quicksilver flow draping rocks, granite heavy with moss and lichen.
“Hell, I guess we have to let the cops know about this when we head out. But for now, it’s fire, tent, booze.”
Catina took a few Missoulians and spread them out over the scene of some crime. It was a crime in anyone’s books – to chuck personal correspondence and two high school yearbooks into the mud.
Making camp was a quiet time for us, a rarity. Catina was in her thoughts. Her own family demons. I was just stunned with the possibility of having to do some sort of bullshit thing if anyone returned to the scene of the scattering. A crime? My theory was the opposite of Catina’s.
I got the half full bottle of Juarez tequila from the back, tucked in a nice colorful serape from Juarez we were going to gift to Crumley. I took swigs from the bottle. Warm, dry earthy draws back to hot desert. Being up here — with Crumley, and thinking about my own prodigious dance with booze, drugs, adventure and recklessness never seemingly coming to a bad end, even when I got in a few pickles out in the wilderness with no gas and a hot motorcycle I had to push to find some place to put down a bedroll — I was invincible with my girlfriend and my guns.
Man, the time I was 18 with my scuba buddy Brian, in the Sea of Cortez, and we had just run out of gas after hours of diving and snorkeling (he continued to say, I told you so . . . we shoulda bought another gas tank). Shit, I told him to stay put, and I went madly swimming toward a marlin fisherman who also happened to be out in the middle of the Sea of Cortez near Tiburon Island. I swam and swam with rocket fins and snorkel-mask. I got there in 30 minutes.
Typical for me: Bad situation turned into a free tow, a party at their condo and still my buddy complained, as he stayed in the one room hotel and pouted. Tequila, steaks, amazing stories, and even getting laid. That’s what running out of fuel in a 16 foot barely-sea worthy boat will get you.
Or get me.
I had promised Catina’s parents back in El Paso that no harm would come to her on this camping trip. The clearly anxious and chaotic nature of the Samsonite toss and the large area of disarray felt like a foreboding.
Yeah, my own 23-yea- old sister came to mind when the fire was roaring with the agave spirit burning my esophagus. Barely dead a few years.
Roberta was wild, adventurous and killed driving her Harley out of Kamloops south to see me, our sister, mother and father in Arizona. Call us the half brother and half sister. The Army stepdad was on his way out of the country to Saudi Arabia. Robbie insisted on coming down by road, to Tucson, with two male buddies on their rides.
That was 1978 when we got the call that she had hit the pavement after some fucker passed out at the wheel and crossed the lane into her bike.
Another set of adventures, a burial, a wake, after a crazy sea plane into Hyder, Alaska. My mother was there, with her fragile lungs, coming into Alaska on a cold night, which was bright in June. I was her escort, the only other family there. I met her biological dad Rod there, a guy I had met years earlier in Vancouver, when my sister sent me a bus ticket to visit her.
As I write this (and almost everything), her squash blossom turquoise bracelet is by me, sort of a talisman, a reminder, or some ethereal message bugging me to keep plugging away. Here I am sixty-five, writing about a forest haunting when I was 28.
Those years, man, 28, Crumley had my book, something I thought would sell: the great American novel set in Mexico. That was what centered in my head then, and even now, almost 40 years later, it’s like a rheumatoid disease, a stupor at times, enchanting me into believing I have the impetus still, now, to push through all the bloody hurdles and walls to get something big published.
That disease lasted for 30 years since that week with Crumley. It’s untreatable. It’s terminal for some. I am one of the unlucky suckers still believing in some fucking New York publishing miracle.
We got the tent set up, as snow slowly powdered the ground. The campground was amazing, the greenest, most jungle like since we had been camping in deserts, along the north rim of the Grand Canyon. In Utah. In New Mexico. Coming from El Paso, we decided to hit the Colorado route.
But this, Grizzly Campground we claimed to ourselves. Hours with Crumley and then my interview at the Missoulian (I never got the job – a dozen out of work PhDs in Missoula looking for writing work, even newspaper work, way ahead of me on the prospect list). We were heading to Livingston, to Chico Hot Springs, to hang out with Crumley and the director of some film Jim was helping script-fix.
The guy – director of Black Beauty, I think — had an option on Dancing Bear and The Last Good Kiss. Time magazine had just done a piece on the up and coming noir writers, and Crumley was one on that list as a killer detective fiction guru. He was from Texas, did shit in the Army, got an MFA from the Iowa writers workshop, and learned from Richard Hugo to study Raymond Chandler in order to become fluent and real and poetic as a novelist.
At 28 with my own suitcase full of real life, adventures, travels, I was an admirer but not a fan boy, really, of the complete Crumley, though he did resist paying taxes as a protest against the Vietnam War. I was all life, fiction, journalism, politics and considered myself left of Che.
That suitcase, the fire Catina had stoked well, the waning light, the creepy icy white on all the ferns and low limbs of amazing conifers made for a Crumley noir setting. Then, juxtaposed with our own plans to take this Datsun pick-up all the way to Guatemala loaded with scuba gear and typewriters. Then, we’d be heading to the Yucatan after hitting every Mexican state. Stories for the two dailies in El Paso. Rolls of film sent to the editors.
There is something about the personal belongings of someone – a woman’s make-up accouterments, the undergarments, the letters, hair brush and berets – spread out all over the place in the open. No tire tracks to speak of, except ours. And, to be sure, I did make a head-lamp and hand-held flashlight recon of the area within a mile of the camp.
The idea Catina had was she just lost it. Threw the shit away in a rage. Something about the past, all those journals and yearbooks. Mind you, we had not rifled through anything yet, and we did not pull things out of the suitcase. We did, however, bring the scattered remains of the orange travel case back to the center of the dirt road.
The newspapers were getting covered in snow. We were shivering. The tent was perfect near the fire. I drank Juarez tequila and Catina sipped a bottle of merlot. Granola and gouda we consumed while we were deep in our literary and gumshoe thoughts.
The pile of belongings I kept pointing the strong flashlight at (actually, a diving light, with a huge veronica of bright beams) — the covered-up life of this woman. And, I saw eyes, in the distance. Bear whiskers. We had the food in the camper sealed up. We tried to keep crumbs away from everything. Nothing in the tent would attract a bear. I even had a big can of bear spray. And the fucking .44 magnum and 30.30 Marlin.
There were bears out there. That’s what we came for, but we didn’t count on the broken suitcase and a life strewn all over the place.
There was some essence of Cherri Halister the next morning. That’s what her name was. We looked hard and long in the yearbooks. She was there, circled, with “The best one at the party. . . . three-fisted drinker . . . why do we have to graduate now, now that we are just becoming friends?” Other tributes and benedictions from her graduating friends. She looked like Barbara Hershey – Remember her, in The Last Summer, Boxcar Bertha, The Baby Maker? Catina knew Barbara, and, of course, later, she did Hannah and Her Sisters, and played Mary Magdalena in The Last Temptation of Christ.
Hell, my younger sister Heidi was an extra in a movie with Charlton Heston, The Last Hard Men. Barbara Hershey took a liking to my kid sister. Heidi was nine years old; it was shot at Old Tucson, the movie lot that burned down. I took her to the set many times. I watched Heston and Hershey plod along in some of the scenes that needed the old western cutout town. I told Catina that, and she laughed, telling me that I would be famous one day for being just this far on the edge of fame – she put both her hands out and sized up that fame around 18 inches.
She was right.
This is a place I never heard of, Mayfield High School, in Cleveland. The Wildcats. The year books were for 1968 and 1969. If she was 18 upon graduation, this Cherri Halister would be 34 when we found her stuff all over the forest.
We were entranced by the pile of belongings, but I had pangs of paranoia that something bad really did happen to her . . . or some fuckers might be coming back. I had the Ruger holstered on my hip and the Marlin fully loaded and on the front seat of the Datsun.
I sort of knew those two firearms would be added props for the story I was going to tell Crumley, and all the friends I had back in El Paso, in Tucson, and doctor family back east. Guns, long-haired guy with earrings in both ears, a blue Datsun king cab pickup, a girlfriend who knows how to get a campfire going in sleet and rain, and some flagging belief that a guy like Crumley would actually help me get a novel published.
Sure, a few hours with Peter Fonda and some other notables at Chico Springs was filed away in my Irish storytelling satchel. Crumley introduced me to him. Then the lore of, well, Richard Brautigan who, after meeting Thomas McGuane (another Montana writer), he would eventually visit Montana’s Paradise Valley and buy a 40-acre ranch in Pine Creek, near Livingston. All that lore, man, and yet, the trip, the entire trip we made was punctuated by Cherri’s disappearance.
We did stop at Deer Lodge and call the Sheriff about what we found. I did rip-off a photo of her: a nice color photo of Cherri Halister, at a pool, in a blue bikini. She must have been around age 16 or 17. Nothing creepy. Just a captured moment in time, when she looked like a really young and budding Barbara Hershey.
When that suitcase was still in her family’s garage. When the light of life was just seeping a bit out of her young life. Barbara Hershey would have been jealous of Cherri. She looked like a star.
(@OxfordDiplomat) 
(@HoydenSpark) 
