radiofree.asia

Category: Opinion

  • COVID-2021: a Plague of Mandates Odyssey

    “Does the White House think they have an Afghanistan problem or a COVID problem?”–“Chucky Doll” Todd question to Game Show Contestant-Panelists on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” September 5, 2021, seen on the Useful Idiots “Monday morning Sunday Morning News Shows” podcast review

    Clearly, there are many officially unanswered “Meet-the-Pressing” questions viraling around these COVID-dark days, including whether the “Great Reset” signifies a revolutionary and “great game”-changing volleyball technique, like a drone-spike protein kind of move; or, in fact, the net-bisected surface of play more resembles a tennis court, as in the phrase:  “Game, Great Re-Set, and Match.”  Well, as of this writing, no FDA-approved word has come down from Swiss Alpine High on whether Klaus Schwab’s forehand or backhand is in better “form” these COVIDly-twilit days, but a greatly more un-resettling question du jour remains:  Where is Kamala Harris, undoubtedly the most popular vice-president in the history of the United States of America?

    Perhaps ironically, VP Harris was last seen in Vietnam while “America!” was awkwardly kerfuffling its way out of a Defense Industry gravy train in Afghanistan (Update:  Harris also came out of hiding recently to stump for famous French Laundry-ist and could-have-been-recalled California governor and Getty fortune heir Gavin Newsom, but I digress, like an ornithological enthusiast that’s spotted a rarely seen bird — again!).  Rumors swirl, like helicopter blades unsettling blood-caked dusts in countless “foreign” lands, that “Credit Card Country” Joe Biden’s heiress-apparent has been eye-witnessed drinking pinot grigios in Baghdad, Benghazi, Mogadishu, “on the road to Damascus,” Tel Aviv, Riyadh, Hong Kong, Xinjiang Province, etc.  Other anonymous “Deep State” sources indicate, however, that the much-celebrated vice-president has been successfully relocated to an Antarctican safehouse, where all of the penguins have been fully “vaccinated,” and, “many times over!”  Leakage of this hyper-classified “intel,” clandestinely known as the “Penguins in Peril!” dossier, has caused quite the stir at the Total Propaganda Network.  In an indefatigable effort to combat “false narratives,” or “dis-to-misinformation,” the TPN has sand-blasted images all over Major Media Platforms of penguins dutifully queuing up–with eggs impeccably balanced on their “mighty Eskimo” feet — to receive their next “booster” of the constantly evolving “vaccine…”

    On a mildly more serious note:  Among other side effects, the rollout of the COVID-19 “variants” of the 9/11 Regime has accelerated the cognitive collapse of most Lefty-Liberal lobes of the American Mind into a brittle, authoritarian shrill-shell of its former Self.  This “slo-motion” demolition project, or “shrinkage,” has been going on for decades.

    Since the events of 9/11, certainly, but also easily traceable to the Clinton presidency, the core Liberal American Brain has been re-wired to embrace the National Security State, including all of its undeclared wars and other various shenanigansgterisms.  Once upon a myth in America, there was this belief that the “conservatives” (also sometimes characterized as “isolationists”) were the “hawks,” or, truth be told, the “chicken-hawks,” to give all-due-cred to the Dick Cheneys and Donald Trumps of the world.  This “belief” was perhaps a Doppler Effect illusion produced by the “Star Wars”-crazed Reagan-Bush-the-Elder regime of the 1980s, which managed most of the Brzezinski-Carter regime’s “dirty war” against Soviet Russians in Afghanistan, while double-down-dealing with Israelis and Iranians over Latin American cocaine-for-hostages-and-guns arrangements, culminating in the debut of the “Stealth War” strategy with the invasion of Panama — quite quietly, overnight — in December, 1989, but way more loudly over the Iraqi-occupied Kuwaitenland slightly more than one year later, in 1991.  Indeed, the American Odysseus was all over the map during the 1980s, and the “pre-neo-cons” had softly earned their militaristic credentials by the war-mongering end of the 3-term Reagan-Bush presidency.  But then, like a Trilaterally Commissioned miracle, Bill Clinton “took over,” and under this Rhodes Scholar from obscure Arkansas–the bombs never stopped falling…

    So the neo-liberal-con job was already in full farce when another Bush, this time a rehabilitated “W,” won the 2000 quadrennial election by a singularly slender one Supreme Court vote; Al Gore might still demur, but the “inconvenient truth” was that the Third, or Judicial, branch of the Federal Government still counted (so to speak…).  One 9/11 later, and we were back in Undeclared War-Landia, but this time with a vengeance, bombing the be-Jesus out of the “Allah-Mighty” Caliban-Taliban in far Off-ghanistan, like this unlikely neo-Bush president was a “Jack-in-the-Box” Prospero waving a magic wand — and the Corporate Media Press corps cheered, where formerly they had…jeered.

    In fact, after the events of 9/11, the “Liberal” sentiment in America fell completely in line with a novel “War on Terror”-style of thinking, a “free-fall” that was unofficially coronated when all leading “Liberal” lights — Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, et al…– absolutely proselytized for the WMD-lie like it was the “New Religion, and all Good Democrats should get them some!”  The WMD propaganda campaign, of course, greased the “Shock and Awe!” track to the Constitutionally illegal invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.  No honest American–Republican, Democrat, or Other–had bargained for that, but the “bill of sale” was final:  the Liberals had sold out to the Pentagon, and knew they could always pivot the blame on a “Republican” when the “Grapes of Wrath” went sour…

    Enquiring Minds Want to know:  “But, Like, Are the Taliban Vaccinated or what?”

    But what, indeed!  There has been some breaking Big Media News on the fama volat wire, shocking to tell, to wit:  “FOX News sales tool Pawn Hannity and MSNBC’s Russia-grating Rachel Madcow have apparently eloped to Afghanistan to join the Taliban in order to atone for shilling for American Empire these last decades.  No confirmed word on their exact whereabouts, but grainy leaked video appears to show the two Corporate Media hacks having a Tea-for-Three in a Kabul cafe with Kamala Harris, the current VP-absconditus of Joe Biden’s Klaus Schwab-sponsored Imperium in the North American sector. Taliban spokes-transgenderpeoplepersons will neither confirm nor deny this story…”

     Escape from Afghanistan has not proved the most successful Wash-Pentagon movie of all time (should have consulted John Carpenter…); in fact, it appears to have pissed off more than a few folks.  No one, especially “Liberals,” questioned the motives at the time of “invasion,” yet managed to happily embrace the acrobatic accolades of a “Just War” kicked-off by a Junior Varsity Bush, which ultimately resulted in the miraculous election of Barack O’Bushma, our first ever Black-Irish-White-American president, who squared off in the main election against a Vietnam War prisoner of 5 years, John McCain, in 2008.  Quite ironically, perhaps, McCain had been a bit pigeon-holed in the Keating-5 Savings-and-Loan scandal of 1987 just as O’Bomney himself would never take any real flak for his bailout of the Big Banks when he assumed Oval Office, in January 2009.

    What were the odds?  Throw a crazy “Trump” card into the mix a few years later and you have about what we are dealing with today.  Biden’s the spitting image of a doddering Imperialist, except that he can no longer regularly access the spit in his own mouth.  That’s a “mean thing” to write, but entirely true. “Joe Biden” is pretty far from the “way forward,” and Trump was used as the “Clown” on the way to this improbable — if not totally unpredictable — act of Ventilator-Stage Dying Capital.  Klaus Schwab, for one, has a “plan,” and it involves, quite literally, “micro-chipping” your brain; he’s entirely “on record” as stating the same.  Bill Gates and the British Royals — “Hello, America!” — are completely on-board with this patently defunct — and perverse — model of continuing the “Great White Western Imperial Shark Model” moving forward — but:  It’s dead in the water, and the sooner we jettison it, the better.

    That’s all a bit of editorializing on the way to a “happy ending,” but we are all being placed between the Scylla and Corona-bydis of modern western imperial, and cognitive, decline; scientifically, this condition is known as “entropy.”  Choppy waters, indeed.  The much-praised “AI” will not save us so much as enslave us, and that is the “plan” according to the Expert-Idiots who are issuing all of these insane “mandates,” like Humanity hasn’t survived a plague or two before.  Of course, Humans have, but maybe We are a plague upon this Planet?  That’s another question, this plague of humans; however, there is plenty of evidence that We can do something different than mis-engineer a screwed-up Dystopia, as if this were all a teleological nightmare, and “Hush, hush:  No further questions, please…”  Quite hopefully, but obviously ironically, I will put you out of the misery of reading this essay any further by quoting the last eloquent lines of the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking political Space movie 2001: a Space Odyssey —

    “Day-zee…Day-zee…”

    The post COVID-2021: a Plague of Mandates Odyssey first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The End of the Speed Limit on the Highway to Nowhere

    There was a time when time was time and space and speed had some human meaning, for people lived within the limits of the natural world of which they were a part.

    As Albert Camus said, “In our madness, we push back the eternal limits, and at once dark Furies swoop down upon us to destroy.”

    The destruction is now upon us.

    In former days you could cross over to other people’s lives and come back with a different perspective, knowing what was obvious was true and that to exist meant to be composed of flesh and blood like all the others in different places and to be bound by the natural cycles of life and death, spring and fall, summer and winter.  There were limits then, on the land, water, and even in the sky, where space too had dimensions and the stars and planets weren’t imaginary landing strips for mad scientists and their partners in celluloid fantasies.

    In that rapidly disappearing world where people felt situated in space and time, life was not yet a holographic spectacle of repetitive images and words, a pseudo-world of shadowy figures engaging in pseudo-debates on electronic screens with people traveling from one place to another only to find that they never left home. When the mind is homeless and the grey magic of digital propaganda is its element, life becomes a vast circinate wandering to nowhere. The experience of traveling thousands of miles only to see the same chain of stores lining the same road in the same town across a country where the same people live with their same machines and same thoughts in their same lives in their same clothes.  A mass society of mass minds in the hive created by cell phones and measured in nanoseconds where the choices are the freedom to choose what is always the same within a cage of categories meant to render all reality a “mediated reality.”

    Without roots we are like Sisyphus pushing his rock not up the hill but in circles, only to reach what we think is the end is the beginning again.  Runners in the circle game.

    People’s roots were what once gave them distinction, a place to stand against the liquid flow of modernity and its disillusionments. These roots were cultural and geographic, material and spiritual.  They went deep.  Such rootedness was not a panacea, simply a place to take a stand.  It gave a bit of stability, the sense of real existing individuals with identities, histories, ground under their feet.  It was possible to meet others as different but equally human despite their different roots, and to grasp our common reality.  It was the antithesis of globalization, of sameness.  It was diversity before there was fake diversity.

    The idea of roots has become even more complicated since Simone Weil wrote her well-known book, The Need for Roots, in 1943.  Even then she admitted this:

    To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define.

    So I will not try to do so.  Like so much in life, its reality involves both a yes and a no, like our relationship to time.

    For we have always been time-bound creatures, caught in its mystery, and we always will be. This was true before the invention of clocks, although the clock ushered in a technological revolution from which we’ve never looked back.  Most people are now on speed going nowhere.

    I recently looked back at a series of photographs that my parents had taken of me when I was about two years old.  They were shot at our home by a professional photographer and got me thinking about three themes that have always fascinated me and which lie at the center of our world today: cameras, clocks, and mirrors.  Each plays a significant part in what Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle:

    In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation…The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

    I, the only boy with seven sisters, was dressed for the occasion in shorts and a polo shirt with suspenders.  Like a little model. An actor on a stage, a player in the spectacle before the spectacle became all-consuming.  Some of the photos were of me standing on a couch in front of a large mirror, double images, some with me looking away and others looking into the mirror.  Two boys in a mirror world.  Images.  A few captured me winding up a metal mechanical toy soldier so he could march across the floor to war. Others were of me looking up at a grandfather clock, focused on the time I couldn’t have understood; seeing the hands of time I couldn’t tell.  Those photographs froze me in time as they were meant to do. They lie before me now as afterimages of my earliest memories and my later concerns.  Time will decompose the paper they are printed on, just as my memories will disappear with my final journey.

    I write these words from the third floor of the old Rogues Harbor Inn to anchor my sojourner’s passage through the mists of time. The old clocks throughout this ancient hotel are all stopped.  It is and is not comforting.  Yet these words move as I write them but stop when I’m done.  They too are a double-edged sword.  We want to stop time’s passage but to live as well, and you can’t have both simultaneously.  Maybe words are edible, and once they are written they must be eaten.  Then they are gone.

    After fifty years I have returned to Ithaca, New York for three days and nights.  Everything has changed, changed utterly.  When I first arrived here half a century ago, I came to spend a few days with Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J. on my exit from the Marine Corps and my jettisoning of the mechanical soldier’s life.  I had to move out of the photographs.

    The boats are still anchored in the sea-like Cayuga Lake along whose west side lies the towns of Ovid and Ulysses through which we passed to taste the wine pressed from the vines whose roots sink deep into this earth.  To imbibe the fruit of these vines on a beautiful day is to feel happy.  The names evoke the traditions of classical Greece and Rome, but when you study history, you realize that the soil then and now is soaked deep with the blood of innocents.

    Walking through the ancient deep gorge that leads to the beautiful Taughannock Falls, the tallest free-falling waterfall east of the Mississippi River at 66 meters, beauty dominates your mind.  But when you grasp the history of how the native Iroquois tribes were massacred right here by the European settlers who drove them from their roots in this land, the natural beauty turns a darker shade of red.  Your mind flips.

    Is there any place on this blood-soaked earth where a semi-conscious person can rest easy?  For beauty is the beginning of terror, is it not, the terrible realization that, as Rilke said, “every angel is terrible”?  And we are the terrible angels, exulting in beauty and often loving life so much that it brings us to tears, for we know it will end, and so we kill others to extend our lives, thinking it will bring us peace, even as we falsely cry peace, peace, when there is no peace.

    If we think radically and go to the roots (Latin, radix) of human existence, we uncover our double-consciousness, the tragicomic state of laughter and despair, suffering and happiness that has no end.  There is no escape for mortals, even though history is replete with so many failed efforts to transcend the limits of the possible.  The modern project to achieve perfection and total control is a technological Faustian effort to transcend our humanity, now with artificial intelligence, digital dementia, and the marriage of the human to the machine.  This mad quest goes by many names (Lewis Mumford presciently called it The Myth of the Machine), but it  is always directed by ruling elites to gather more power to themselves. Today it is called the Great Reset, using medical technology and “vaccines” as the leading edge of its spear to disembowel our humanity. It may succeed because so many people have lost a rootedness in the lived spiritual experience of a sacred vision of an escape from our enigma. With this loss, they have lost the utopian vision that inspires hope when there is no hope.

    The much-maligned English writer, D. H. Lawrence, grasped this in the years after the mass insanity of World War I when he wrote:

    We are all spectres….spectres to one another….abstracted reality….Shadow you are even to yourself…abstracted reality….We are not solid. We don’t live in the flesh. Our instincts and intuitions are dead, we live wound round with the winding-sheet of abstraction. And the touch of anything solid hurts us. For our instincts and intuitions which are our feelers of touch and knowing through touch, they are dead, amputated. We walk and talk and eat and copulate and evacuate wrapped in our winding-sheets, all the time wrapped in our winding-sheets.

    There’s a man I know very well, who, when his brother-in-law died, was given one of his watches.  The brother-in-law had been an accountant who saved everything that passed through his hands, from ticket stubs to scraps of notes and old pens and jewelry that his mother had worn eighty years before, including many of her watches.   Everything.  His passion to save was countered by his speed at getting to the finish line.  He was a champion runner, who had grown up in the Depression and his parents were immigrants who worked hard to survive.  The watch had never been used.  It was a beautiful wind-up watch the man had won as part of a collegiate four-man two-mile relay track team that had set a world record at a major track meet.  The man had, through grit and perseverance, won a track scholarship to this prestigious university where he had excelled at running very fast.  The back of the watch was inscribed from the Meet Committee with the date, place, and record time.

    My friend used the watch regularly, winding it every morning.  It ran a few minutes slow every day, insulting the fleet feet of his brother-in-law, who, of course, was Greek.  One day, while winding the watch, the man dropped it and it stopped.  The jeweler said it would be very expensive to repair, so the man decided to set it at 12:00 and leave it at that stop-time.  He kept wearing it and when anyone asked him for the time, he’d show it to them, saying it was high noon or midnight at the oasis, or, if they preferred, NOW.  Naturally this was received with quizzical looks.

    This always made him cry before he laughed.

    The post The End of the Speed Limit on the Highway to Nowhere first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Covid-19 delta pandemic a Trojan horse to extend French colonialism

    COMMENTARY: By Ena Manuireva with Tony Fala

    In imperial and colonial contexts, dominant groups express their power in three ways: colonisation of the bodies of the minority groups (slavery and labour exploitation); colonisation of territories and natural resources; and colonisation of the mind (colonised peoples internalising the values of the dominant power).(1)

    All three ways of exerting power were forced upon the population of Mā’ohi Nui from the beginning.

    A French protectorate was enforced over the Mā’ohi Nui people by military occupation, imposed over the Mā’ohi Nui territories via a 30-year French nuclear testing programme, and imposed on the minds of local indigenous people through a political system called Autonomie Interne (Internal Autonomy) — a system that has shown its limitations and now seems to be on a ventilator.

    The covid-19 pandemic that hit the world nearly 2 years ago has become a Trojan horse for the French state to physically colonise and occupy Mā’ohi Nui further.

    The arrival of the pandemic in Mā’ohi Nui was attributed to a Tahitian lawmaker coming back from Paris in March 2020, and our first deceased were an elderly Tahitian couple in September 2020.

    Borders were not completely closed. Exchanges of people, goods, and services continued between Mā’ohi Nui islands and between the island groups and people travelling from international destinations.

    Travel continued even if it was somewhat reduced in a piecemeal programme led by local Mā’ohi Nui government authorities that included partial confinement.

    Pape’ete marketplace
    The decision to keep the popular marketplace in Pape’ete open during week days but closed on Sunday is one example of the local government’s mismanagement of the crisis — the virus does not take time off.

    Allowing people to attend religious services is to think, naively, that worshippers will religiously follow the distancing instructions.

    Going back to my last article for Asia Pacific Report about the impact of covid 19 on the Mā’ohi Nui population, on 13 August 2021, the number of death and patients in ICU (Intensive Care unit) were respectively 176 and 26.

    The month of August was the deadliest for the populations of Mā’ohi Nui with 513 deaths and 59 patients in ICU with the hospital struggling to cope with the sheer volume of patients.

    This tells us that 337 Mā’ohi people died in a single month.

    Those figures are unacceptable for a population that is geographically isolated and should have been better protected and impervious to any types of pandemic. Sadly, the bar of 600 deaths was passed recently.

    Ma'ohi Nui covid summary as at 28 Sept 2021
    Ma’ohi Nui covid summary as at 28 September 2021. Graphic: The Pacific Newsroom from official Tahitian statistics

    PPE provision
    What did the French state and the local government do to halt the surge of the pandemic?

    Vaccinations and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) were provided to the population, but heavy equipment such as ventilators were sadly lacking at the main hospital.

    However, in the middle of the pandemic in July, President Emmanuel Macron came for a presidential visit to Mā’ohi Nui with about 250 of his own staff.

    Macron wanted to show support for the appalling local health situation, but it is hard not to believe that the looming presidential election in 2022 did not influence his visit.

    While demonstrations and gatherings were prohibited as part of the means to both curb the virus spread and silence the gathering of Mā’ohi Nui independence demonstrators, the Tahiti-Fa’aa airport tarmac was busy welcoming Macron — with the local President Édouard Fritch leading the welcoming committee.

    Covid-19 social distancing protocols were ignored during Macron’s 5-day visit in Tahiti and on the other islands where he mingled with the crowd.

    Before the arrival of President Macron, the pro-French local government found enough time to call a parliamentary session to push through the change of the local name of the main hospital Ta’aone to that of former French president Jacques Chirac.

    Self-congratulatory speech
    Although the privilege to change names of buildings is one held by the local government, it begs the question whether this decision to rename the building was done for political expedience to please Macron who visited the hospital.

    He gave a self-congratulatory speech about France coming to the rescue of Mā’ohi Nui while encouraging the populations to get vaccinated.

    The work of the local Mā’ohi Nui government and Macron illustrate how an implicit colonisation process works, and is a remarkable illustration of a history of subjection of the Mā’ohi Nui people to external forces.

    Similarly, the behaviour of both the local Mā’ohi Nui government and Macron here cast illumination upon the dispossession of Mā’ohi Nui people’s cultural agency and authority.

    In many instances, the indigenous names are disregarded and replaced by the names of colonisers with the support of the local government.

    The complacency and complicity of members of the local government with the French state regarding covid-19 restrictions has resulted in a kind of 2-tier justice system where those close to the colonial power seemed to enjoy prolonged freedom from judiciary prosecutions — or hope to be exempt from them.

    By contrast, the rest of the Mā’ohi population are fined on the spot for not adhering to legal directives.

    Stark disparity
    An invasion under the guise of humanitarian assistance for the Mā’ohi Nui population.

    There was a stark disparity that was noticed by the media and the population in Tahiti between the way emergency measures were applied in Mā’ohi Nui and Aotearoa.

    New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern acted swiftly and decisively to impose a complete lockdown after the discovery of just one case of the delta variant.

    Kanaky New Caledonia covid statistics at 29 Sept 2021.
    Kanaky New Caledonia covid statistics at 29 September 2021. Graphic: The Pacific Newsroom from official New Caledonian govt statistics

    Similarly, people in Mā’ohi Nui noticed the disparity between the way the covid-19 emergency was dealt with in Mā’ohi Nui and New Caledonia.

    Sharing the same French colonial system of governance as Ma’ohi Nui, French authorities in New Caledonia declared a state of emergency on September 7.

    The New Caledonian government has been very decisive in handling the delta variant that has already killed 33 people.

    Could it be that those drastic and stricter decisions imposed by the French High Commissioner (in charge of security) were to protect the 24 percent of the New Caledonian population who are French?

    The hecatomb
    New Caledonia has seen the Polynesian scenario in Ma’ohi Nui and they call it a hecatomb — a public sacrifice.

    It was only when the number of deaths reached around 500 that a state of emergency was declared in Mā’ohi Nui — with a catastrophic death rate averaging 11 deaths a day especially during the month of August.

    Only on the promise made by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs did we start seeing the arrival of a contingent of French health experts (nurses, doctors and firemen) numbering nearly 300 two weeks ago.

    Did we need to get to that degree of desperation before we activated the emergency measures with that many French nationals arriving in Mā’ohi Nui? It might be good to remind ourselves that only 8 percent of the population are French and over 85 percent of the dead are unvaccinated Mā’ohi people.

    It is easy to see how the handling of the security and health of the Mā’ohi nation was unjust and scandalous from the very start while New Caledonia pulled out all the stops to cater for the safety of its population — two very different justice systems.

    Another important consequence of the hospitals being overwhelmed by the number of cases and deaths was the ban by the health authorities preventing families from holding a vigil besides their own dead.

    This ban pressured families into not declaring that they might have other family members contaminated with covid-19 to hospital authorities.

    Being able to say their last goodbyes was more important for the bereaved families.

    While the official figures of those who died at hospital are recorded, the number of those who died at home remains unknown.

    It is a sad state of affairs to witness such a disparity in the treatment of the indigenous peoples by the colonial authorities which call for justice and can only fuel support for independence among the Mā’ohi Nui people.

    Ena Manuireva, born in Mangareva (Gambier islands) in Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia), is a language revitalisation researcher at Auckland University of Technology and is currently completing his doctorate on the Mangarevan language. He is also a campaigner for nuclear reparations justice from France over the 193 tests staged in Polynesia over three decades.

    Note:
    1. Philipson, Robert (2012). From British empire to corporate empire. Sociolinguistic Studies 5(3). Retrieved from DOI: 10.1558/sols.v5i3.441

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • PNG Post-Courier: Time to consider piracy as a serious issue

    EDITORIAL: By the PNG Post-Courier

    Ten years ago, a dinghy carrying 5 medical research institute scientists disappeared in Papua New Guinea’s West New Britain waters.

    The scientists — 3 men and 2 women — have never been found.

    A few weeks ago, the PNG Medical Research Institute finally closed its book on the missing five.

    PNG Post-Courier
    PNG POST-COURIER

    What remains interesting in this case is an open finding in a coronial inquest several years ago, which did not rule out an act of piracy in its conclusion.

    Last Friday, hundreds of angry protesters marched in the town of Buka, raising their voices against piracy and venting their anger against the new Autonomous Region of Bougainville for failing to take action against sea pirates.

    They, just like every other Papua New Guinean, have every right to know how their loved ones have vanished without a trace while travelling along the shores or out in the open oceans.

    In recent years in East New Britain, sea pirates caught by police were prosecuted and sentenced to death.

    In the Gulf of Papua, travellers from Gulf and Western fall victim to sea and river pirates.

    Along the Northern Province waters and Milne Bay waters, sea piracy is becoming a common law and order issue. In the last two years, wanted criminal Tommy Baker led a string of piracy attacks.

    He is still on the run.

    Papua New Guinea has a vast coastline and many islands.

    In fact, our coastline is said to be 5,152 km (3,201 miles) long. And out in the open seas, there are many big islands and even more smaller islands, many uninhabited.

    Policing the vast coastline and the islands is nonexistent.

    Once in a while, we hear of piracy, boats shot up, people robbed, women kidnapped and sexually abused, children subjected to trauma.

    Some victims are never to be heard of or seen again.

    In the absence of anything resembling a coast guard, the government needs to have a policy on this that works for public confidence, public protection and interest.

    The NMSA needs to seriously consider this as a national threat to the safety of our travelling public who use small craft and smalls ships for movement of passengers and cargo.

    Police boats given to maritime provinces are virtually useless given that they are hardly used on anti-piracy patrols due to lack of funding.

    Boat travellers and seagoing ships are tired of this. Incidences of piracy are now being reported on our country’s big rivers and waterways. This is adding to the fear our people face.

    Some years ago, the NMSA made it compulsory for small boats to be registered, and owners to provide emergency equipment on their craft.

    This law is not effective, just as taxi meters for taxi operators is non operable on land.

    In this age of rocket science, internet and robots, and drones, finding missing boats or hijacked craft using GPS, should be made mandatory and the costs passed onto dinghy manufacturers to include Emergency Position Indicator Radio Beacon on their products.

    Frankly, we have had enough of piracy on the high seas and on our rivers.

    This editorial was published by the PNG Post-Courier today, 29 September 2021.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Bainimarama: Pacific faces tough climate, disease challenges – world leaders need to rise up

    COMMENTARY: By Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama in Suva

    Fiji Islands Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama is the current Chair of the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum. Addressing the UN General Assembly virtually on September 25, he called on the global community to embrace Fiji’s vision of a “better, greener, bluer and safer future for humanity”.

    The United Nations report to the UN General Assembly this year is titled “Our multilateral challenges: UN 2:0”, a Common Agenda the blueprint for a future that is better, greener, and safer—and I would humbly add, “bluer”.

    We want that future for Fiji. We want islands inhabited by citizens who stand with nature and not against it. We want sustainable economic growth that is powered by clean energy and protected from the impacts of climate change.

    We want robust and resilient health systems, and we want good jobs and income supported by a green and blue economy. To succeed, our vision must become the vision of humanity, because our fate is the world’s fate.

    The world’s present course leads nowhere near the future we want for ourselves. A deadly pathogen is burning through humanity like a bushfire—and inequity is fanning the flames. This year alone, climate-driven floods, heatwaves, fires, and cyclones have killed hundreds and inflicted unsustainable economic damage.

    We humans are the cause, but we are refusing to become the solution.

    The UN Secretary General’s recommendations in “Our Common Agenda” are spot on. We must meet this moment with a new UN—a new energy, new resources, and new bonds of trust with the people this institution serves.

    A new UN that empowers those on the margins of society—particularly women and girls—and brings them into the centre of global decision-making.

    Two pandemics
    In the past year, it has become clearer that we face two pandemics—one that is ending for the wealthy nations and one that is worsening across much of the developing world. That widening chasm can be measured in lives lost and in years of economic progress undone.

    Across the Global South, what the world once branded as “sustainable development” is unravelling before our eyes. Hundreds of millions of jobs have been lost, hundreds of millions of people cannot access adequate food, and an entire generation has had their education disrupted.

    The wounds of this crisis will cripple us for years if left untreated.

    Leaders who cannot summon the courage to unveil these commitments and policy packages at COP26 should not bother booking a flight to Glasgow. Instead, they—and the selfish interests they stand for—should face consequences that match the severity of what they are unleashing on our planet.

    — Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama

    Fiji’s experience shows how an equitable recovery can begin. It starts by getting jabs in arms, fast. After one full year with zero local covid cases, the insidious delta variant crept into our country and sparked a deadly second outbreak.

    After a slow start while we scrambled to acquire enough vaccines, we are winning the battle.

    Over 98 percent of adults across our 110 populated islands have [had] one jab of the vaccine, and more than 67 percent are fully vaccinated. We thank India, Australia, New Zealand and the United States for helping us secure the doses we needed.

    Our mission now is to recover the more than 100,000 jobs lost to the pandemic and to recoup a 50 percent loss in government revenues. Soon, Fiji will reopen to tourism and to regional and international business.

    Victory over the virus
    We will look to accelerate investment trends, like increased digitisation, that will modernise our economy and help it recover.

    But Fiji’s victory over the virus will be short-lived unless the global community can accelerate vaccinations everywhere. It is appalling that wealthier countries are already considering third doses or boosters for their citizens while millions of people—including frontline healthcare workers—in the developing world cannot access a single dose.

    Globally, thousands of lives are still being lost every day to the virus. The majority represent our collective failure to make vaccines available to developing countries.

    Vaccine nationalism must end. The G7, G20, and multilateral financial institutions have failed to stop it. Only the UN can fill this void of leadership.

    I join other leaders in calling on the UN to convene an urgent special meeting of leaders to agree to a time bound, costed, and detailed plan for the full vaccination of developing countries.

    Vaccine inequity is a symptom of a much larger injustice, one that is inherent to the international economic system. This injustice is the unequal distribution of finance, or access to finance, that can fuel a recovery.

    While wealthy nations have propped up their economies by printing and investing trillions at near zero interest rates, developing nations—particularly small states—have had to borrow at punitive rates to simply keep our people alive, fed, and healthy.

    Cash transfer programme
    Through the pandemic, my government rolled out the largest cash transfer programme in our history—providing hundreds of millions of dollars in unemployment benefits to nearly one-third of Fiji’s adult population.

    We even expanded some of our social protection programmes, including pensions for the elderly, and financial support for the differently abled and other vulnerable communities.

    The alternative was mass destitution, which we would not accept. But to pay for it, we had to take on debt, precipitated by massive reduction in government revenue.

    We need a more innovative framework for development finance that recognises the unique needs of SIDS (Small Island Developing States). And we must adopt a more sophisticated framework of assessing debt sustainability that incorporates the urgency of building resilience and breaks free of the norms of the 20th century.

    This pandemic has been a painful lesson about where unilateral action can lead and where our multilateral institutions are unwilling to go. We must find new frontiers of co-operation if we stand any chance of averting future pandemics—or staving off the worst of climate change.

    If small states are to build back greener, bluer, and better, we will need an equal voice about and vote on decisions that determine our future. Small states need our interests heard, understood, and acted upon.

    Despite all the talk we hear of saving the planet, the world’s collective commitments are paltry. Akin to spitting into the strengthening winds of climate-fuelled super-storms.

    Frequent devastation
    The climate is on track for 2.7 degrees Celsius of global warming, which would ensure the loss of entire low-lying nations in the Pacific and huge chunks of global coastlines. It guarantees frequent devastation from floods, cyclones, coastal inundations, and wildfires.

    It spells climate-driven conflict, mass migration, and the collapse of food systems and ecosystems. It is appalling. It is unimaginable. But it is where we are headed.

    Since March 2020, Fiji has experienced three cyclones—two of which approached category five intensity. Fijians are strong people. We endured much, and we will endure more still. But I am tired of applauding my people’s resilience. True resilience is not just defined by a nation’s grit but by our access to financial resources.

    Today, SIDS are able to access less than 2 per cent of the available climate finance. To build a truly resilient Fiji, we need access to fast-deploying targeted grants, long-term concessionary financing and financial tools and instruments established through public-private collaboration and partnership.

    The Fijian economy depends on a healthy ocean and so we are taking bold strides to reverse its current decline. We have committed to 100 percent sustainable management of EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) and 30 per cent declared as marine protected areas by 2030.

    We are expanding investments in sustainable aquaculture, seaweed farming, and high-value processed fish.

    But we cannot do this alone. We look to the global system to stop illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. We look to UN member states to agree to a new treaty to preserve marine in waters beyond national jurisdictions.

    Pacific mission in Glasgow
    In one month, we meet in Scotland for a hugely consequential COP. The Pacific’s mission in Glasgow is clear: we must keep the 1.5 target alive.

    This demands drastic emissions cuts by 2030 that put large nations on a path towards net-zero emissions before 2050.

    Leaders who cannot summon the courage to unveil these commitments and policy packages at COP26 should not bother booking a flight to Glasgow. Instead, they—and the selfish interests they stand for—should face consequences that match the severity of what they are unleashing on our planet.

    We do not tolerate war between states. So, how can we tolerate war waged against the planet, on the life it sustains, and on future generations? That is the firm red line Pacific nations will draw in Glasgow. We are demanding net-zero emissions and accepting zero excuses.

    At COP26, the global north must finally deliver on US$100 billion a year in climate finance and agree to a pathway to increase financing commitments to at least $750 billion a year from 2025 forward.

    If we can spend trillions on missiles, drones, and submarines, we can fund climate action. It is criminal that vulnerable Pacific Small Island Developing States can access a mere 0.05 percent of the climate finance currently available to protect ourselves from an existential crisis we did not cause.

    These are the challenges we face, and we must find the courage to face them squarely. The consequences of not doing so are simply unthinkable.

    Published in partnership with IDN-InDepthNews.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Why ‘she was just walking home’ feeds a victim-blaming narrative

    The murder of Sabina Nessa as she walked through a London park has, rightly, shaken women across the country yet again. It seems like only days ago we were reading similar headlines about Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry, and Nicole Smallman.

    As women, we are sick and tired of being told to moderate our behaviour. “Follow the rules”, they say. “Don’t walk alone in the dark”. “Don’t be drunk”. “Don’t dress a certain way”. How, exactly, does moderating our behaviour in any way address the root issue: the misogyny entrenched in our society? As women, it’s not our responsibility to make sure we are safe. It’s our most basic right to be safe. If you’re a man reading this, it’s your responsibility to tackle misogyny within our society. Please don’t respond with, “but not all men”. Please don’t ignore the fact that this is a systemic failing that you’re a part of.

    The majority of women aren’t actually murdered on the street

    According to Counting Dead Women, at least 108 women have been killed by men, (or where a man is the principal suspect), in 2021 so far. On average, this year, a man has killed a woman every 2.5 days. Think about this. Every 2.5 days. This figure is far greater than the stories covered by news headlines. Usually, it’s young women, murdered while walking on our streets who are deemed worthy of mainstream media attention. “She was just walking home,” we now hear all the time.

    But the majority of women aren’t killed while walking down a city street. The Femicide Census names all of the 1,425 women killed by men in the UK over a decade, between 2009 and 2018. It has found that 62% of women are killed by their current or former partner. Others are murdered by relatives. In 92% of the cases, the women knew their killer. Many of the women had lived for years in abusive relationships, subjected to coercive control. In fact, the researchers argue that coercive control in a relationship is key to understanding whether a woman is in danger of being murdered.

    The ages of the 108 women killed by men this year vary greatly: 71-year-old Christina Arnold was killed by her husband of fifty years. 85-year-old Loretta Herman’s son was charged with her murder. And as I write this, the ex-partner of 26-year-old Bethany Vincent has stood up in court and denied her murder. Vincent was stabbed to death in a house, along with her nine-year-old son.

    Don’t ignore domestic abuse victims

    By giving the greatest headlines to those who were “just walking home”, or who were attacked on the street by strangers, are we somehow victim-blaming the women who were murdered by people they know, inside their homes? Are those killed by their husbands seen as less innocent? As a society, do we see them as complicit in their abuse because they weren’t murdered by a stranger, or because they didn’t walk away from their abuser?

    The Canary spoke to Alice Chambers, who works with survivors of domestic abuse. She said:

    We know that when women are killed it is usually by someone they know – two women are killed a week by a partner or ex-partner in England and Wales. Yet it is often when the perpetrator is a stranger that the story hits the headlines and protests ensue. What does this tell us about our views of domestic abuse victims?

    Chambers continued:

    Women are often blamed for the harm perpetrated against them by men. It seems this is even more so when women are attacked by their partners or ex-partners, with common responses being that she must have driven him to it or that she should have left him. Women killed by their partners and ex-partners are just as worthy of our compassion and rage as those killed by strangers and they are in no way responsible for what happened to them. We must get educated about domestic abuse and challenge these harmful myths.

    State failings

    Independent magazine Hate Zine, summaries our society nicely when it says:

    [Women’s] behaviour is constantly scrutinised, dissected and micromanaged by a society which is somehow still able to ignore the entrenched misogyny within.

    I have already written about how the state should be held accountable for the murder of women. Back in December 2020 I wrote:

    Under UK law, a perpetrator receives a minimum sentence of 15 years for murder if the weapon he used was already in the home where he committed the crime. But if the perpetrator takes a weapon to different location and kills someone, he is sentenced for a minimum of 25 years. It’s a travesty that the murder of someone in a home can be seen as a less serious murder than one on the street. And because most women are killed in their homes, this law can be seen as systemically sexist.

    And in April 2021 I wrote about how the government rejected amendments to the Domestic Abuse Bill: amendments that might have protected women more.

    The issue is men

    By focusing only on the victims who are attacked on the streets, it’s easy for the government and the police to come up with half-hearted solutions, like lighting our streets better, or giving us suggestions not to walk alone. And by ignoring all those domestic abuse victims murdered by men, the state don’t have to face the actual issue at hand. And that is male violence.

    The issue isn’t about whether we are safe alone at night. We aren’t even safe in our own homes, surrounded by those who are supposed to love us the most. So while we grieve Sabina Nessa and Sarah Everard, remember, too, 85-year-old Loretta Herman, 71-year-old Christina Arnold and more than one hundred more women in 2021 who have barely made news headlines. Let’s continue to shout all of their names in rage as we fight against entrenched misogyny.

    Featured image via a Bristol activist. Used with permission

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • COP26 shows our leaders won’t save us from the climate emergency

    The immediacy of the climate emergency is intensifying everyday, as we see fires and natural disasters become ordinary fixtures in the news.

    The recent IPCC report confirmed what we already know; time is running out to salvage the planet. It’s a good thing we’ve got a global climate conference coming up for world leaders to plan the drastic changes that need to be made. This morning, however, the Guardian reported that some key officials have already admitted COP26 won’t hit the aims of the Paris Agreement.

    Objectives unfulfilled

    Figures from the UK and UN have warned that the talks will not result in promises of emissions cuts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, the target set by the Paris Agreement.

    A senior UN figure reportedly said:

    We are not going to get to a 45% reduction, but there must be some level of contributions on the table to show the downward trend of emissions.

    This isn’t the only less-than-aspirational view on the potential of Cop26. On the official Cop26 website, the first goal of the conference is:

    Secure global net zero by mid-century and keep 1.5 degrees within reach

    The phrase ‘within reach’ is a lot more vague and non-committal than the Paris Agreement’s original pledge to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

    The Paris agreement

    Climate analysts have been warning for a while that current global policies will not be enough to achieve the 1.5 degree target. Climate Analytics and the New Climate Institute say current policies as of May 2021 have a 78% likelihood of putting the planet on track for warming greater than two degrees.

    Last year, former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon told the Guardian: 

    We have lost a lot of time. Five years after the agreement in Paris was adopted with huge expectations and commitment by world leaders, we have not done enough.

    Climate catastrophe

    So, let’s take a look at what more than 1.5 degrees warming means for the planet and people.

    1.5 degrees means that severe heatwaves will hit about 14% of the world’s population “at least once every five years”. At two degrees, that increases to 37% of the world’s population. The difference could see about 420 million more people regularly exposed to extreme heatwaves.

    This doesn’t end at heatwaves – hitting two degrees of warming also means that millions more will be exposed to drought, water stress, and extreme flooding. There will also be a massive jump in the impact on biodiversity.

    Evidently, there are pretty severe consequences of not hitting the 1.5 target.

    The current reality

    And let’s not forget – many parts of the world are already experiencing the catastrophic effects of climate change with an onslaught of deadly extreme weather events.

    Acres burned during the Pacific North West’s fire season this year, and heatwaves killed hundreds. Violent flooding killed people and wrecked homes in Germany.

    We know these extreme weather events already hit the poorest countries the hardest – an effect that will only increase if they grow globally in occurrence. Under the missed goals of the Paris Agreement, the UN’s warnings of a coming “climate apartheid” between rich and poor seem ever more true.

    A deadly disappointment

    With all those impacts considered, the admission that the COP26 talks won’t bring about the change needed is, frankly, terrifying.

    If not at a global climate summit, then when? The fact that officials have already admitted 1.5 won’t be achieved before the conference officially starts on 31 October in Glasgow spells a pretty bleak future.

    At a climate dialogue in May, prime minister Boris Johnson told the audience:

    This will be the decade in which we either rise up and tackle climate change together or else we sink together into the mire. And this year at COP26 will be the moment the world chooses which of these two fates awaits us.

    These are big words given the Climate Change Committee said just a month later that Johnson’s policies would not hit his ‘historic’ targets.

    At the moment, it seems like we’ll be sinking. And it won’t be together – it will start with the poorest parts of the world already battling the impacts of climate change.

    Featured image via YouTube/Evening Standard

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The Fiji Times: The role of the media – holding power to account

    EDITORIAL: By the Fiji Times editor-in-chief Fred Wesley

    Fiji’s Assistant Minister for iTaukei Affairs Selai Adimaitoga said quite a lot on Friday in her end of week statement on the Media Industry Development Act 2010 in Parliament.

    She blamed reckless reporting by journalists as “one of the causes of violence and economic destruction over the past years”.

    She said dishonest media had played a role in every troubling event in Fiji’s history. For that, she said, media organisations had a duty to tell the truth to the public and not to publish things that would stir political instability or violence.

    “We must ensure that history does not repeat itself as Fijians deserve honest and fair media,” Ms Adimaitoga said.

    She said every media organisation should only speak the truth and fairly report on facts, adding “Fiji cannot afford the reckless reporting of the past. The media have a responsibility to publish the truth. They also have a responsibility to maintain professional standards, a responsibility to maintain integrity”.

    We totally agree with her that media organisations have a duty to tell the truth and fairly report on issues. We do not just talk about it. We do it, every day.

    We try, every day, to fairly report on issues of importance to the nation, and to provide coverage that cuts through any imaginary demarcation line.

    There are many such lines — political leanings, ethnicity, gender and religion for instance. Any good news organisation lives on its reputation for reliability. If its information is reliable it has the trust of its readers or viewers. But a key part of the media’s role is to hold power to account.

    Ms Adimaitoga, whose [FijiFirst] government has held power (in one form or another) for more than a decade, said nothing about that. Our editorial decisions on what information we present must factor in what is of public interest, and the public interest requires close scrutiny of those who exercise power over us.

    So when a government politician talks about “anti-government” news, she must think carefully about the fact that the public expects accountability from her government. Keeping the trust of our readers requires us to maintain a balance and not to be partisan advocates for one political side or the other.

    Ms Adimaitoga needs to better appreciate and understand the role of the media. And we will say to her what we have said to the government in the past when we have faced the same “anti-government” label.

    We are not anti-government, nor are we pro-government, and neither she nor anyone should try to put us into one corner or another.

    The Fiji Times does not exist to create positive headlines for the government. It exists to publish all views and to ensure there is balanced coverage of the news and balanced political debate.

    The public in any democracy expects to read diverse news and opinions which are representative of our whole society and the different viewpoints and perspectives that exist in our nation.

    And we believe in serving the public in line with those democratic expectations.

    The Fiji Times was founded at Levuka in 1869. This editorial was published in The Sunday Times edition of the newspaper yesterday (September 26) under the title “The role of the media” and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Eight Bristolians have now been sentenced to more than 23 years prison in ‘riot’ crackdown

    In the last few weeks, three more Bristolians have been handed long prison sentences. After clashes with the police at a Kill the Bill demonstration on 21 March, a total of eight people have been sentenced to prison so far. A further two people are currently on remand in prison. In total the police have arrested 80 people, with the trials of those accused scheduled to last until July 2022. Most are charged with riot, which carries a maximum ten year prison sentence.

    It’s our responsibility to stand with those who fought back against the police. We need practical solidarity with those who are in prison and going through the court process. But, we also need to turn the narrative about the events of 21 March on its head.

    What happened on the 21 March?

    On 21 March 2021, thousands of people marched through Bristol in a huge show of force against the authoritarian Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill.

    As the evening drew in, the crowd ended up at Bristol’s Bridewell Police station. Several writers from The Canary were there to witness what happened as Avon & Somerset Police began to use extreme violence against the crowd of young protesters. People were angry about the government’s planned restrictions on protest, increases to sentencing powers, and criminalisation of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities. Riot police attacked people with batons and pepper spray; slammed riot shields down on protesters’ heads; charged people with horses; and attacked protestors with dogs.

    The crowd defended themselves, and by the end of the evening the windows of the police station were smashed and several police vehicles were on fire.

    Were the police taking revenge for the toppling of the slave trader statue?

    Why did Avon & Somerset Police respond to the protest on 21 March with such extreme violence? Well, first of all, violence against protesters is nothing new. You’ve only to look at the use of violence against people resisting the DSEI arms fair this month to see that police violence is routine – not something out of the ordinary. However, some exceptional circumstances may have influenced the police’s decision to use violence on 21 March.

    First of all, the 21 March demonstration was part of the Kill the Bill movement. This movement directly challenges the new powers the Tory government is planning to give to the police. The demonstration had marched to the local police station. Protesters were chanting anti-police slogans, protesting not just against the Bill but against police violence as a whole. It’s reasonable to say that the police are likely to have responded with more violence, because the protest was directed against them.

    Secondly, the demonstration came during the tail end of the UK’s harshest coronavirus lockdown. The government’s lockdown measures did not contain any specific exemptions for protest, and Avon and Somerset Police had – earlier that day – been threatening protesters with arrest for simply being out on the streets. However, many have argued that the lockdown protest ban breached human rights law, and last week a Kill the Bill protester was acquitted of an offence under the Coronavirus Act. But on 21 March, Avon & Somerset Police were acting as if everyone at the protest was committing a crime just by being there. It’s fair to assume that this assumption may have empowered officers to use violence more readily.

    Thirdly, March’s Kill the Bill protest was the largest in Bristol since the massive Black Lives Matter demonstration of June 2020. During that demonstration, a statue of local slave-trader Edward Colston was pulled down and thrown in the River Avon. On that occasion, the police stood by and didn’t confront the crowd. Avon & Somerset police defended their decision to stand back, saying that intervening could have sparked a riot. However, the Force was publicly lambasted for its ‘inaction’ by Priti Patel, who reportedly had a “firm discussion” with local Police Constable Andy Marsh over the police response to the incident. Marsh stepped down from his post the following year, just after the 21 March Kill the Bill protest.

    Which leads us to…

    So it’s hardly surprising – amidst pressure from the home secretary – that Avon & Somerset Police opted to use violence against the Kill the Bill demonstrators at the next large mass protest to take place in Bristol since the toppling of Colston.

    And it’s important to remember that racialised and classed violence by Avon & Somerset police is constant. If you’re Black in Bristol, you are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched. Commenting on the police response to the Kill the Bill movement, 67 year old Black Bristolian Judah Adunbi told Novara Media that – looking back on policing in Bristol from 1980 until 2021 – “he saw more continuity than change: he’s still up against the same “racist police””.

    Sentencing so far

    So far, eight defendants have plead guilty to charges relating to the 21 March, the majority of them to riot.

    Having first been subjected to police violence, the crackdown on the Kill the Bill demonstrators has continued in the courts. I have attended most of the hearings so far, and I can say that judge Patrick – who has presided over all the Crown Court hearings – has treated the cases in a highly sensational and politicised pro-police manner. Patrick has handed out custodial sentences, even when he clearly didn’t have to, and has shown empathy with the police officers – who he claims were “dehumanised” by protesters –  while paying no heed at all to representations by the defendants about police violence.

    On 30 July, the first five defendants – who had all plead guilty – were sentenced to over 14 years between them. Bristol Anarchist Black Cross and Bristol Defendant Solidarity (BDS) said at the time:

    We are writing this statement to make clear that we support those who have been sentenced today, and that we are proud of them for fighting back. We need to be ready to defend ourselves against the police, and stand with those facing repression and criminalisation.

    In recent weeks Patrick has sentenced Dylan Dunne to four months in prison for theft of a police officer’s cap. A probation officer advised the court that Dylan could be given a non-custodial sentence, but Patrick chose to ignore it.

    On the same day, Shaun Davies was sentenced to three years six months in prison for riot. BDS tweeted:

    Most recently, Ben Rankin was sentenced to a massive five years for riot.

    A rotten system that’s stacked against defendants

    You might think that all those who plead guilty were – in fact – guilty.  But that’s not the whole story. When faced with a serious charge like riot, there’s a heavy pressure on people to plead guilty, because those who do are automatically offered a reduction in sentence

    Those wanting to argue their innocence are making a serious gamble. They have to stake years of their lives on the promise that a jury will reach the right verdict. In riot cases one of the key legal defences is that you were acting to defend yourself or somebody else, which is highly subjective. So it’s easy to understand how – faced with a heavy charge like riot – someone might plead guilty – even if they have a good legal defence – to avoid a long sentence.

    I hasten to add that – in my view – we shouldn’t just be standing in solidarity with those defendants who have a legal defence that would stand up in a court of law. (I.e. that if they used any violence they were defending themselves – or someone else – against immediate acts of police violence). What happened on 21 March was not just about the police’s violence that evening; it was an outpouring of anger at the countless continual acts of violence carried out by police against our communities.

    If we are going to move beyond the violence of the state, we need a wider definition and a clearer understanding of community self defence. Regardless of whether those accused have a defence that fits within the constraints of the legal system – a system which clearly serves the interests of those with the most power – they are our allies in the wider struggle against police violence and state power. If we won’t stand back to back with them, then who will?

    “We stand with the defendants against a system that shows no care”

    BDS and Bristol Anarchist Black Cross are helping support the defendants in court and in prison, and have raised almost £50k to support those facing repression. One poignant tweet explains why their work is so necessary:

     

    Kat Hobbs of the Network for Police Monitoring told The Canary:

    The courts have shown that there will be no leniency for defendants, and these punitive sentences are way above anything we have seen for a demonstration in this country for many years. Avon and Somerset police have faced scorching criticism for their handling of the Kill the Bill demonstrations, with a parliamentary report accusing them of “revenge policing” and suggesting that the police use of force may amount to a criminal offence.

    The report referred to was made by an All Party Parliamentary Committee in July. Hobbs continued, by arguing that the police are attempting to “save face”:

    by trying to paint the defendants as violent criminals at trial, and throwing the book at them. This isn’t the first time Bristolians have been made an example of – after the tearing down of the Colston statue, for which 4 people are standing trial later this year, the government was so angry that the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill includes a specific measure to increase the penalty for damaging statues.

    We need to change the narrative

    Right now, the narrative about 21 March belongs to the likes of judge Patrick and Avon & Somerset Police. And why wouldn’t it when they have all of the power of the state in their hands? But, we have power too. We have the power and the responsibility to stand up for those who fought back against the police. And, we have to tell the real story of what happened outside Bridewell. The defendants need all of our support as their trials go on, and those in prison deserve our support too.

    We have seen again and again that we can’t trust the mainstream media to stand up to power and tell the real story; we need to do it for ourselves.

    Featured image via Bristol Defendant Solidarity (with permission)

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • In spite of relentless media negativity, NZ’s covid story is largely successful

    COMMENTARY: By Glen Johnson

    On August 17, a 58-year-old man from Auckland became symptomatic and tested positive for covid-19. It was New Zealand’s first community case of the coronavirus in almost six months.

    Within hours, the nation of five million moved into alert level four, part of its “go hard, go early” approach. All travel outside of people’s homes was forbidden, except to fetch supplies, visit pharmacies or exercise.

    The country largely ground to a halt.

    “We have seen the dire consequences of taking too long to act in other countries, not least our neighbours,” said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, while announcing the cabinet’s decision to impose a lockdown that evening.

    Within a few days, one case had grown to 21 cases. After a week, to 148 cases. By August 31, the cluster contained 612 cases.

    Snap lockdown
    One month after imposing the snap lockdown, New Zealand has bent the curve and may be able to eliminate an outbreak of the potent delta variant of COVID-19 – though it is no sure thing.

    As of September 20, some 1051 people in Auckland and 17 people in the capital city, Wellington, have been infected with the virus, of whom 694 have recovered.

    Contact tracers have methodically identified tens of thousands of contacts – and hundreds of locations of interest – part of an updated track-and-trace system repurposed to cast a much wider net around the far more transmissible delta variant.

    The outbreak, now spread across 20 subclusters, 10 of which have been epidemiologically linked, presents the most serious challenge to elimination that New Zealand has faced so far. With its fragmented public health system under intense strain from decades of under-funding, any unchecked spread of the delta variant would see hospitals rapidly overwhelmed.

    But New Zealanders rallied behind the restrictions, sticking to their “bubbles”, masking up and watching patiently as cases peaked, then began to decline – though the outbreak’s tail is proving persistent.

    If the country does eliminate this outbreak, it would once again validate the “go hard, go early” approach that officials have taken over the past 18 months.

    With Auckland moving yesterday to the more permissive alert level three, case numbers over the coming weeks will be closely watched for any sign of uncontained spread.

    Entitlement and denunciation
    Yet, as with previous outbreaks, the clamour from critics of the government started almost immediately, a chorus of whinge.

    Business special interests laundered their messaging through an uncritical media – “certainty” they chanted, while pressuring for a move down alert levels.

    “We also know that in lockdown Treasury has forecast it to cost the country NZ$1.45 billion per week – and that’s just the economic impact,” Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce chief executive Leeann Watson told broadcaster Newstalk ZB.

    Incredibly, less than a week into lockdown, Export New Zealand executive director Catherine Beard complained to Stuff, the country’s most popular news website, that the business environment was getting “tough” for exporters, while lobbying for more managed isolation spots for business travellers – or self-isolation.

    “Some of these are multimillion-dollar deals, so the situation is very stressful,” she said.

    Some in the hospitality sector complained about limits on gatherings and threatened to withhold tax, while demanding “targeted” assistance from the government.

    “Now it’s 100 percent [Ministry of] Health running the show,” said Hospitality New Zealand chief executive Julie White, according to Stuff. “No one is advising them commercially.”

    Most New Zealanders would, presumably, prefer that the Health Ministry – as opposed to hospitality interest groups – responds to the threat presented by a lethal, airborne pathogen.

    ‘Glacial’ pace criticised
    The “glacial” pace of the country’s vaccine rollout was also riffed off in headline after headline.

    Perhaps, as the political opposition and reporters contend, the rollout has been “sluggish”.

    Perhaps the government could have instructed the medical regulator Medsafe to conduct a less rigorous assessment of the Pfizer vaccine, under emergency protocols.

    “Another [possibility] is,” Craig McCulloch, Radio New Zealand’s deputy political editor speculated, “that the government’s negotiators came late to the party, did a poor job and got a raw deal.”

    Or perhaps soaring global demand amid the pandemic, Pfizer’s finite ability to supply vaccines to a vast suite of countries and New Zealand’s limited purchasing power and largely covid-free status explains the “delay”.

    Certainly, the World Health Organisation has described vaccine hoarding by wealthy nations as approaching a “catastrophic moral failure”.

    When Pfizer became able to deliver large shipments midway through July, New Zealand saw a dramatic scale-up in the vaccination programme, as officials had promised for months.

    Rollout a success story
    If anything, the nation’s rollout — a massive logistical undertaking — has largely been a success story, conducted in an environment of incredible uncertainty and reliant upon an already stretched workforce.

    It has additionally played a key role in supporting vaccination efforts in the Cook Islands.

    As of September 20, some 4,711,410 doses of the vaccine have been administered, tracking close to supply, with 1,618,673 people now fully vaccinated.

    Amid the rising racket, the entitlement and denunciation, even commentators from abroad got in on the act.

    Fox News host Tucker Carlson — agitating anti-lockdown sentiment — suggested that New Zealand provided a model for how his viewers would be subjugated by Joe Biden’s administration.

    “How far can they go? […] A single covid case in New Zealand, not a death from covid, but a case of covid has shut down the entire country.”

    Writing in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, one commentator called the outbreak “poetic justice” and claimed a “once-welcoming nation is turning into an isolated dystopia, where liberties are taken away in a heartbeat and outsiders are shunned”.

    While these criticisms are couched in the language of defending civil liberties, they reduce to variants of the “learn to live with covid” argument.

    Or put another way: “The cure cannot be worse than the disease”.

    The economy must reign supreme, after all.

    Sound familiar?

    ‘Needles in my eyes’
    New Zealand’s elimination strategy relies on public buy-in. Recent polling shows that some 84 percent of the public supports the latest lockdown.

    As with previous outbreaks, Ardern has used clear, empathetic language to reassure and unify an often politically divided nation. These briefings are held in Parliament’s theatrette and usually feature the Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield.

    For many in New Zealand, the daily press briefings provide a detailed window into how authorities manage outbreaks and have been the most visible key to the elimination strategy’s success.

    “To all Aucklanders, you have done an amazing job so far protecting yourselves, your family and your community,” Ardern said on September 13, while announcing that Auckland would stay in alert level four for another week. “We owe you a huge debt of gratitude … but the cases are telling us we have additional work to do.”

    Voters rewarded Ardern’s Labour Party for this kind of humane approach and its exceptional management of the viral threat in the national elections last October, granting it an outright majority.

    The political opposition judges these briefings a political threat, and routinely denigrates them as Ardern speaking from “The Podium of Truth”.

    With the return of daily briefings on August 17, right-wing broadcasters and some journalists began to deride the briefings, at exactly the moment when trust in the authorities needed to be reinforced.

    Undermining public perceptions
    There is a difference between “holding power to account” and deliberately attempting, for purely partisan political reasons, to undermine public perceptions that the covid-19 response is being well managed.

    “I tried, I really did, but I wanted to stick needles in my eyes by about four minutes in,” said Newstalk ZB’s Kate Hawkesby, the day after the return of the 1pm press conferences. “I’d forgotten how soul-destroying it is to be spoken to like a three-year-old.”

    On the same station, Hawkesby’s husband, Mike Hosking, overdubbed turkey “gobbles” and truck horn sound effects onto an interview recorded with Associate Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall.

    Newstalk ZB’s political editor, Barry Soper, in a report about an Auckland man whose kidney surgery was postponed due to staffing shortages, loaded his story’s preamble with phrases like “their altar” and “practise what they preach”.

    He also issued a remarkable dog-whistle to New Zealand’s far-right, the kind of people who believe Ardern – a fairly mild political centrist – is turning the country into a “communist dictatorship”.

    “If you have ever wondered what it must have been like to live in a totalitarian state, then perhaps wonder no more.”

    This nonsense went on and on.

    Moaning media
    Some press gallery reporters began to complain about the length of Ardern’s introductions, while Jason Walls, a political reporter with Newstalk ZB, took to Twitter to moan about Dr Bloomfield saying “finally” two times.

    This speaks to how the media has fundamentally misunderstood what the briefings are: public service announcements.

    They are for the public. Reporters are invited as a check and, as such, should resist the urge to demand a say in how these announcements are structured.

    Even The New York Times managed to launder messaging that targeted the briefings, quoting former National Party staffer and political commentator Ben Thomas – who appears fixated on denigrating Dr Bloomfield.

    “He [Dr Bloomfield] has … a cult-like following,” said Thomas. “The country has a huge kind of parasocial devotion to him, which is very new to New Zealand.”

    Apparently, Thomas has not heard of Michael Joseph Savage, who founded New Zealand’s welfare state in the 1930s and whose framed photo hung in homes throughout the country for decades.

    Regardless, all of this is a fairly obvious partisan political effort, driven by both ideology and market dynamics.

    Many reporters and commentators at New Zealand Media and Entertainment (NZME), which owns The New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB, seem unable to accept that their preferred political tribe is no longer in power.

    More critically, in an age where the news media increasingly attempts to attract subscribers by catering to their social and political values, NZME appears to be ring-fencing centre-to-far-right eyeballs.

    It is, essentially, becoming New Zealand’s Fox News.

    A brave new world
    The sense in New Zealand is that this may be the last of the nation’s sledgehammer-style lockdowns, though one hopes officials do not retire lockdowns altogether.

    The goal is to get as many people as possible vaccinated, assess the impact of opening up, and then tentatively start easing some border restrictions, if possible.

    No doubt, certain industries – tourism, hospitality, horticulture, media – will continue to apply relentless pressure.

    Yet, when the nation reconnects more fully to the networks of global trade and travel, the super-highways of hyper-globalisation that have spread disease and death around the world, when the inevitable outbreaks come, there will be a toll.

    Glen Johnson is an independent New Zealand journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for 11 years, predominantly out of the Middle East and North Africa. His work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Seattle Times, Vice, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Reuters, Le Monde Diplomatique, Balkan Insight, Al Jazeera and The New Zealand Herald, among others. His article was first published by Al Jazeera English and is republished with the permission of the author.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Over a year after Corbyn’s resignation, the antisemitism smear campaign isn’t going anywhere

    As The Canary extensively reported, throughout Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, the corporate-owned press, Tories, and the Labour right alike targeted him with a vicious and protracted smear campaign. This campaign employed bogus accusations of antisemitism to try to derail his radical political project. This was one of the factors that led to Labour’s defeat in the 2019 UK general election, which in turn led to Corbyn’s resignation as party leader. But even now that he’s stepped down, the antisemitism smear campaign shows no signs of abating. Indeed, it has now morphed into a wider movement to attack the left more broadly. This includes, in particular, critics of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.

    The latest instalment in this sorry saga is a column in a right-wing US newspaper penned by a British comedian. It both represents a new low and highlights how the left will be the continual target of false accusations of antisemitism for the foreseeable future. We must continue to stand up to these pathetic and spurious attacks if we have any chance of rebuilding a movement for radical change.

    The US equivalent of the Sun

    On 18 September, the New York Post published a column about the left’s purported antisemitism problem by David Baddiel. Baddiel is a US-born British-Jewish comedian who is perhaps best known for his stand-up comedy and television work alongside TV personalities such as Frank Skinner. The article is preposterously titled, The progressive left now sees antisemitism as an ‘acceptable’ racism.

    This should come as no surprise given that the New York Post is a right-wing tabloid owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Naturally, it has an editorial style and political orientation similar to Murdoch’s major paper in the UK, the Sun. Like its British counterpart, it has frequently courted controversy with incendiary headlines and sensationalist reporting.

    A good start, then all downhill…

    The article actually starts off well enough, stating:

    some… think that Jews and Israel are basically the same thing. They aren’t, and to assume so is racist.

    This is certainly true. And as The Canary has argued previously, assuming that all Jews support Israel is not just racist but factually false and even defamatory. In fact, some of Israel’s major critics are themselves Jewish. They include academic experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein.

    Sadly, however, after making this worthwhile point, the article takes a sharp turn for the worse. Baddiel claims that: “The conversation around the Middle East and antisemitism has changed of late, and disturbingly so”. And to support this argument, he employs a steady string of emotive anecdotes such as cases of pro-Palestinian protesters holding antisemitic signs or shouting antisemitic slogans.

    …only to get worse

    Certainly, antisemitism should always be condemned. But as The Canary has argued before, taking the actions of a small fringe of protesters and then falsely presenting them as representative of Palestinian solidarity activists as whole is a highly dishonest tactic. It slanders the vast majority of pro-Palestinian activists who are not motivated by antisemitism but rather by outrage at Israel’s actions.

    And as The Canary has also argued, the fact that participants in the antisemitism smear campaign feel the need to engage in this deceitful tactic is itself revealing. Because it shines a light onto how desperate they are to defend Israel and/or smear friends of the Palestinian people like Jeremy Corbyn. It also demonstrates how little they have in substantive criticism of pro-Palestinian campaigners’ actual arguments.

    Relying on anecdote and generalisation, with good reason

    Baddiel then continues:

    As I describe in my new book, “Jews Don’t Count,” antisemitism is elusive: It often unfolds in unconscious codes and tropes and assumptions. One of my readers on Twitter said he was surprised by how much he had fallen into some of the traps my book outlines, commenting, “It’s the racism that sneaks past you.” But that placard doesn’t sneak past you.

    There are two important things to note with this paragraph. First, the title of his book makes an outrageous generalisation. He’s essentially saying that the left as a whole doesn’t see antisemitism as real racism. This is obviously absurd given the many Jewish supporters of Corbyn’s leadership. In February 2019, the BBC reported: “A network of Jewish Labour members has backed Jeremy Corbyn over claims the party has become “institutionally anti-Semitic” under his leadership”. And second, he relies solely on an anecdote about a (conveniently unnamed and therefore unverifiable) Twitter user to support his argument.

    Turning reality on its head

    But moreover, the reality is that research has shown that antisemitism is in fact much more prevalent on the political right than the left. This reality is also evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of antisemitic crimes in the US have been committed by far-right extremists. In parts of Europe, meanwhile, it has overwhelmingly been far-right populist/nationalist figures like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban who have made antisemitism mainstream again.

    Speaking of Orban, in May he met with British prime minister Boris Johnson. And as The Canary argued at the time, whereas Corbyn would surely have been pilloried by the corporate-owned media had he done so, Johnson largely got a free pass when he welcomed Orban into 10 Downing Street. And this reality fits within a much larger pattern within British media.

    Double standards, Islamophobia

    During the 2019 UK general election campaign, for example, Johnson again largely got a free pass on this issue just as the antisemitism smear campaign against Corbyn went into overdrive. This is despite Johnson having written a novel with some suspiciously antisemitic-seeming tropes. The media also largely ignored the fact that Tory figures, including Johnson and then-prime minister Theresa May, took part in the unveiling of a statue of Nancy Astor, who was openly antisemitic. (Needless to say, had Corbyn done any of these things we surely would have never heard the end of it from the major British media outlets.)

    And as if this weren’t enough, some of these very same Tory figures have made flagrantly Islamophobic remarks with practically zero consequence. Johnson for example, described Islamophobia as a “natural reaction” and said that “Islam is the problem”. He also once quipped that Muslim women who wear burkas “look like letter boxes”. In November 2019, meanwhile, the Guardian reported:

    Twenty-five sitting and former Conservative councillors have been exposed for posting Islamophobic and racist material on social media, according to a dossier obtained by the Guardian that intensifies the row over anti-Muslim sentiment in the party.

    In short, whereas the left gets pelted with often spurious accusations of antisemitism, Islamophobia appears to take place in the Conservative Party in an atmosphere of near total impunity. And this in turn highlights the incredible hypocrisy and venality of those who orchestrated the antisemitism smear campaign against Corbyn.

    Manipulative rhetoric

    Toward the end of the piece, Baddiel concluded the following about his motley assortment of unverifiable anecdotes:

    Thus, huge increases in hate crimes against Jews during the period of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — a 600 percent rise in incidents in the UK alone — have been met with a shrugging sense that there’s something appropriate about that. Attacks on Jews during these conflicts are seen not just as understandable, but excusable.

    Somewhere in the hive mind, certainly as you can hear it buzzing on Twitter, is the sense that Jews who experiencing violent pushback, wherever they are, whatever their views, is fitting.

    Notice the vague language such as “met with a shrugging sense” and “somewhere in the hive mind… is the sense”. He talks a lot, in other words, about what he ‘senses’. And I believe this is deliberate. It serves to manipulate his readers by smearing a deliberately loosely-defined left without naming anyone specifically. Notice also the use of the passive voice: “Attacks on Jews during these conflicts are seen not just as understandable, but excusable”. (Seen by who, exactly?)

    Together, these duplicitous and cowardly rhetorical sleights of hand have a double benefit. First, they allow him to subtly communicate the notion that large sections of the left are antisemitic without saying it quite so directly. And second, they provide him with a degree of plausible deniability should any specific individual complain at having been characterized this way.

    We shouldn’t be surprised, though. This kind of intellectual dishonesty is neither new nor clever. It’s just another garden variety version of an underhanded smear to attack the left and provide cover for Israel’s ongoing crimes. With such tactics evidently not going away, we must redouble our efforts to fight back against this shameless, politically-motivated smear campaign.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons and Flickr – Marco Verch

    By Peter Bolton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Samoa Observer: The fallacy of a nuclear submarine deal for peace

    EDITORIAL: By the Samoa Observer editorial board

    It perhaps wasn’t a remarkable coincidence that last month Samoa’s former Ambassador to the United Nations called on the United States to ratify a treaty declaring the South Pacific a nuclear-free zone.

    Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia, currently Samoa’s High Commissioner to Fiji, made the comments during a Blue Pacific Talanoa series last month to mark the August 29 International Day against Nuclear Tests.

    The treaty created by the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) was called the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone Treaty of Rarotonga of which Samoa is a signatory.

    The virtual conference also featured high profile state actors including Fiji Prime Minister and PIF Chair Josaia Bainimarama, PIF Secretary-General Henry Puna and the secretary-general for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, Ambassador Flavio Roberto Bonzanini.

    The lineup of the presenters last month underscored the significance of the issue for the region, which very much remains relevant for Samoa and other Pacific Island nations some 25 years after the last nuclear test explosion by France at the Moruroa and Fangataufa atoll test sites on 27 January 1996.

    Lest we forget the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands where the US unleashed 23 nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958 to displace the Marshallese people for ever.

    Discussions today around nuclear testing or the use of nuclear energy as an alternative energy source are likely to be associated with protest marches in the 1960s and 1970s with public opinion shifting due to the calamitous effect of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings towards the backend of World War Two in 1945.

    The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power disaster in Ukraine (which was at that time part of The Soviet Union) claimed 31 lives, though in 2005 the United Nations reportedly projected that some 4000 people would eventually die due to radiation exposure.

    In March 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake in Japan triggered a tsunami, which overran the seawall of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and flooded the nuclear reactor, triggering a failure of the emergency generators to lead to nuclear meltdowns and the leaking of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.

    Over a decade later the Japan government announced in April this year that it would release 1 million tonnes of contaminated water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific, triggering concerns within the region and leading to calls for an independent assessment.

    And it appears we in the Pacific are not out of the woods just yet — as more developed and economically affluent nations dabble with this deadly form of energy in our part of the world — despite being privy to data collected showing how thousands of lives were lost and millions displaced due to the use of nuclear weapons or energy in war as well as peacetime over the past 76 years.

    So it is disappointing to see reports emerge over the last couple of days on Australia penning an agreement with the US and the UK to acquire nuclear-powered submarines in a bid to beef up its military arsenal.

    Why has Australia become a party to a military pact that could now see conflict return to our peaceful islands some 76 years after the end of World War Two?

    We are not interested in your wars and the political ideologies that you continue to flout in your quest for global domination.

    Nor are we keen on subscribing to a train of thought promoting oligarchy where all power is centred in an individual.

    The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, when defending his country’s decision to sign the military pact with the US and the UK, is of the view that there will be peace and stability in the region due to the partnership.

    “She [Jacinda Ardern] was my first call because of the strength of our relationship and the relationship between our countries,” Morrison said when confirming that he had advised his New Zealand counterpart, reports the Associated Press.

    “All in the region will benefit from the peace and the stability and security that this partnership will add to our region.”

    So what peace and stability is Mr Morrison referring to in his defence of this agreement?

    Barring the covid-19 pandemic and its impact on our fragile and vulnerable economies, we in the Pacific are happy where we are.

    Our journeys as sovereign nations haven’t been without their challenges and we know the destinations we want to get to with the assistance of bigger nations as well as development partners.

    But signing up to a military pact behind the closet and then declaring we in the region will benefit from the peace and stability it would bring is not how friends treat each other.

    It is a relief seeing Prime Minister Ardern continuing to maintain the tradition of her predecessors by promoting a nuclear-free Pacific; probably she is the only true friend of the Pacific Islands.

    Having lived with and witnessed the ravages of war for close to a century; brought to our doorstep and into our homes without our consent; we expect global leaders to respect the various sovereign nations and their people who make up this huge expanse of an ocean that is now known as the Pacific.

    It would be appropriate for Samoa’s first female Prime Minister, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa bringing this to the attention of the international community, in her first maiden address to the United Nations General Assembly.

    Samoa Observer editorial on 21 September 2021. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The mainstream media’s demonisation of Muslims has parallels in anti-Irish sentiment

    The International Witness Campaign (IWC) remembers the last 20 years of illegal wars and “mass displacement in the Muslim world”. This period also saw an increase in Islamophobia in Britain. And as so clearly outlined by The Canary’s Maryam Jameela, the mainstream media (MSM) played no small part in spreading such hate.

    But this comes as no surprise to me. I’m Irish, and just as the MSM aided and abetted a war on Muslims, it did something similar to us. That war on the Irish raged for well over a century. And while it may not be as obvious today as it once was, it’s not completely done. Because just as ‘needs must when the devil drives’, the media renews its attacks whenever the Irish aren’t behaving the way the MSM believes we should.

    This in part is what makes the IWC so important. And it’s important we stand together to ensure the MSM can no longer victimise at will. Or if it does, it can expect one hell of a response from all of us.

    A personal account

    I’m not Muslim, so I can’t personally write about how the MSM’s support of the war on terror affected Muslims. At The Canary we have others who articulate that so elegantly. But there are parallels between Islamophobia and anti-Irish sentiment. And as an Irish person, I can explain a bit about how the war on the Irish affects us. Some English people reading this may well be thinking – “What are you on about? War on the Irish? No such thing!” Well I’m afraid there was. And quite possibly there still is. Let me explain.

    This last 20 years of an illegal war on Islam was preceded by a 30-year war in Ireland. As the British never publicly admitted they were at war, the international community couldn’t declare it ‘illegal’. But to me it was. And while some may not agree that the MSM cheer-led the British into it, it certainly supported Britain’s role in Ireland.

    That war was mainly fought in the six north eastern counties of Ireland. Some of you may call this ‘Northern Ireland’. That’s up to you, and I’ve no particular qualms with that. But since I was a child, with no political significance attached, I’ve always and most simply called it ‘the north’. Sometimes ‘the six counties’. Similarly, I’ve always and only ever said ‘Derry’. It’s easiest. And it’s understood by pretty much every Irish person.

    And therein begins one tiny part of the MSM’s war on the Irish. Because it likes to amplify criticism of those who use language Irish people are most comfortable with. Why should it matter what people chose to call any place? It always struck me as a form of imperialist conditioning and thought control. Side note, neither me nor the Irish government ever say the ‘British Isles’. I consider this to be imperialist conditioning also!

    What’s in a name?

    But the MSM is also fond of a much more dangerous form of conditioning. And this is through its biased use of the word ‘terrorist’. This was a term the media used predominantly for Irish republican paramilitaries but not for British loyalists. And it’s a war of words that continues to this day. Those loyalists are still predominantly referred to as ‘paramilitaries’ whereas republicans are ‘terrorists’. As a child, I remember clearly how the media talked about Irish terrorists murdering while British loyalists simply killed. No doubt, that must have affected the public’s perception of the war.

    And I also remember the omission of words terrorism or murder when reporting the crimes of the British state. Even as it colluded with loyalist terrorists or used its own official agents, such as the cowardly Military Reaction Force (MRF), to terrorise and murder innocent Catholics. Or even when its own soldiers gunned down peaceful protesters and murdered other innocent people.

    Britain fought a ‘Dirty War’ in Ireland using criminal and terrorist tactics against its enemy and against those who had no involvement in the conflict whatsoever. So tuning in to the MSM during that war always left me frustrated and enraged. Because to me its Orwellian narrative read as:

    While the British may have done some ‘wrong’, they did it ‘defending’ democracy. Whereas Irish republicans were completely wrong and everything they and the community they came from did was and always will be wrong. And the only reason we find them (Sinn Féin) somewhat tolerable today, is because they’ve finally agreed to implement British law.

    Such ignorance is racist

    Many years ago when I was living abroad, I remember clear as day a conversation between myself and a couple of friends. One of them was English. For some reason, I’m not sure why, someone made reference to the famine in Ireland (No! It’s not the ‘Irish famine’. We didn’t want it!). It wasn’t even a political discussion – just a few friends ‘shooting the breeze’, you might say. And it appeared as if, without giving the matter any thought at all, my English friend responded:

    serves you right for eating so many potatoes!

    I’ll never forget it. I was enraged. The absolute wretched ignorance of someone living so close, from a nation with so much blood on its hands in Ireland (and beyond), to be so feckless and clueless about the effect that famine had, and still has, on Irish people. The effect it had on her friend! Blood boiling! Disgusting! Racist!

    Like I said, it wasn’t even a political discussion, just a chat among friends. But for some reason this was her immediate response to a catastrophe that took at least one million lives and forced at least another million to emigrate. A catastrophe from which Ireland’s population still hasn’t numerically recovered. And all of this under the watchful eye of an occupying British government and army. All the while that government’s soldiers protected the boat loads of food that left Ireland as Irish people starved. Like I said, I was enraged. But not completely surprised. Because it’s an attitude I’ve encountered far too often from White English people.

    The MSM’s racist depiction of Irish people

    So I wonder, were these attitudes in any way formed by mainstream media? Because Britain’s war of words had been going on for some time. The mid-19th century saw publications like Punch depict the Irish as “ape-like” and indeed much worse. The Economist and the Times blamed us for the famine and believed us unworthy of assistance. Of course you could say that was a long time ago. So it had no influence on these attitudes. And yes, it may have been a long time ago, but unfortunately it wasn’t the end of it.

    Fast forward about 100 years and the media was at it again. The infamous ‘No Irish, no Blacks, no dogs’ signs displayed in guest houses in England up until the 1960s. Yet in October 2015, the Guardian published an unsubstantiated letter claiming these signs never existed. Total nonsense. One week later, it eventually published a rebuttal of that ridiculous claim.

    Again I hear you say “the 60s is a long time ago…move on”. And I’d love to. But what about the comments of ‘Mr. Uber Brit’ himself, the Reverend Ian Paisley? Upon his death in 2014, the BBC published a list of his most disgusting quotes. But the way it was written felt as if the BBC was eulogising him. Among such quotes was his disgustingly racist comment in 1969 about Irish Catholics, where he bellowed:

    They breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin

    One year prior, when Catholics had been burned out of their homes by loyalist gangs, Paisley blamed the Catholics for the fires, saying:

    Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were attacked and burned because they were arsenals and priests handed out sub-machine guns to parishioners

    And it wasn’t confined to British MSM. Because one CBS News article‘s condemnation of Paisley could only stretch as far as calling him a “divisive Protestant firebrand”. It went on to say he was the person Catholics “loved to hate” because of his “unflagging energy”. Indeed, it claimed Paisley’s antics were actually good for the Catholic cause! So ‘our persecution made us stronger’ eh? Where have we heard that racist trope before? But no outrage from either publication. No cries of ‘racism’.

    Yet no amount of MSM airbrushing nor comedic spin of that man will undo the carnage he inflicted with his “energy”.

    And it’s not over yet…

    In 2014, a well-known BBC TV show host in the north of Ireland openly mocked the Irish language in a face to face interview with an Irish language speaker. He did so when discussing comments of the DUP’s Gregory Campbell in the north’s parliament. Campbell had previously mocked the Irish language in parliament in what some described as borderline racism. The TV host later apologised, but it’s hard to understand how he’d have thought his outburst could ever be acceptable.

    In recent days, the Irish president Michael D Higgins declined an invitation to attend a political event in the north of Ireland ‘celebrating’ 100 years of partition on the island. Both historians and constitutional experts found he was correct to have rejected the invitation. Several online polls would appear to show an overwhelming majority of Irish people support his decision not to attend. And from the conversations I’ve had since this controversy broke, absolutely no one seems to be screaming for Higgins to change his mind.

    However, the MSM has attacked the Irish president for not attending. The British unionist position that president Higgins ‘snubbed’ them has appeared regularly in MSM headlines. Other articles gave a lot of word count to him ‘defending’ his decision or ‘encouraging’ him to reconsider. But they could have just as easily given that space to facing down his detractors. Is he just another Irish person that doesn’t know their place?

    Stand together

    So this is my experience of the MSM’s depiction of the Irish through the years. It may or may not resonate with Muslims, but it at least highlights the lengths the mainstream media goes to to demonise an already victimised community, when this ire should instead be directed at the perpetrators.

    Guns and bombs typically fall silent quicker than words. And given the worldwide online nature of media, those words last an eternity. I believe that’s the intention of the attacks. Ours must be a united resistance.

    Featured image via – Flickr – Peter K. Levy

    By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Drone strikes prove that Muslim lives hold no value for Western imperial powers

    The US recently admitted that its drone attack in Kabul, perpetrated on 29 August, killed 10 civilians. Seven of them were children. The youngest victim, a toddler named Sumaya, was only two years old.

    With this development has come a fresh wave of outrage against US military aggression. But the outrage means little without an outright rejection of the neoliberal system of which these strikes are a feature. It also means little if it comes from people who won’t acknowledge the Islamophobia inherent in the war on terror – and the dehumanisation of Muslim lives that it’s enabled and legitimised.

    The US only helps itself

    At the start of the 1987 Hollywood film Predator, American soldiers charge into an unidentified forest in Central America and indiscriminately gun down an entire encampment. Their aim was to save hostages, but their policy was to shoot first and ask questions later. More recently, The Suicide Squad similarly depicted US agents accidently gunning down a camp that later turned out to be ‘the good guys’.

    The drone attack in question is a real-life example of this approach. The attack has turned on its head the notion that the US is, or ever has been, a benevolent protector of Afghan people. But moreover, this incident is symbolic of US foreign policy for at least half a century. Acts of military aggression instigated on claims of freedom, democracy, and justice are anything but. Whether the bogeyman is communism or terrorism, the objective remains the same: protecting US interests.

    And in service of this aim, human life is reduced to collateral damage. Of secondary importance. Its loss is regrettable but necessary. The US attack on 29 August killed 10 people, none of whom were IS agents. Sorry about that, but oh well.

    The non-value of Muslim lives

    Moreover, a defining feature of drone strikes carried out over nearly two decades is that the targets have been Muslim countries. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya – all attacked in service of US interests. Although the justifications have been varied, they fall broadly under the ‘war on terror’ umbrella. And nothing exemplifies the concept of structural Islamophobia quite like the war on terror.

    These strikes have killed as many as 16,901 people so far. And as many as 2,200 are recorded as being “civilians”. These are high estimates – but even if we were to take the lower estimates of these figures, what would that prove? The lives of 910 civilians are as valuable as the lives of 2,200 civilians. 8,858 extra-judicial killings is no better than 16,901.

    And even if we consider confirmed non-civilian killings to be ‘justified’ targets, the killing of innocent civilians in pursuit of those targets is never justifiable. These people were not collateral. They were not mere statistics. They were human beings with names, and families, and aspirations. Hundreds of them were children. And regardless of the extent to which the media and Western superpowers may have dehumanised them, their lives mattered.

    We need more than outrage

    It won’t be long before the news cycle moves on to discuss something else. Drone strikes in Muslim countries, meanwhile, will continue. Nation states will keep chasing their tails, trying to fight ‘Islamist’ groups and radicalisation while refusing to look to their own disastrous policies. Yet the 7/7 bombers had said in no uncertain terms that military aggression against Muslim nations played a role in motivating them. For decades, the wars that benefit our governments have only put the rest of us at risk.

    The war on terror killed those 10 civilians in Kabul on 29 August, seven of whom were children. Outrage is no longer enough. Anyone who continues to give credence to the war on terror – and moreover the counter-terror ideology that spawned in its wake – is complicit. Anyone that continues to support politicians who have presided over these drone strikes is complicit. And anyone who supports a neoliberal status quo that tut-tuts at civilian deaths in one breath while celebrating war heroes in the next is complicit.

    Reject the system that created the war on terror, and all the senseless wars that may yet be fought in its name. The system that continues to dehumanise Muslims and render their lives worthless. Otherwise, your sympathies are meaningless.

    Featured image via YouTube – Sky News

    By Afroze Fatima Zaidi

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Richard Naidu: The Fawlty Towers government – everything they touch seems to turn to disaster

    By Richard Naidu in Suva

    In my household, the 1970s BBC comedy Fawlty Towers is on regular repeat for family entertainment.

    Only two years ago it was authoritatively ranked as the greatest British sitcom ever.

    Starring the six-foot-five manic comedian John Cleese, it depicts life in a chaotic English seaside hotel.

    Its owner, Basil Fawlty, is a man who thinks he is always right. His attempts to cover up small problems quickly turn into major disasters.

    If you are already drawing comparisons between Fawlty Towers and the current Fiji government, you would not be the only one.

    The most popular of its (only 12) episodes is called “The Germans”. A group of German tourists comes to stay. Basil doesn’t much like Germans but it’s money after all. Obsessed with not offending them he instructs everybody “don’t mention the war”.

    The more he tries not to mention the war, the worse it gets. By the end of the episode he is doing frog-marching Hitler impressions and his guests are asking: “How did they ever win?”

    This is what comes to mind when I think of our government and ethnic population data.

    The more the government tries to pretend it doesn’t exist, the more public the issue becomes.

    Statistics saga
    The media was treated last week to an 8pm peroration from Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum. Maybe he forgot that this was way past every media company’s news deadline (the editors of the Fiji Sun, however, seemed to extend theirs so they could report the speech the next day).

    The head of the Statistics Bureau was fired, marched out from his office by security personnel.

    That guaranteed another cycle of bad press as opposition parties and NGOs issued statements and social media lit up.

    Immediately the critics reminded us of what happens when the Attorney-General loses an argument. Vice-chancellors get deported.

    The media is attacked for bias. He blasts his own lawyers for losing a court case (the “winning argument” he says they missed would be laughed out of any remotely sane court).

    Why?

    Comedy aside, surely the question to ask about this disaster-prone policy is “why”? I know of no other nation in the world where the government tells the people “you are not allowed to know the ethnic breakdown of people in your own country because it is bad for you”.

    Those who question this policy are attacked by the Attorney-General as “obsessed with ethnicity”.

    But a lot of effort and drama has gone into suppressing what is usual (and critically important) demographic information. Now it has been applied to punishing the man who made it available.

    All of this seems to suggest that it is the Attorney-General, not us, who is obsessed.

    “It is a big issue,” he told the media. “If you are going to start having compassion for people based on their ethnicity, then you are losing your sense of humanity and that’s precisely what has happened”.

    Really? When did that happen?

    When did we all decide that we would “have compassion” for only one ethnic group? We’ve barely had time to understand the data.

    Mind-numbingly obvious
    It is mind-numbingly obvious why ethnic data is important to government policymaking and operations.

    As opposition MP Lenora Qereqeretabua put it two years ago, calling us all “Fijians” doesn’t make us the same”.

    New Zealand health authorities have heart disease profiles for Indo-Fijians, a tiny slice of their own society. Why? Because they are “obsessed with ethnicity”?

    No, because they understand that different ethnic groups have particular physiologies, diets and even lifestyles. They use the information to save lives.

    Anecdotal evidence suggests that in Fiji the take up of coronavirus vaccines is lower in the indigenous population than for other races.

    If everybody had the data, NGOs and health authorities could co-operate in working out why. They could upgrade the messaging and vaccination strategies to respond.

    Because as we are all reminded, no Fijian is safe until everyone is vaccinated.

    In the middle of the coronavirus it took weeks for the government to even start communicating virus information in vernacular languages.

    Why? Were they instructed not to be “obsessed with ethnicity”?

    Affirmative action
    We need to understand ethnic performance gaps in critical areas such as education and poverty, representation in business and professional life. If we don’t, how are we going to fix them?

    Are we going to pretend that cultures and lifestyles play no part in these gaps? Are we going to pretend that we can’t use targeted programmes and information to close them?

    Past governments – yes, those evil “past governments” which get blamed for everything bad — tried to respond to these gaps with “affirmative action” policies in education and economic support. They were not, in my opinion, very effective.

    In my view they addressed the symptoms, rather than the causes, of these gaps. So (in my view) it was necessary to re-think the affirmative action policies, look critically at what had gone wrong, and re-design them.

    The gaps have not gone away. But for 15 years we have not been allowed to talk about them. So that is 15 years in which we have lost the opportunity to look for new, imaginative ways to deal with the gaps.

    Fiji is like every other multiracial country in the world. Race is a natural fault line.

    You cannot paper it over by saying “the Constitution says we are all Fijians now”.

    When things go wrong, in times of economic, social and political stress, people look for simple answers to their problems.

    Sometimes they are encouraged to find those simple answers by blaming people who do not look like them or speak like them.

    And that’s when things go wrong. The explosions of 1987 and 2000 are not so long ago.

    Are we all trying to pretend that these things could not happen again?

    The current government seems to think that warning us against racism, or arresting people who criticise Bill 17, will deal with the problem (or maybe solve their own future election problems).

    Nation-building
    But like everything in the stunted and short-sighted vision they have offered us for 15 years, this government doesn’t seem to understand the essence of nation-building.

    Our government seems to think that a nation is built when everyone is brought under control by the government and ordered around.

    So, apparently, we must all call ourselves “Fijians”. We must pretend that we are all the same.

    We must not be allowed our own local governments in case they disagree with the people in Suva. We must not be allowed autonomy in the schools that in many cases our own forefathers or religious communities built.

    In the midst of our worst ever health and economic crisis, non-governmental organisations, charities and private citizens should not get government support because they cannot be controlled.

    Instead, government will do everything. Dial 161 and take your chances.

    But nations are not built like that. Nations are built by their people, helped by (not ordered around by) their governments.

    Citizens do the building
    In a well-run nation, it is the citizens who do the building. It is the citizens working together, in business, in community organisations, schools, health, in advocacy for minority groups, in town and city councils, who build.

    They know what their communities need and respond to those needs.

    The citizens, through their councils and committees and charitable trusts, argue with and criticise and demand things from the government. Because after all, the people who run the government are supposed to work for them.

    It is citizens who can come up with the ideas and demand action and support from the government to deal with the obvious ethnic differences in income and poverty levels, in education and in other critical areas of national life.

    But how can they do that when they don’t have the information and are not allowed to talk about it? All we have to talk about, it seems, is what will be the next episode in our very own series of Fawlty Towers.

    Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer, media commentator and former journalist in New Zealand and Fiji. His workmates think he is a bit like Basil Fawlty. This article was originally published in The Fiji Times and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ANZUS without NZ? Why the new security pact between Australia, the UK and US might not be all it seems

    ANALYSIS: By Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato

    We live, to borrow a phrase, in interesting times. The pandemic aside, relations between the superpowers are tense. The sudden arrival of the new AUKUS security agreement between Australia, the US and UK simply adds to the general sense of unease internationally.

    The relationship between America and China had already deteriorated under the presidency of Donald Trump and has not improved under Joe Biden.

    New satellite evidence suggests China might be building between 100 and 200 silos for a new generation of nuclear intercontinental missiles.

    At the same time, the US relationship with North Korea continues to smoulder, with both North and South Korea conducting missile tests designed to intimidate.

    And, of course, Biden has just presided over the foreign policy disaster of withdrawal from Afghanistan. His administration needs something new with a positive spin.

    Enter AUKUS, more or less out of the blue. So far, it is just a statement launched by the member countries’ leaders. It has not yet been released as a formal treaty.

    As The Conversation reports, the initiative coincides with the Morrison government deciding it is best for Australia to accelerate the production of a more capable, integrated, nuclear-powered submarine platform — at a vastly higher cost — with the US and the UK.

    Australia’s previous A$90 billion deal with the French company DCNS to build up to 12 submarines has been canned.

    The Indo-Pacific pivot
    The new agreement speaks of “maritime democracies” and “ideals and shared commitment to the international rules-based order” with the objective to “deepen diplomatic, security and defence co-operation in the Indo-Pacific region”.

    “Indo-Pacific region” is code for defence against China, with the partnership promising greater sharing and integration of defence technologies, cyber capabilities and “additional undersea capabilities”. Under the agreement, Australia also stands to gain nuclear-powered submarines.

    To demonstrate the depth of the relationship, the agreement highlights how “for more than 70 years, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have worked together, along with other important allies and partners”.

    At which point New Zealand could have expected a drum roll, too, having only just marked the 70th anniversary of the ANZUS agreement. That didn’t happen, and New Zealand was conspicuously absent from the choreographed announcement hosted by the White House.

    Having remained committed to the Five Eyes security agreement and having put boots on the ground in Afghanistan for the duration, “NZ” appears to have been taken out of ANZUS and replaced with “UK”.

    Don’t mention the nukes
    The obvious first question is whether New Zealand was asked to join the new arrangement. While Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has welcomed the new partnership, she has confirmed: “We weren’t approached, nor would I expect us to be.”

    That is perhaps surprising. Despite problematic comments by New Zealand’s trade minister about Australia’s dealings with China, and the foreign minister’s statement that she “felt uncomfortable” with the expanding remit of the Five Eyes, reassurances by Ardern about New Zealand’s commitment should have calmed concerns.

    One has to assume, therefore, that even if New Zealand had been asked to join, it might have chosen to opt out anyway. There are three possible explanations for this:

    The first involves the probable provision to Australia of nuclear-powered military submarines. Any mention of nuclear matters makes New Zealand nervous. But Australia has been at pains to reiterate its commitment to “leadership on global non-proliferation”.

    Similar commitments or work-arounds could probably have been made for New Zealand within the AUKUS agreement, too, but that is now moot.

    The dragon in the room
    The second reason     New Zealand may have declined is because the new agreement is perceived as little more than an expensive purchasing agreement for the Australian navy, wrapped up as something else.

    This may be partly true. But the rewards of the relationship as stated in the initial announcement go beyond submarines and look enticing. In particular, anything that offers cutting-edge technologies and enhances the interoperability of New Zealand’s defence force with its allies would not be lightly declined.

    The third explanation could lie in an assumption that this is not a new security arrangement. Evidence for this can be seen in the fact that New Zealand is not the only ally missing from the new arrangement.

    Canada, the other Five Eyes member, is also not at the party. Nor are France, Germany, India and Japan. If this really was a quantum shift in strategic alliances, the group would have been wider — and more formal than a new partnership announced at a press conference.

    Nonetheless, the fact that New Zealand’s supposedly extra-special relationship with Britain, Australia and America hasn’t made it part of the in-crowd will raise eyebrows.

    Especially while no one likes to mention the elephant – or should that be dragon? – in the room: New Zealand’s relationship with China.The Conversation

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


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Logic of Hegemony

    On September 8, 2021, at least five media houses and six offices of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) were vandalized in three of Tripura’s eight districts by the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP). These instances of violence come after a growth in the intensity of the Left’s political activity.   While the center-right Congress Party is in a freefall and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) is busy in the reconstruction of its state unit, CPI (M) has been consistently engaged in building a strong social base. Through sustained protest campaigns against neoliberal policies, it has been highlighting the basic grievances of Tripura’s population.

    The attacks against CPI (M) – in a crucial conjuncture of political struggle – reveal the inherent contradictions of liberal democracy. In §48 of Notebook 1, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci proposed an important distinction between two modalities of modern-day governance. On the one hand, “the ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony on the now classic terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterized by a combination of force and consent which balance each other so that force does not overwhelm consent but rather appears to be backed by the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion”.

    On the other hand, there are situations in which “the hegemonic apparatus cracks and the exercise of hegemony becomes ever more difficult. The phenomenon is presented and discussed in various terms and from different points of view. The most common are ‘crisis of the principle of authority’, ‘dissolution of the parliamentary regime’. Naturally, only the central manifestations of the phenomenon on the parliamentary or governmental level are described, and they are explained by the failure of the parliamentary ‘principle,’ of the democratic ‘principle,’ etc., but not the authority ‘principle’…Practically, this crisis manifests itself in…the ever greater instability of the governments”.

    The interpenetrative interaction between force and consent corresponds to the texture of the distinction between political society and civil society respectively. In §38 of Notebook 4, Gramsci wrote that “[this] distinction is purely methodological and not organic” because it does not find actual confirmation “in concrete historical life”. As an example of this intertwined relationship, he speaks of “what is called ‘public opinion’” in § 83 of Notebook 7, noting that it “is tightly connected to political hegemony, in other words, it is the point of contact between ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’, between consent and force”.

    Since hegemony is the specific linkage between civil society and political society, the moment of consent and the moment of force, civil society – far from being a sphere of freedom beyond the state, as is endlessly maintained by bourgeois commonsense – is an integral element of the hegemonic relations that structure the contemporary state. To establish and preserve the oppressed masses’ subalternity – their lack of historical personhood and political autonomy – the bourgeois state restricts mass activity in civil society to particular levels of passivity.

    In §90 of Notebook 3, Gramsci argued: “The historical unification of the ruling classes is in the state and their history is essentially the history of states and of groups of states. This unity has to be concrete, and thus the result of relations between the state and civil society. For the subaltern classes unification does not occur: their history is intertwined with that of ‘civil society’, it is a disaggregated fraction of it”. In other words, the active production and reproduction of subalternity for some social groups is the structural foundation for any bourgeois ruling order, be it a liberal administration or a fascist dictatorship.

    A system of political elites and passive citizenry is generated by the exigencies of legitimacy, which require that the dominant and leading class incorporate increasingly broader strata of its society in the national-popular framework – with the process of inclusion occurring in forms that definitively neutralize any threat of a graduated de-subalternization of the lower classes and their consequent transition to hegemonic politics. Thus, while subaltern social groups are present on the terrain of civil society, they occupy insignificant roles and positions, which led Gramsci to remark in §5 of Notebook 25 that “the subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unify themselves until they become the ‘state’”.

    Left parties are the social organisms that are responsible for the unification and historical subjectification of the subalterns – the process in which subaltern social groups stop being mere objects of contemplation for the discourses of the dominant classes and enact their self-representation through the formation of their own strata of organic intellectuals. This hegemonic project is the synthesis of political society and civil society, dedicated toward ending the unilateral determination of the latter by the former. When both the levels of society are unified in a political strategy, tactics are dialecticly dictated by the structural struggle for state control and the cultural-educational struggle for de-objectification.

    The two aspects of the Left’s political strategy are a direct result of the objective mechanisms which determine consciousness – the material interests and articulated identities produced by social structures, arising through the practice and lived experience of subaltern agents. These agents are involved in relations, both with each other and with social structures and practices. The presence of structural determinations – primarily in the form of the restrictions imposed by civil society and political society – means that the Left’s political practices deploy a limited set of instruments upon certain kinds of raw material in a historically specific context against institutional resistance.

    Hence, the Left’s hegemonic project is an articulated attempt to transform the existing structures and relations, to combine ethical-ideological goals of civil society with the strategic necessities of political society. Achieving dominance in political society crucially involves the objective elaboration of the independent position of the proletariat. In § 44 of Notebook 1, Gramsci said:

    A class is dominant in two ways, namely it is ‘leading’ and ‘dominant’. It leads the allied classes, it dominates the opposing classes. Therefore, a class can (and must) ‘lead’ even before assuming power; when it is in power it becomes dominant, but it also continues to ‘lead’.

    There can and there must be a ‘political hegemony’ even before assuming government power, and in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony one must not count solely on the power and material force that is given by government.

    In other words, political dominance can only be grasped concretely in terms of the unity between state power (a relation of power, the domination of one social class over another), and the state apparatus (the institutional machinery in which the relation of state power is crystallized). The logic of the aggregation and disaggregation of class alliances – with the potential to determine the predominance of one form or the other in the course of the revolutionary transformation – should be directed by this ultimate objective; i.e., political leadership of the revolutionary movement of the people as a whole.

    Considering the dialectic between force and consent, political society and civil society, it becomes clear that the CPI (M) in Tripura is engaged in a popular-democratic struggle aimed at the construction of the broad-based hegemony of progressive forces. The orientations of this dynamic are defined by a commitment to proletarian self-emancipation – the operation in which the antithesis of subalternity is forged and sustained not through a purely pedagogical and abstract assertion of working class independence but through political struggle embedded in determinate organizational forms. These movements are undergirded by the politically concrete formulations of relations of classes as constitutive components of a new historical bloc, as opposed to their perception as mere structural connections between sociological objects. How these developments will play out depends on the future amalgamation of forces in complex, uneven and contradictory conjunctures.

    The post The Logic of Hegemony first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yanis Iqbal.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Slippery slope for Fiji’s media in politically charged climate

    COMMENTARY: By Shailendra Singh in Suva

    Do the Fiji news media represent a wide range of political perspectives?
    Fiji’s national media, like media elsewhere, would cover a wider berth collectively, rather than as individual media organisations, because individual media have obvious leanings and priorities.

    But do the media, even as whole, provide a wide enough perspective?
    Not always – media coverage is discriminatory by nature, even by necessity, some would argue.

    Besides media’s commercial priorities and political biases, there are resource and logistical constraints to consider, as well as professional capacity development challenges. Inevitably, certain individuals and groups fall through the cracks.

    Generally, the political elites, and to some extent the business lobby tend to receive proportionality greater coverage because they are deemed more important and more sellable than the less prominent, prosperous or powerful in society.

    Internationally, research indicates that women are among the disadvantaged groups consigned to the margins of political coverage, along with youth.

    Then there’s the question of political parties. Are they treated equal?
    Usually, the dominant party, and/or the governing party, which can marshal the most resources, gets the lion’s share of coverage, and follows in descending order.

    In Fiji, the governing party regularly accuses some media of being anti-government, especially The Fiji Times. Meanwhile, the opposition complain that they are ignored by the Fiji Sun and the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation, whom they label pro-government media.

    Fiji media weaned on Anglo-American news tradition
    The Fiji media were weaned on the Anglo-American news reporting tradition, based on journalistic objectivity as an ethos. This calls for reporting the “facts” in a neutral, unattached manner.

    Because objectivity is neither possible nor ideal in every situation, the media can, and will take a stance on certain issues, political or otherwise. The compromise is that any such leanings are confined to the opinion sections. The news section must remain objective, unbiased and untainted by opinion.

    However, it is a slippery slope, and the lines between news and opinion have become blurred, both in Fiji and abroad. Nowadays, it is not unusual to see opinion masquerading as news.

    Different media commentators have different takes about the risks and benefits of this trend. At best it is a mixed bag, depending on the issue on hand.

    Media can support government policy out of conviction, but not out of pecuniary/financial interests. Even if they take a certain stance, media should still provide reasonably equal coverage to opposing views. Especially state media since it is tax-payer funded.

    Ideally, state media should give opposing views a fair hearing, but in the Pacific, the reality is different. State media, by policy, serve as government mouthpieces.

    The surest way to know if media represent wide a political perspective is through research. USP Journalism is examining Fiji’s 2018 election coverage data with Dialogue Fiji, and preliminary results indicate a clear bias on the part of all media – some far more than others.

    Complex variables for media bias
    While the Fiji media do have their favourites, analysing media bias can be complex because there are so many variables to consider. For one, media bias is not only intentional, but unintentional as well.

    For example, if a politician or political party refuses to talk to a certain media, then the bias is self-inflicted. The media can hardly be blamed for it.

    The bottom line is that the Fiji public know by now their media’s stances. While the media have an obligation to be fair and balanced, the public have the right to choose not to consume media that are deliberately biased.

    Do Fiji media exercise self-censorship?
    It’s obvious that media exercise a greater level of self-censorship since the 2006 coup and the punitive 2010 Fiji Media Industry Development Act. There are several reports attesting to this, including IDEA’s Global Media-Integrity indices.

    The indices show that the Fiji media have been bolder since 2013, yes, but they will not cross a certain line – the fines and jail terms in the Media Act are not worth the risk.

    While no one has been charged under the Act so far, it’s like having an axe on your neck because the lettering in the Act is quite broad. For instance, any news reports that are “against the national interest” is a breach of the Act, without clearly defining what constitutes “against national interest”.

    This means that there are any number of reports that could be deemed to be against the “national interest”.

    An ordeal in terms of stress
    Even if in the end the charges don’t stick, just going through the hearing process would be an ordeal in terms of the stress, both financial and emotional.

    In 2015, the fines and jail terms for journalists were removed from the Act. Was this impactful in reducing self-censorship? Not necessarily, because the editors’ and publishers’ penalties were retained.

    The editor, and to some extent the publisher, are the newsroom gatekeepers – they would put a leash on their journalists to protect themselves and their investment.

    So, media are trying to live with the Act and operate around its parameters. Rather than take big risks, they are taking calculated risks, such as a degree of self-censorship, so that they can live to fight another day.

    Is criticism of the government common?
    The answer is both yes and no — criticism is common with some media, not all media.

    There is not as much criticism as before the Act, but still a fair amount of criticism — under the circumstances. Private media such as The Fiji Times stand out for their critical reporting, as well as Fiji Village, more recently.

    The FBC and the Fiji Sun are on the record saying that they have pro-government policies, and this is reflected in their coverage.

    Blind eye to goverment faults
    Of course, being pro-government policy would not mean turning a blind eye to the government’s faults, or endlessly singing its praises.

    Some complain that Fiji media in general are not critical enough — such people do not fully understand the context that media work in, or appreciate the risks they take — on a daily basis.

    Government accusations usually come with the territory. But because of the Act, the government criticism is menacing. So given the context, I don’t buy fully into claims that the media are not critical enough.

    Besides its news reporting, The Fiji Times gives space to government critics in its letters columns, and hosts columnists ranging from opposition members, academics and civil society representatives.

    Could there be more criticism? Should there be more criticism?
    My answer to both is “yes”. But the criticism needs to be measured, as well as fair and balanced.

    In the last IDEA session, University of Hawai’i professor Tacisius Kabutaulaka stated that the quality of media reporting was part of media freedom. I agree — the two cannot be separated. Just as a fawning, biased media is bad for democracy, so is a negative, overly-critical media.

    Region’s toughest media law
    Fiji’s Media-Integrity graph has improved since 2013 but is still among the lowest in the region. Why so?

    Fiji has the lowest ranking in the region, simply because it has the toughest media law in the region. There was some improvement in the rankings because of the 2013 constitution and the 2014 elections. Compared to military rule, this signalled a return to a form of democratic order.

    But as long as the Act is in place, the media are government-regulated. In a fuller democracy, the media are self-regulated, as Fiji’s media used to be.

    Also, the two-day media coverage blackout on the 2018 elections would have affected Fiji’s ranking as well. The ban was seen to restrict political debate at a crucial time.

    The contempt of court charge against a government critic and The Fiji Times sedition trial all affected Fiji’s rankings.

    How can Fiji media improve?
    Addressing the issues concerning the Act could be a starting point. For one, the Act was imposed on the media; for another, it has not been reviewed in over 10 years.

    I suggest a roundtable of stakeholders to review and update the act. The government, the media and other interested parties can get together to find common ground and apply it in the Act to come up with a more acceptable arrangement.

    Shailendra B Singh is associate professor in Pacific journalism and coordinator of the University of the South Pacific Journalism Programme. This is extracted from Dr Singh’s recent presentation on International IDEA’s Democratic Development in Melanesia Webinar Series 2021.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Boycott Vaccine Mandates and Covid Passports

    Just as many predicted over a year ago, the rollout of the vaccine for Covid-19 and its implementation has introduced intense polarization and social segregation through the implementation of mandatory vaccination for employees and vaccine passports. Medical authoritarianism and the burgeoning biosecurity state are here, expanding in real time. In New York City, San Francisco, France, and Italy, vaccine passports are mandatory for entrance to nearly any indoor public venue: restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas, and more. Also, hundreds of corporations, colleges, federal and state agencies are mandating rushed emergency experimental injections with no long-term knowledge of side effects.

    Yes, we’re all well aware that the Pfizer vaccine just got full FDA approval. Did anyone think that it wouldn’t? Did anyone in the media bother to ask if the forces of power, money, and technocratic medical tyrants would back down and not give full approval, considering how these forces have managed to shape reality and scare to death half of the population over a disease with a very low mortality rate? Regardless of your opinion of how severe the disease is, mandates and passports are incontrovertibly coercive, tyrannical measures. If the vaccines do not stop transmission, which the medical authorities have already admitted to varying degrees, then what is the point of these mandates and passports?

    Furthermore, the vaccine passport will effectively be discriminatory since minorities are less likely to get the vaccines. African Americans especially have lower vaccination rates, for good reasons, the US medical establishment experimented on black populations throughout the Cold War and even beyond. It’s not difficult to see the ramifications of bio-digital segregations. One does not need a PhD or medical degree; in fact, these “credentials” seem to blinker one’s view in support of this new form of discrimination.

    In the view of what we might term the technocracy, or perhaps the emerging biosecurity establishment, it is virtuous to separate the “clean” vaxxed from the supposedly disease-carrying, uneducated, lower-classes who won’t take these experimental shots.

    All of the power and money, all the “Science ™” snowballed into an unstoppable corporate/government momentum which shows no signs of letting up. All that propaganda, the deliberate lies about mask efficiency (they don’t work) and vaccine holiness (they don’t prevent transmission) they’ve been shoving down the public’s throats for over a year and a half? Yeah, the nanny-state politico-medical tyrants are not going to give up this narrative without a fight. They are doubling down on the fear and quest for total obedience and control. It suits late-stage capitalism just fine if small and medium sized businesses go under and the excess labor supply of the unemployed are evicted and go hungry. They are extraneous to the monopoly cartels which run the “economy”, which is run by giant tech corporations, the stock market, the military-industrial complex, and the FIRE sector, multinational conglomerates who operate with almost no competition in nearly every industry.

    There is no way to fight back against these abuses of power through the court system. In my opinion, the most rational approach would be to boycott, in any way possible, the corporations and public institutions that are going along with vaccine mandates and passports. Part of this involves the vote with your dollars approach. Hurting the corporate lemmings and technocrat sociopaths in their wallets and lack of tax revenues are the only things they will understand.

    If you were thinking of traveling to Europe, skip France and Italy. Guess what?  If globally millions of tourists suddenly gave the middle finger to these two countries and vacationed elsewhere, the dent in lost revenue and GDP might actually have some effect on the political establishment. In France and Italy citizens are rightly fed up with protests every day against the passports, and many vaccinated people have burned their vaccine papers in solidarity.

    Similarly, if people in the US abstained from traveling to and spending money in NYC and SF, every restaurant owner, museum board, theater, and small business would then put immediate pressure on city, state, and federal politicians to ban vaccine passports, hopefully for good. If millions of people refuse to shop and do business with companies that have mandatory vaccination requirements for their employees, it would also put immense pressure to relent.

    Investors should also divest from corporations that insist on mandating vaccines for employees. It may, in fact, be legal for companies to do so, but it is frankly coercive and is a sort of crossing of the Rubicon, blurring one’s private life and medical choices with public duties, to create a new type of “good citizen”, a biopolitical subject serving capitalism with zero critical thinking skills.

    For those in the workforce facing mandates, such as federal/state public employees and health care workers, if possible it is definitely worth considering if another career/job can be found. If enough teachers, nurses, etc., quit or go on strike against their employee mandates, pressure can be applied and the mandates could potentially be lifted.

    It’s worth pointing out that the goalposts continue to be changed from slowing the pace of transmission to eradicating the virus- from two weeks to flatten the curve (tacitly acknowledging that coronaviruses cannot really be stopped) to mandates for wide swaths of public and private work, as well as military and police presence on the streets of Australia, to name one of the most obvious police state measures. The goalposts are changing to determine our “good citizen” status. Before, one simply had to go along to get along, obey the laws, pay taxes, and keep one’s head down; now, not only are we expected to do and say the right things, but to inject the right experimental drugs into our bodies.

    My humble prediction is the goalposts are going to continue to move. The game is akin to the frogs boiling slowly in the pot; by consenting to our own freedom being curtailed and our own imprisonment, the establishment gets what it wants without having to crack down using excessive force and coercion. The innate desire to have access to public spaces, to go on vacation, will lead many people ignorant of the wider implications to accept these new dystopian measures.  The horizon of getting “back to normal” will recede faster as new variants naturally emerge, as viruses tend to do, and this will continue to be used as a new scare tactic, even as death rates effectively returned to normal four months ago (May of 2021) in the US, and many other countries show no more excess deaths, or none outside normal yearly variations, as well in 2021.

    The virus is now endemic, but the powers that be are going to insist upon using it as a weapon for total control over the population. We’re through the looking-glass, we now have a form of “scientism” which is irrefutable no matter how unsettled the truth really is. Statistics such as death counts from Covid are unreliable, with doctors confessing to listing Covid-19 as the primary cause of death when it’s not- dying “from Covid” is conflated as dying “with Covid”. Deaths from the lockdowns are not seriously considered, even though many scientists are on record stating that the lockdowns led to a large chunk of the excess deaths.

    Frankly, the near future looks pretty bleak for the US and the chances to have an open, honest dialogue about the seriousness of the pandemic, the capitalist world-system which stands to gain by using a 21st century tech-driven shock doctrine, and the police-state that will be built on the back of the panic caused by incessant propaganda. The fault lines are deepening and Democrats yammer to “trust the science” without any understanding themselves, and are willing to demonize anyone who doesn’t get an experimental jab or wear two masks while alone in their car; while Republicans continue to frame the “reopen the economy” debate in terms of those supposedly wonderful job-creating corporations, all the while being willing to sell the average worker out for an extra buck or two. Both parties are more than willing to screw over the poor, minorities, and working classes; if either cared about their citizens’ lives they wouldn’t throw people out into the streets via the mass evictions that are already underway.

    As imperial decline and rot deepen, and the domestic surveillance apparatus pulls its noose tighter against our necks, our best bet to resist these freedom-crushing decrees is to deploy citizen power, mass protests, and coordinated direct action against inhumane vaccine mandates and police-state vaccine passports.

    The post Boycott Vaccine Mandates and Covid Passports first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Jason Brown: 9/11 and a mango dawn – and here’s to the end of being Pacific pawns

    COMMENTARY: By Jason Brown in Auckland

    Twenty years ago, I was on a plane from Rarotonga to Auckland. Lovely flight, with a path at the end I had never experienced before.

    Almost from the tip of the North Island, down to Tamaki Makaurau — the rising sun bathing the hills and coastline in rich, almost mango, orange. So rich and orange that for a second I wondered if I had mistakenly got on a flight to Aussie, not Aotearoa.

    It was the most stunningly beautiful sight.

    Half asleep from the then usual awake-all-night, early morning departure, dawn arrival, I floated through duty free and customs, not noticing anything really different — until our old Cook Islands Press photographer Dean Treml who was on the same flight came up looking alarmed.

    “There’s been an attack in New York – two planes have flown into the World Trade Towers,” or words to that effect. I was like, “..whaaat? No …Really??”

    He nodded, hurried off.

    I blinked a bit, shook off my disbelief, and forgot about it as we moved through the lines, looking forward to seeing my younger son, Mikaera.

    He was there in arrivals. Rushed to give my three-year-old a kneeling hug. Smiled up at his grandparents.

    ‘Stay calm’
    “Stay calm,” the grandfather told me, “and don’t get upset, but terrorists have attacked the Twin Towers in America,” or words to that effect. “It’s on the screen behind you.”

    In those days, news was still played on the big multiscreens over the arrival doors. I turned, looked, and caught sight of a jet slicing into one of the towers. Over the rest of the day, that scene, and its twin, were replayed over and again, as a stunned world witnessed an unthinkably cinematic display of destruction.

    And then, hours later, one by one, the towers dropped.

    Like billions of others, I watched, in my case in between playing with my young son, alone at his mum’s home, looking over his shoulder at the television.

    A few times it got too much. Made sure Mikaera was okay with toys and/or food, then stepped outside to the garage to cry, the replay sight of people jumping from the smoking towers to their deaths; hiding my tears and low moans of stunned despair.

    Big breaths, wipe away the tears, back inside to play with blocks and trucks, and … planes. One eye on the TV.

    Nearly 3000 people died that day. Almost all Americans, with a few hundred other nationalities.

    Since then?

    Tragedy of so-called ‘War on Terror’
    Millions of non-Americans have died in the Middle East, mostly from economic blockades resulting in deaths from starvation and treatable diseases. Hundreds of thousands dying in a so-called “War on Terror” that served to produce tens of thousands more “terrorists”, vowing to avenge the deaths of their children, siblings, parents, aunties, cousins and uncles.

    Western states have spent trillions of dollars, weapons dealers making obscenely fat profits on the back of jingoistic propaganda from news media which, to this day, counts Western deaths to the last man and woman, but barely mentions any civilian deaths from their bullets, bombs and drones.

    Profits that have been used to bribe officials at home and abroad, via a network of secrecy havens such as New Zealand and the Cook Islands, but mostly via American states like Delaware, or financial centres like London in the UK, flushing trillions more through millions of secret companies for the benefit of a few.

    9/11, they said, changed everything.

    Twenty years later, with the war on terror a complete and utter failure, everything certainly has changed.

    For the worse.

    Western financial hypocrisy
    Trillions continue to be hidden, including with our help, legally or otherwise. Legality being a very moveable feast. Western states pick on tiny offshore banking centres like the Niue, Samoa and the Cook Islands, while ignoring the gaping holes in their own banks and finance centres.

    Governments like New Zealand and Australia fund corruption studies in the Pacific, as one regional example, but not their own.

    And, like little children, we are still over-awed when famous people come to visit our homelands, happily posing and smiling in delight whenever big country people deign to visit our shores.

    Unlike when then Tahitian president Gaston Flosse came to Rarotonga in 1996, and Cook Islanders protested nuclear testing, for example, the Cook Islands happily welcomed then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012.

    Even media people and supposed journalists lined up to grin, to grip the hand of a leader reported as once asking about using a drone to assassinate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

    In fact, in 1996, I was one of those people, “meeting” Clinton on a rope line at the Atlanta Olympics when I was “Press Attache” for our Olympics team.

    “Greetings from the South Pacific!” I said cheerily when she offered her hand to me, among a hundred or so others who had suddenly gathered.

    “Outstanding!”, she replied, equally delighted.

    Of course, none of us knew then what was coming.

    But we know now.

    Cook Islands in lockstep
    And still the Cook Islands walks in lockstep with our powerful neighbours, a “dear friend” of Australia’s ruling party and its unbelievably corrupt mining, military and media networks.

    Two decades later, the Homeland seems yet to learn any lessons from 9/11, yet to admit any responsibility for its part in enabling #corruption, money laundering and terrorism which breeds extremism, hate, and death, on all sides.

    Instead, our government works against the interests of our own region, a Pacific pawn used and abused in age-old colonial tactics of divide et empera – divide and conquer – a phrase going back over two millennia.

    Today our peoples are further misled by a tsunami of fake news – misinformation and disinformation – from mysteriously well-resourced sources. Distracted from real responses to the #covid19 pandemic, which distracts further from even bigger threats from global warming — or “climate change” as it was known for so long, before leaders started only recently admitting we face a “climate crisis” — but still locked to “market mechanisms” as a supposed solution.

    So, what are the solutions?

    Fight fake news. Fight corruption. Fight the hateful, extremist, death cults hiding behind religion, especially within the largest, most powerful faith in the world — Christianity.

    Fight for a world where shorelines are bathed in mango dawns, and our children don’t grow up watching death replayed every single day of their lives.

    Jason Brown is founder of Journalism Agenda 2025 and writes about Pacific and world journalism and ethically globalised Fourth Estate issues. He is a former co-editor of Cook Islands Press. This article is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Kahlia Strong: Confessions of a ‘token’ Tongan – the rest is up to you

    This Tonga Language Week, Pacific Media Network asked several people how they are celebrating being Tongan. PMN news journalist Khalia Strong shares her story.

    “Grandma, can I say I’m ‘afakasi?”

    I’m in the kitchen of my grandmother’s home on the North Shore, preparing for a video journalism piece on the Tongan tau’olunga.

    “No, you’re palagi”, she says quietly, turning to fill up the kettle for a cup of tea.

    “You don’t speak Tongan.”

    She’s right, and it’s a blunt truth I’ve struggled with as I’ve tried to reconnect with my culture as an adult.

    It’s a truth that makes me feel like I need to justify my Tongan-ness, and almost stopped me telling people my cultural heritage, or even applying for my current job.

    But, it’s there, deep down.

    Statistics NZ 2018 figures show just 40 percent of New Zealand-born Tongans can speak the language, that figure dwindling from 56 percent in 2006.

    Hearing stories of my history, I can see where my own family has leaned away from some of their Tongan roots and done things the “palagi way” to access opportunities and get ahead.

    ​Back in the day
    My grandmother, ‘Alieta Strong was born on 6th January 1934. Her mother was Louveve Tohi and she was the 6th child of 10 children. Her father was Robert Hurrell.
    As a young woman, she made a vow that she would either marry a palagi or be a nun. Luckily for us grandchildren, she caught the eye of Michael Strong who was the manager at her work in Nuku’alofa, and they were married in St Paul’s Church in 1955.
    Grandmother's wedding
    My grandmother Alieta’s wedding, walking on the tapa cloth that was made by her mother, Louveve Tohi. 1955. Image: Kahlia Strong

    I don’t mean any disrespect, but I’m not entirely sure if it was a love match. They had three children before moving to New Zealand in 1965, to a one-bedroom bach in Torbay.

    My grandfather Michael, holding my dad Gordon, 2, with Grandma Alieta and their one-year-old daughter Connie, c. 1958. Image: Kahlia Strong

    My father, Gordon, remembers being the only dark-skinned boy at Torbay school when he arrived at the age of 9.

    To settle into their new country, he and his siblings were only allowed to speak English at home, and only remembers a few words of Tongan now.

    My dad, Gordon Strong, 9, in their Torbay home, c. 1965. Image: Kahlia Strong

    This attitude was still there in my youth, after many requests to learn the language or Tongan weaving and handicrafts, they were abandoned after first attempts.

    My grandmother would make beautiful woven bags and hats to sell at the markets, using her own earnings to eventually purchase a car in New Zealand.

    Childhood memories
    My best memories of Tongan culture stem from my grandmother, and her home near Waiake beach, where she died in 2011.

    She stayed connected to our family in the islands, going back to visit every year or so, and would often be picking someone up from the airport, and there always seemed to be a relative staying whenever we visited.

    As a child, I remember when Telecom would do their special prices to call the islands, and Grandma would go through her black book, filled with her neat, precise handwriting.

    She’d be on the phone for hours.

    We’d pick up the phone downstairs and hear her and an Auntie gossiping away, followed by, “Oi! Get off the phone, you lot!” and we’d run away giggling.

    Every January for her birthday we had an umu with a big puaka tunu on a spit roast.

    There would be music and dancing and so much laughter.

    Aunties would kiss my cheeks and uncles would bite my ear.

    I’d scurry off with my cousins and we’d try to figure out how we were related, then give up and go running off to find more food or scab $2 from one of the rich uncles.

    My Tongan memories are filled with music and colour, family, and food.

    Pictures of my Grandma always showed her dressed beautifully, often with a grandchild in her arms, surrounded by family.

    Grandmother Alieta with her handicrafts at market. Image: Kahlia Strong
    Grandma Alieta with my brother Jason, 3, and me aged one, 1990. Image: Kahlia Strong
    Present day
    ​Our household’s best effort for Tongan Language Week goes to my partner, who is an Englishman and doesn’t speak a lick of Tongan.

    “Malo peto Khalia,” he says in a text, proudly repeating it when I walk in the door after a morning spent reading the news on 531pi, “malo peto”.

    Although my nine-year-old chickened out of saying “Malo e lelei” in his class zoom, I can’t force him without leading by example, so I’ve signed up for online Tongan classes. They start in a few weeks with the Pasifika Education Centre.

    As an adult, it is with great regret that I didn’t make more effort to learn the language, and converse with my Grandma in her mother tongue.

    I am more familiar with words in Samoan and Te Reo, so the Tongan language seems more interrupted and punctuated than other flowing, vowel-heavy Pacific languages.

    Being just under a quarter Tongan, I can pass for a regular Kiwi, and am aware of the privilege this has afforded me, but looking palagi doesn’t cancel out DNA.

    So, I’d encourage my New Zealand-born non-speakers out there, it’s on you now. Speak to your aunties and cousins, hear their stories.

    Tell them it’s OK to speak their island language around you. Sign up for some classes or learn some words or songs.

    You can’t judge someone for where they are in their language journey, because everyone starts at different places, but the rest is up to you.

    ‘Ofa atu.

    Image: Kahlia Strong
    • In memory of my dear Grandma, Alieta Strong.

    Republished from Pacific Media Network with the permission of the author.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • After 9/11, I was kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, then ‘released’ – but I have hope

    The first time I heard about 9/11 was on the radio at a restaurant in Afghanistan, where I was working as a research assistant. I wasn’t following any news, and at that time in Afghanistan there was no TV or internet. People used radios to listen to the outside world.

    I’m from Yemen, and I couldn’t imagine a skyscraper 110 floors tall. In fact, it was the first time I heard that such buildings even existed. The tallest building in Sana’a was 25 floors — that was a skyscraper by Yemeni standards.

    At that time, Afghanistan was a mix of a lot of the past and a little of the present, mostly represented by cars. The land, damaged buildings, scraps of war machines that harvested countless lives, and general destruction and casualties already told a brutal and sad tale of Afghanistan’s past and what would shape its future.

    Attack

    When I heard on the radio that airplanes had flown into buildings in the United States, I couldn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the attack, what it meant, or how many victims there would be. The United States was all the way around the world and didn’t have anything to do with me.

    Most Afghan people, along with the foreigners who lived in Afghanistan, had no idea what had happened either. Life continued as usual, until suddenly word got out that a Saudi charity organisation that worked in Afghanistan had received instructions to immediately liquidate and distribute everything it had then leave.

    My friend was working for the organisation so I agreed to help him and take some aid, logistics, and medicine to a nearby hospital. We then planned to leave Afghanistan in the organisation’s car.

    It never once crossed my mind that 9/11 would impact me. I was 18 years old and traveling outside of Yemen for the first time. I knew very little about the West. I didn’t really know the difference between the United States and the United Nations.

    My dream was simply to finish my mission, get back to Yemen, and leave to one of the Gulf countries to finish my education and work there.

    Classified by the government

    Instead, I was kidnapped in Afghanistan and sold to the Americans. They said I was an “Al Qaeda general”, and the United States government classified me as an “Al Qaeda commander” and a “9/11 insider”.

    I don’t consider myself any different from the many Muslims around the world who must live under the war on terror. But I do consider myself fortunate compared to those who have lost their lives, lost their families, or lost their limbs as collateral damage in ground wars, air strikes, and drone strikes.

    I was tortured and imprisoned for almost half of my life at Guantanamo and my life changed forever. I still live with the stigma of Guantanamo. And this past hinders my daily life in Serbia, where I have been placed in the detainee “resettlement” programme, and where I am still treated as a terrorist even though I have been cleared of any crime.

    But I appreciate that I’m alive.

    Turning point in history

    9/11 was a turning point in history. It accelerated the war on Islam and Muslims and on those who understand or sympathise with us. For the last two decades, we have faced state-sponsored crimes against us in the name of the war on terror.

    9/11 was also presented as the beginning of history. But people forget that the United States was deeply involved in what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s. There it paid Muslims to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union which helped lead to its downfall.

    The current US policy towards Muslims and Islam leaves an especially bitter taste if you realise that, thanks to Muslims, the US won against the Soviets in Afghanistan without a single American life being lost.

    9/11 was a product of United States foreign policy and a long-standing conflict between the US and al-Qaeda. But it has been employed and misused against Muslims more broadly all over the world.

    It served as a framework which has enabled countless senseless deaths, and US and NATO invasion and aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East and Asia, as well as across Africa.

    It has also been waged against Muslims who live in the United States, UK, and Europe. This has been done through counter-extremism and counter-terrorism policies that profile people based on their religion and undermine justice.

    Justice

    But despite what I see, and what I’ve been through as a result of 9/11, I still believe in justice.

    The innocent people whose lives were lost on 9/11, and their families, deserve justice. I don’t think that the 9/11 victims or their families would approve of the killing, kidnapping, and torture of people around the world that has followed from an already terrible event.

    In fact, I don’t think any member of the 9/11 families would want other innocent people to suffer and to experience the pain they felt from having a loved one taken from them in such an unjust way. I imagine the first responders, the firefighters, the police officers, the medics, and all the others who were lost on 9/11 would not support the distortion of justice, the sacrificing of values, and the taking of innocent lives to be done in their names.

    Let us remember that those who lost their lives on 9/11 and their families are not the only victims of 9/11. Over a period of twenty years, there are now victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Guantanamo, and many countries around the world. Countless people have suffered silently at the loss of innocent lives. They experience untold 9/11s every single day, with no country to defend them or media to cover their stories. They deserve justice too.

    To that end, I’ve recently joined CAGE in its global campaign to do exactly that. The International Witness Campaign, which I’m proud to support, will aim to ask the questions that we must answer: how do we truly arrive at justice?

    Every single life is sacred. I pray every day for justice and peace for all humanity.

    Featured image via Mansoor Adayfi

    By Mansoor Adayfi

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Top global accolades for USP, the ‘captain’ and Pacific regionalism

    OPEN LETTER: By Elizabeth Reade Fong

    A ranking of an institution of higher education by Times Higher Education (THE) is the ultimate recognition of excellence that an institution can aim for.

    The University of the South Pacific (USP) has achieved two accolades by being ranked for 2022 and secondly being the only institution of higher education in the Pacific to gain this recognition.

    All USP graduates of the 12 member country states can look back and appreciate the wisdom of the decision to establish the USP with the main campus at Laucala.

    Fiji as the host of the main campus continues to be the largest beneficiary in terms of graduates and financial income and has much to be grateful for.

    I am an alumni and a grateful Fijian!

    This kind of recognition takes a team and every team has a captain.

    Vice-chancellor and president Professor Pal Ahluwalia is the captain that took the university across “the finishing line” that won us “gold”.

    In this journey he has acknowledged the contribution of the many who played a part in this achievement that is about all of us Pasefikans.

    Congratulatory messages have been received from alumni, current and former staff members, stakeholders and generous donors inclusive of messages from the member governments of Nauru, Samoa and Tuvalu to date.

    The silence from the leadership of the country hosting the largest campus that also leads the Pacific Islands Forum is deafening to say the least!

    Should we live in hope?

    Nevertheless this will not detract from USP’s status as the most successful example of regionalism in the Blue Pacific as it continues to “Shape Pacific Futures”.

    Long live USP!

    Dr Elizabeth Reade Fong is chief librarian at the University of the South Pacific. This letter was first published in The Fiji Times on 10 September 2021.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The ‘war on terror’ couldn’t have happened without mainstream media

    As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, The Canary has partnered with advocacy organisation CAGE. The organisation’s International Witness Campaign is commemorating 20 years of the war on terror.

    Along with over 50 other partners, we’ll be rolling out coverage and events over the next 5 months. They’ll look to critique and analyse the role of media outlets in enabling the war on terror to continue. Whilst recent months have seen the US withdrawal from Afghanistan (and the almost immediate takeover of the Taliban), this by no means signals the end of the war on terror.

    Infamous

    War criminal George Bush famously declared a “war on terror” when a number of mostly Saudi nationals bombed the twin towers in 2001. This declaration of war on a concept has characterised the domestic and foreign policies of Western governments over the past two decades.

    There’s plenty to focus on in this area – weapons of mass destruction that never existed; CIA torture and rendition; the continued operation of Guantánamo Bay; illegal wars. It’s unmistakeable that the war on terror has not been fought on battlefields alone. It’s also been played out in workplaces, schools, hospitals, and prisons. In other words, it’s been a war that’s about domination and control of Muslims in every possible arena.

    As we look back over the past 20 years, one element that’s been instrumental in the course of the war on terror has been mainstream media. Public opinion has swayed over the years, and appetite for war has been sporadic. Many protestors came together to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much work has, and is, done to protest and resist Islamophobia. But much of this work has had to focus on repeated racism from the media.

    Manufacturing consent

    A functioning news media industry should question power, not work in service of power. Unfortunately, that generally isn’t the case in British media, and it certainly isn’t the case when it comes to coverage of Muslims. Outlets across the political spectrum are guilty of fanning the flames of Islamophobia and racism. It’s no accident that the phrase “manufacturing consent” often pops up in these discussions. Domestic and foreign policy decisions don’t happen in isolation. They happen within the context of a range of media outlets that prop them up.

    A 2018 report from the Centre for Media Monitoring found:

    Almost 1 in 4 online articles (23%) misrepresent an aspect of Muslim behaviour or belief

    The Muslim Council of Britain has a running tally of misrepresentation and outright hostility towards Muslims. The need for such reports and initiatives has come from domination of the media landscape by the same, few wealthy voices. Their wealth has brought them their connections. This, in turn, equips them to dominate propaganda about Muslims.

    In 2019, the outgoing chairperson of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) Alan Moses said:

    The portrayal of Islam and Muslims in the British press has been the most difficult issue facing the press watchdog in the past five years.

    Warmongers

    I don’t quote these reports and statistics to give legitimacy to the problem I’m describing. The fact that even white-dominated organisations like IPSO are noticing these trends tells us the scale of the issue. Muslims have intimate knowledge of how the media has used fear to whip up a public frenzy against them. And governments have instrumentalised this frenzy to push through their actions in the war on terror.

    At this stage it’s almost pointless to offer up headlines and front pages to describe the media’s complicity. It’s become so ingrained in British culture that it’s now part of the fabric of this country. Governments may well have declared the war on terror, but it’s been the media that has kept the war drum beating.

    Fear and ignorance

    In his 1981 book Covering Islam, scholar Edward Said writes:

    Far from challenging the vulgar stereotypes circulated in the media, the academic experts on Islam are… status symbols of relevant authority on Islam, and also dependent on the whole system constituting and legitimating their function within it: and it is this system which the media, in their reliance upon stereotypes based on fear and ignorance, reflect.

    Whilst Said was discussing academics, the pattern of thinking he describes is also relevant for journalists. Mainstream media is full of white people who have no experience, relevance, or expertise to speak on Islamophobia or racism. And yet, they have the loudest voices and largest platforms. They peddle ill-disguised support for government policies which seek to make all Muslims the target of increased securitisation and suspicion.

    Some journalists have neutralised their own capacity for critique in order to serve as cogs in the machinery of war that they uphold. They rely on stereotypes that keep the wheels of fear and ignorance turning. It’s not in their interests to question power, no matter how many Muslims are scapegoated, tortured, surveilled, or abused.

    Power

    Even in the 80s, well before 9/11, Said warned about the dangers of media outlets misrepresenting and obscuring power:

    Underlying every interpretation of other cultures–especially of Islam–is the choice facing the individual scholar or intellectual: whether to put intellect at the service of power or at the service of criticism, community, and moral sense.

    What Said is describing here is the choice that commentators face when they report on the ‘war on terror.’ Are you going to work in the service of power? Or are you going to work in the spirit of critical thinking, community ties, and with a sense of morality?

    What we’ve seen over the past 20 years from mainstream media outlets is a consistent commitment to racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia. Indeed, it’s a choice which allies itself to the racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia of any British government over the past 20 years.

    Featured image via The Canary

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Graham Davis: In the stars? It’s in the polls, Rabuka’s final political twist

    COMMENTARY: By Graham Davis

    “So many detractors were saying, ‘no you won’t get it, the Supervisor of Elections won’t allow it’. I said, ‘well let him just do his work’. And I believe in the goodness of the man. We got it and we’re happy.” — Sitiveni Rabuka, CFL/FijiVillage interview. 8 September 2021

    The leader of the new People’s Alliance gives Frank Bainimarama and Aiyaz Sayed-Kahyum has given yet another masterclass in how to win friends and influence people in the Fijian context.

    Of course, he doesn’t necessarily “believe in the goodness” of Elections Supervisor Mohammed Saneen, who tried to prevent him from contesting the 2018 election and will do his damnedest to try to exclude him from the 2022 election.

    Or maybe he does. It doesn’t matter because Sitiveni Rabuka has spoken well of someone who everyone regards as his nemesis and in doing so has presented himself as magnanimous and humble.

    Fijians like that and Rabuka knows it. Which makes it all the more astonishing that Frank Bainimarama and Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum still don’t know it after 15 years in power.

    It was Rabuka’s humility and forbearance in the face of an ordeal in the courts before the 2018 election that triggered a wave of community sympathy that manifested itself on election day and took the Bai-Kai duo to the brink of defeat.

    Readers of my website will know that in the immediate aftermath of the election, I tried and failed to get Bainimarama to realise that the FijiFirst government’s appearance of arrogance — its vei beci, viavialevu attitude to everything — was the prime cause of its electoral collapse.

    But they still don’t get it. And having given them a fright in 2018 but still not having learnt their lesson, I suspect that the Rabuka juggernaut is going to bear down on them in the coming months and flatten them like toads on hot bitumen.

    Why? Because the Fijian people are fed up with them, not just the usual burden of longevity in government and people tiring of their increasingly tired faces but a visceral distaste for the manner in which they conduct themselves.

    Always right. Never wrong. Always contemptuous. Never, ever humble.

    Fiji opinion poll FS 01-09-2021
    Sitiveni Rabuka is the front runner to win the next election, presuming it is ever held. The Western Force/Fiji Sun poll published in the September 1 edition of the Fiji Sun. Image: Grubsheet

    Even some of my closest friends say Rabuka cannot win — that the burden of his two coups in 1987 and the hatred and bitterness that lingers — especially among Indo-Fijians – is too much of a cross to bear, let alone such things as the fiasco of the National Bank collapse under his watch when he was eventually elected prime minister.

    But politics is more about perception than substance wherever it is practiced in the world. And is equally true that electors have notoriously short memories, never mind that a great many voters weren’t even born when Rabuka held the reins of power.

    I am coming to the view that not only can Rabuka win the next election but probably will.

    For many Fijians, the events of 1987, let alone Rabuka’s period in government, aren’t a part of their lived experience. In any event, Bainimarama and Khaiyum have yet to learn the most basic lesson of politics — that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them.

    And these two conjoined twins — with their chronic hubris and arrogance — are doing everything they possibly can to lose.

    I’ve chosen the accompanying selection of photos to illustrate Rabuka’s extraordinary journey from coup-maker in 1987 to the benign figure that the opinion polls now tell us is set to make the most extraordinary comeback in Fijian political history. Provided of course, that Bainimarama and Khaiyum keep to the election timetable and the people still get their say.

    Sitiveni Rabuka
    Grubsheet montage of Sitiveni Rabuka photos. Image: Grubsheet

    There’s “Rambo” – the smiling tough guy and defender of iTaukei rights who forced thousands of Indo-Fijians to leave Fiji post 1987. And there’s Rabuka as Prime Minister in the 1990s forming a warm partnership with the main Indo-Fijian politician, Jai Ram Reddy, that produced the 1997 Constitution and eventually led to Rabuka’s defeat.

    There’s the “treasonous” soldier who abolished the monarchy and took Fiji out of the Commonwealth when it wouldn’t accept his takeover. And there is the barefooted Prime Minister at Buckingham Palace making a formal apology to HM the Queen for his act of lese majeste and it being graciously accepted.

    The man has had an incredible journey, that’s for sure. And maybe, just maybe, he is going to cement his place in Fijian history next year with an incredible final twist.

    Is it in the stars? It doesn’t matter. It’s already in the opinion polls.

    And you can bet your last saqamoli that it’s keeping Frank Bainimarama and his puppet master, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, awake at night with agonising intimations of their own political mortality.

    Fiji-born Graham Davis is a Walkley Award and Logie Award-winning Australian-based journalist and media consultant. He is publisher of the Grubsheet blog on Fiji affairs. This commentary is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • A View From Afar: Could Auckland’s LynnMall stabbing attack have been prevented?

    Host Selwyn Manning with security analyst Dr Paul Buchanan on this week’s A View From Afar podcast. Video: EveningReport.nz on YouTube

    A VIEW FROM AFAR:     Podcast with Selwyn Manning and Paul Buchanan

    In this week’s security podcast, Dr Paul G. Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning discuss:

    • three areas that have been relied on to protect New Zealanders from terror-style attacks;
    • legal measures designed to protect communities from danger and even protect individuals from themselves;
    • and why they failed.

    The background to this episode is the tragic, terrifying, attack that were committed against unarmed innocent people at West Auckland’s LynnMall Countdown supermarket, by Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen.

    The attack occurred last Friday, 3 September 2021. It ended with the hospitalisation of seven people, and, the death of Samsudeen, who was fatally shot by special tactics police officers during his attempt to kill and injure as many people as he could.

    Immediately after, the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told the nation that the dead man was a terrorist and that she herself, the police, and the courts were all aware of how dangerous he was and had been seeking to protect New Zealand from this man.

    Within days of the attacks, we learned, that Samsudeen was a troubled man with psychologists describing him as angry, capable of carrying out his threats, and displaying varying degrees of mental illness and disorder.

    Refugee who sought asylum
    Samsudeen was a refugee who sought asylum in New Zealand after experiencing, through his formative years civil war and ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka, who, at around 20 years of age, arrived in New Zealand on a student visa and then sought political asylum.

    He was eventually granted refugee status, and since then spent years in prison on various charges and convictions – largely involving the possession of terrorist propaganda seeded on the internet by Islamic State (ISIS), and, threats showing intent to commit terrorist acts against New Zealanders.

    In this week’s episode, Dr Buchanan and Manning examine questions about whether this tragedy could have been prevented and considered New Zealand’s:

    • Security and terror laws
    • Deportation laws involving those with refugee status
    • The Mental Health Act and whether this was available to the authorities.

    Dr Buchanan and Manning also analyse whether it is necessary for the New Zealand government to move to tighten New Zealand’s terrorism security laws. And, if it does, how the intended new laws compare to other Five Eyes member countries.

    • More information about the A View From Afar weekly podcasts on EveningReport.nz

    Republished in partnership with EveningReport.nz

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Jo Spratt: ‘Free’ covid jabs are making the mega-rich richer

    COMMENTARY: By Jo Spratt

    When this novel coronavirus first swept the world last year, it was quickly obvious global vaccination was the only way out.

    Governments invested billions in public funding and guaranteed pre-orders to corporations like Moderna, Pfizer/BioNtech, Johnson & Johnson, Novovax and Oxford/AstraZeneca to incentivise vaccine research and development.

    Never before has a vaccine been created and tested so quickly. It was a tribute to human ingenuity and creativity, and a reminder of how powerful we are when we work together.

    Yet, a year after the first person was vaccinated, less than 2 percent of people in the poorest countries have benefited.

    Ahead of their annual shareholder meetings earlier this year, major vaccine producers, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca revealed they had paid out US$26 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to shareholders in the previous 12 months.

    Nine individuals have become billionaires off the back of coronavirus vaccines. Just how are these pharmaceutical corporations and their shareholders making their money?

    Pharmaceutical corporations will not share their covid-19 vaccine intellectual property. This means they have a monopoly over a precious resource everyone needs. This gives them the power to charge excessive prices to maximise their profit. And this is what they have done.

    Governments paying 4 to 24 times more than cost
    Governments worldwide are paying between 4 and 24 times more than the estimated cost of producing the covid-19 vaccines. Experts, including Imperial College London, estimate the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines can be produced for as little as NZ$1.70.

    According to reported prices that are available, even COVAX — the international facility set up to buy vaccines especially for poor countries — is paying an average of five times this cost.

    Pfizer/BioNTech are charging their lowest reported price of NZ$9.70 to the African Union but this is still nearly six times more than the estimated production cost.

    Israel has paid the highest reported price for Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines at NZ$40.26 a dose – nearly 24 times the potential production cost. Some reports suggest they paid even more.

    In New Zealand, while the details are not public, we do know that in the 2021 Budget the Government set aside NZ$1 billion for vaccines. Assuming we have paid for all the vaccines that we have pre-purchase agreements for from this amount, (which is probably a generous assumption), we have paid at least nine times more than production costs.

    As we consider the need for booster shots, Pfizer has suggested raising prices further.

    I don’t buy the argument that pharmaceutical corporations have to charge so much because they invest in risky research and development. As stated, billions of public dollars went into the research and development of covid-19 vaccines.

    Previous public investment
    These vaccines would not be possible without decades of previous public investment in research and development.

    Over the past 80 years, the US’s National Institutes of Health alone invested almost US$900 billion in biotech and pharmaceutical research, and continues to put in US$30 billion a year.

    It is not pharmaceutical corporations investing in the risk of uncertainty, but governments across the world.

    Besides that, pharmaceutical corporations spend more on marketing than on research and development. In 2013, Johnson & Johnson spent more than twice as much on sales and marketing than on R&D: US$17.5 billion versus US$8.2 billion.

    For Pfizer, it was US$11.4 billion on marketing versus US$6.6 billion on R&D. Marketing costs are also tax deductible.

    Further, economist Mariana Mazzucato reports pharmaceutical corporations put their profits into dividends and share buybacks that increase stock prices and CEO pay. That is precisely what we are seeing during this pandemic.

    Put simply, the public fund the bulk of pharmaceutical research and development. Pharmaceutical corporations get the intellectual property and know-how, then force the public to pay again for vaccines, at prices far above a reasonable profit.

    Money goes to already wealthy individuals
    The ultimate result is public money going into the pockets of already wealthy individuals.

    While they get rich, millions fall back into extreme poverty – living on less than NZ$2.70 a day – and the coronavirus continues to circulate and mutate, potentially rendering these vaccines obsolete and holding us all to ransom for years to come.

    Soon negotiations will be under way again at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to get consensus among governments to waive the intellectual property rights for covid-19 vaccines.

    New Zealand supports this waiver, but the challenge is to persuade countries such as Germany and the UK. If this can be achieved, it will break the pharmaceutical corporations’ monopoly and allow vaccine supply to expand and the cost to drop.

    The work doesn’t end there. How can we recreate our system to develop essential medicines and get them to everyone, using public funds for collective well-being, and avoid creating another handful of billionaires?

    Dr Jo Spratt is the advocacy and communications director at Oxfam Aotearoa. This article is republished with the permission of the author and Oxfam.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Seymour’s sabotage of Māori priority vaccine code ‘unbelievably cruel’

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    A Māori political leader has branded opposition neoliberal ACT leader David Seymour’s act this week undermining an indigenous response to New Zealand’s covid-19 pandemic as  “unbelievably irresponsible and cruel”.

    Seymour publicly shared a secret priority vaccine code for Māori so that Pākehā, or non-Māori, could jump the queue for vaccinations against the virus.

    “Political differences aside, it’s hard to understand why a leader with whakapapa continuously chooses not to protect it,” said Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader and whip of Te Pāti Māori.

    ACT party leader David Seymour
    ACT party leader David Seymour … “privileged, and … chose to appeal to the fascist New Zealander.” Image: The Daily Blog

    Writing in The New Zealand Herald today, she said there had been early signs of inequities in the government’s covid vaccination rollout for Māori and Pasifika.

    She cited health specialists arguing that the government’s one-shoe-fits-all vaccine rollout was an “overwhelming failure”.

    The failure resulted in “just 19 percent of eligible Māori [being] vaccinated by the end of Tuesday, compared to 30.4 percent of eligible people in the ‘European or other’ category,” Ngarewa-Packer wrote.

    Fifteen percent of New Zealand’s population 5 million are Māori, the country’s First Nation people.

    ‘Conscious decision to sabotage’
    “This is where David Seymour made a conscious decision to sabotage. He not only underestimated the manaaki our Māori hauora [health] providers have for everyone in their communities, but also the solutions to address vaccination disparity and the success that came with it.”

    The very centre that Seymour had launched a full-scale attack on had a vaccination uptake of 85 percent Pākehā, vaccinating five times fewer Māori than non-Māori.

    “His poor understanding that a Māori-targeted-approach is not anti-Pākehā, exclusive or segregated shows his absolute desperation to compete for the ‘disillusioned white’ voter,” Ngarewa-Packer said.

    “He launched a political missile that fast became a political SOS.”

    Ngarewa-Packer said she was just 12 months out of personally leading a covid response and standing up iwi checkpoints.

    “I appreciate how much effort logistically and mentally goes into leading a response effort,” she said.

    “It takes a team who is prepared to work outside of normal hours to serve their community and one who believes with a passion that they must, and indeed can.

    Poor vaccination uptake
    “Our pāti [political party] with many other leaders, continually raised concern with how poor vaccination uptake was for Māori [and Pasifika].

    “With a third of our population living in poverty and a third under-employed, the luxury of fuelling a car to travel five hours for vaccination versus putting food on the table was not an option.

    “I live in a community where many don’t own smartphones or have data access to book vaccinations, some can’t afford to travel over an hour to their closest urban medical facilities.

    “Access issues for many whānau are real, as are inequities. But the reality is Seymour’s neighbourhood is vastly different to those he attacked.’

    "Māori job inequity"
    “Māori job inequity” … vaccination statistics may be even worse. Image: NZ Herald screenshot APR

    Seymour is MP for Epsom in Auckland, one of New Zealand’s wealthiest electorates, and has been leader of the rightwing party ACT since 2014.

    “He is privileged, and rather than empathise to understand some very real-life challenges, he instead chose to appeal to the fascist New Zealander, to the wealthy who have health insurance, to the 35 percent who no-showed to appointments, to the very elite who designed this vaccination system.”

    Ngarewa-Packer said the access code had nothing to do with skin colour but rather the systemic issues that Māori “consistently confront as a population – with higher rates of deprivation and mortality”.

    Always considered expendable
    “And sadly, it doesn’t matter how hard we work to protect the team of five million or put others before our own. The sad reality is, when it comes to addressing our own needs, it is presented as preferential. We are always considered expendable.”

    Ngarewa-Packer also referred to the sacrifices that the famous Maori Battalion had made for the protection of the people of Aotearoa during both World Wars.

    “The Māori Battalion was a formidable fighting force, highly regarded for all they did on the allies’ frontline to protect our nationhood. Their sacrifice for us is forever treasured.”

    That sacrifice had been hoped that it would “give us full respected rights alongside Pākehā, as [the 1840 foundation] Te Tiriti [of Waitangi] intended”.

    All covid-19 vaccinations are free in New Zealand.

    15 new community cases
    RNZ News reports that Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield reported 15 new community cases of covid-19 in the country in New Zealand today.

    Speaking at today’s media conference, Dr Bloomfield said there were now 855 cases in the current community outbreak and 218 cases were deemed to have recovered.

    There were 21 new cases reported yesterday, and 20 on three days in a row before that.

    NZ government covid-19 advert
    New Zealand government advert promoting its “working” covid policy over the delta variant … 15 community cases today, down again. Image: NZ govt

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Biden Exits Afghanistan, Heads in the Wrong Direction

    On August 31, Joe Biden accepted the inevitable and announced the final departure of all open military personnel from Afghanistan.

    Perhaps, the most important part of the speech had to do with the future, and here Biden was unequivocal:

    And here is the critical thing to understand: The world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia. ….We have to shore up American competitiveness to meet these new challenges and the competition for the 21st century.

    A major motivation for getting out of Afghanistan is to give the US a freer hand to bring down China and Russia. And this is not to be a peaceful “Pivot.” The US has surrounded both countries with military bases, and the Pivot to Asia, pioneered by Obama/Hillary/Biden, sees 60% of America’s naval forces ending up in China’s neighborhood.

    The Final Quagmire. In the aftermath of the Afghan retreat the resolutely clueless mainstream punditocracy is asking: Has the US learned from this latest fiasco about the limits of its power? Did they not read Biden’s speech? Clearly, they have not.

    If the US has not been able to defeat a minor power like Afghanistan (or Vietnam), what are the odds of doing so with major powers like Russia and China? And given the nuclear weapons capacity of these powers, where might that lead? How many Cuban Missile Crises, or worse, shall we have to go through in this New Cold War before one incident leads not simply to endless war but to a world ending war?

    Let us be clear. Biden did the right thing in terminating the war and he should do the same in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. He has, however, not only done the right thing for the wrong reason, but for a very malign reason which will lead to greater problems and graver dangers.

    Unfortunately, the pols, the pundits and think tankers pay no heed to the danger here. Equally sad, too many liberals are silent about this New Cold War or cheer it as a new crusade for “democracy and human rights.” But some opposition is coming from a quarter that must deal with reality, not ideology or electioneering demagoguery.

    The Business Realists Push Back. On the day after Biden’s speech, the New York Times ran a story on the front page of the business section entitled, “Businesses Push Biden to Develop China Trade Policy: … companies want the White House to drop tariffs on Chinese goods and provide clarity about a critical trade relationship.” Said the article:

    Business impatience with the administration’s approach is mounting. Corporate leaders say they need clarity about whether American companies will be able to do business with China, which is one of the biggest and fastest-growing markets. Business groups say their members are being put at a competitive disadvantage by the tariffs, which have raised costs for American importers.

    Patrick Gelsinger, the chief executive of Intel, said in an interview last week…’To me, just saying, ‘Let’s be tough on China,’ that’s not a policy, that’s a campaign slogan. It’s time to get to the real work of having a real policy of trade relationships and engagement around business exports and technology with China.’

    In early August, a group of influential U.S. business groups sent a letter to Ms. Yellen and Ms. Tai (recently appointed U.S. Trade Representative) urging the administration to restart trade talks with China and cut tariffs on imported Chinese goods.

    The silent cruelty of Biden’s speech. Biden was right to grieve for the 2,461 Americans killed in Afghanistan. But he failed to mention the hundreds of thousands of Afghans killed as a direct result of the war, hundreds of thousands more as a result of disease and malnutrition and the millions displaced internally and millions more as external refugees. Instead of apologies from Biden and an offer of reparations, there came news that the US was freezing over $9 billion dollars in Afghan foreign assets needed by this starving nation lying in ruins.

    The United States has apparently learned nothing either in terms of the limits of its power or the morality of its foreign policy if we are to take Biden’s speech and actions as any indication. To say the least, it will not be easy to change this, but we have no choice. A calamity beyond imagination awaits us if we fail.

    The post Biden Exits Afghanistan, Heads in the Wrong Direction first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Are They Disguising mRNA-Experimental Gene-Altering Poison Jabs as Flu-Shots?

    The house of cards is crumbling. It’s a known fact that the so-called SARS-CoV-2 “virus” has never been isolated and identified which logically leads to the conclusion that the entre covid-story – what has been keeping the world in a trauma for the last 18 months – is a huge fraud of biblical proportion, not comparable to anything that has happened – or rather, was done – to humanity in recent history.

    Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York, Carla Stela, reports on 31 August 2021, that the latest official figures (August 30, 2021) point to 38,488 mRNA vaccine reported and registered deaths in the EU, UK and US (combined) and 6.3 million reported “adverse events”.

    Although these are the official figures, they are vastly under-reported. They only represent the figures reported by the official Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in the US, created in 1990, and to those officially reported by the European Medicine Agency (EMA).  According to CDC’s own account, these agencies report under normal circumstances only between 1% and 10% of all cases. And most likely in the covid cases, where reporting is made difficult, even less. In other words, less than 10% of deaths and injuries are reported. For vaccine adverse events approximately one percent of the injuries are registered and reported.

    That would bring the effective death rate, conservatively assessed, close to about 1 million, for a total population of some 830 million (US: 330 m; EU: 500 m), where only about half is fully “vaccinated”. And this, from what they call begin of “vaccination”, on 14 December 2020, during about 8 months only.

    This does not account for probably several million serious adverse effects, some of them serious and most of them incurable.

    The fact that the authorities continue to push for vaccination – instead of stopping all jabs immediately – is indicative that that there is another, an evil plan, in play. Carla Stela puts it straight as it is:

     Most unconscionable is the fact that the United Nations Secretary-General is mandating this untested and often lethal vaccination for United Nations staff, in violation of every human rights declaration produced by the United Nations in its entire history.

    The key to their plan is getting as much people as possible jabbed with this deadly mRNA- experimental gene-manipulation injection. But people are become increasingly hesitant. There is increasing push back. More and more people depart from the mainstream media accounts, from the commanded lie-narrative, and seek their information from alternative media. Which is why extensive, but I mean extensive – censuring goes on. They call it “fact-checking”.

    There is so much fact-checking – call it “fake-checking” – going on, looking at internet has become ridiculous, almost a joke. They – those dark cult elitists in command and those super-billionaires, who control the major social media which do the cult’s dirty job – must be getting to a very low level of credibility among the common people. When censoring is becoming a must tool for survival, the downfall is usually pretty close. Examples abound. The Nazi Third Reich is a case in point.

    But vaxxing – as fast as possible as many as possible – remains a key element of the agenda 2030.  Why? Because, those who are vaccinated can’t escape anymore. They are doomed in one way or another. Either they die immediately from the effects of the inoculations — just see the figures above — or many may die within 1 to 3 years after receiving the shot.

    See here,  here, and here.

    The survivors are loaded with electromagnetic particles – all part of the mRNA-shot – so they can be remote manipulated by robots or Artificial Intelligence (AI) via the 5G and soon 6G, to transit from humans to “transhumans” – Klaus Schwab interview (2-min) on Swiss-French TV in 2016 – see here. At the time of this writing the video was still available. No surprise, however, if it will be “fact-checked” out. See also Dr. Astrid Stueckelberger:  You are Being Chipped

    Also, remember the Bill Gates introduced Agenda ID2020.

    Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, renown German-Thai virologist, warns that COVID-19 vaccination is the  greatest threat humanity ever faced.

    Above figures represent more vaccine deaths than those occurred in the entire history of vaccination – in only just over six months, when covid “vaccination” began on 14 December 2020. And the heartbreaking and criminal truth is that none of these deaths were necessary – because nobody or only very few people died from covid, the same amount or less, than die every year from the common flu. See Dr. Fauci’s peer-reviewed article, “Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted”.

    The evil cult has set a target of about 70% to 80% of world population being vaccinated by 2023, in order to reach their key targets – which include:

    (i) Drastic reduction of the world population, either directly through “vaxx” caused deaths, or from the mRNA-inoculations occurring sterilizations and infertility;

    (ii) Massive Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robot-driven transformation from humans to “transhumans”, through electromagnetic brain manipulation (this is – no kidding – the plan of the “Great Reset” – plus fully digitized money transactions, making the surviving “transhumans” slaves of the global banking system, to the point where, at completion of the Great Reset, you will arrive at “Owning nothing and being happy” (Klaus Schwab, “The Great Reset”); and finally,

    (iii) a colossal shift of worldwide assets and capital from the bottom and the center to the top.

    This is already happening as the world’s ten richest billionaires increased their combined wealth during the plandemic by US$540 billion, while more than half a billion people were plunged into abject poverty – Oxfam report.  This is the result of huge numbers of bankruptcies throughout the world, but affecting more the Global South than the rich West (Global North), since the latter produced – at least for now – debt-financed subsidies to some of the enterprises and to a lesser extent to debt-strapped people.

    Back to the enormous publicity-lie-induced, coerced and outright blackmailed vaxx-drive, people interested in risking their lives by accepting a potentially deadly mRNA-shot are getting fewer and fewer. And this even with a system that pays people to get to jab. In Texas the current going rate is US$ 250; in other US states the rates may be different, but on average already above US$ 100 – and rising. In Europe the incentives, or bribes rather, vary also from a cheap €50 to up to €250 per shot. Yet, many realize that life is worth more than that, and they will not succumb to the money trap.

    Now it looks like the latest gimmick is offering free flu-shots – and that already in August, in the heat of summer, when the official flu season starts in October/November. This is the case in the US, as well as in Europe. It is probably not far-fetched to assume that the so-called “flu-shots” are in reality mRNA-type covid shots.

    This would be the ultimate lie – doesn’t even cost a premium. That shows the kind of respect the dark killer elite cult holds for the population – “reduce” them with one lie or another. Are people really as naïve and lie-indoctrinated that they do not see behind the treason?

    Meanwhile, CDC is sued for massive fraud. Seven US top universities, including Stanford, Cornell, and a couple of the labs at the University of California, tested 1500 samples of people, who had “positive” Covid-19 tests. In none of the university lab tests was a single SARS-CoV-2 virus discovered. ALL people were simply found to have Influenza A, and to a lesser extent Influenza B. This is consistent with previous findings of other scientists.

    Dr. Derek Knauss, one of the testing team, said:

    When my lab team and I subjected the 1500 supposedly positive Covid-19 samples to Koch’s postulates and put them under an SEM (electron microscope), we found NO Covid in all 1500 samples. We found that all 1500 samples were primarily Influenza A, and some Influenza B, but no cases of Covid. We did not use the bulls*** PCR test.

    This latest gimmick to get people conned into getting a flu-shot in the midst of summer, reeks like mRNA-covid poison jab in disguise of flu-shots. The 193 UN member governments – all enslaved to the evil spell of a deadly cult – need as many people jabbed as possible. Because once they are jabbed, they are doomed, – doomed to die within 2-3 years max, according to Dr. Mike Yeadon, former Pfizer VP – and many others.

    And what will happen to these governments, which willingly and knowingly are prepared to actively obliterate their countries’ constitutions, as well as killing their people?

    A Nuremberg 2.0 Trial is in order. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, German-American top-lawyer, with his Team for Covid Ethics (over a thousand scientists and medical doctors), are working on it, having already filed class lawsuits in Canada and the US and are suing health institutions and individuals in Europe.

    We shall overcome!

    Giving-in is not an option.

    The post Are They Disguising mRNA-Experimental Gene-Altering Poison Jabs as Flu-Shots? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.