In an interview with Italian newspaper la Repubblica on 4 September, Booker prize-winning novelist dame Hilary Mantel said she hopes to become an Irish citizen. Mantel’s grandparents were Irish immigrants to the UK, so she hopes to reconnect with her family roots. And despite loving the part of England she lives in, she feels the need to “become a European again”. Mantel believes she “might breathe easier in a republic”. So what motivated this? Is that royal title finally weighing heavy?
Mantel says she’s become ashamed to live in England because of the abuse refugees face and because of the UK’s immigration policies. Or rather its, anti-refugee and asylum-seeker policies.
But it’s ironic, is it not, for a dame to want citizenship of a republic? And at this time too. To be fair, she did speak out about the Tory/Lib Dem coalition’s position on refugees. But neither that government’s position nor the war-mongering, anti-refugee stance of other governments was sufficient for her to seek Irish citizenship before. More pertinent is that it’s an option not available to the refugees she claims to be speaking up for.
Disgusting treatment of refugees
Mantel is right about one thing. This Brexiteer-government’s treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers isshameful. And, if Priti Patel’s Nationality and Borders Bill becomes law, potentially criminal. This shameful treatment is evident in how its currently dealing with Afghan refugees.
The UK has only promised to allow 5,000 refugees into the UK over the next year. Abdul Ghafoor, the director of the Afghanistan Migrants Advice and Support Organisation, said 5,000 isn’t enough when “there are millions of people suffering”. Ghafoor said the UK was “very tough towards refugees, especially Afghan refugees”. In the last 18 months, the UK has either refused entry or deported 177 Afghan refugees.
But that’s hardly new for this Tory government. As reported by Mohamed Elmaazi in December 2020, the Home Office kept 400 refugees and asylum seekers in “unsanitary, overcrowded, and degrading” accommodation in Napier Barracks in Kent. Residents at the former military base had been self-harming. They also said conditions “were prison-like” and worse than what they had fled. That barracks still houses refugees and has been the site of major coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreaks.
Additionally, in August 2020, Patel rightly faced criticism for attacking lawyers representing refugees. She said current regulations are “allowing activist lawyers to delay and disrupt returns”. Patel doesn’t seem to realise that words can sometimes be deadly. Such as in 1989, when a Tory junior minister claimed some lawyers were “unduly sympathetic to the IRA”. Belfast-based human rights solicitor Pat Finucane was killed by the UDA (a loyalist terror gang) just three weeks later.
Not so ashamed of the past though?
But what’s confusing about Mantel’s position is that she wasn’t motivated to adopt new citizenship while living under prime ministers Thatcher and Blair. Having written a book of fiction on Thatcher – The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – Mantel said Thatcher “was worth hating”. And that was in comparison to the current Brexiteer government – who are “not worth a story” – that have motivated her big announcement.
Yet despite such understandable loathing for Thatcher, Mantel didn’t feel compelled to seek refuge in the Irish republic during Thatcher’s tenure. Was it really that much easier to be British and feel European during the Thatcher years? Thatcher didn’t exactly have a free and easyrelationship with Europe. Nor did she welcomerefugees with open arms. And what of warmonger Blair?
Both he and Thatcher fought unjust and dirty wars from the coast of Argentina to Ireland – not forgetting, of course, Afghanistan. It was Blair who led us there this time around. And during the miners’ strike, Thatcher’s government launched a war on its own people. Then in her final years, she introduced the dreaded poll tax. Yet none of that seems to have affected Mantel’s view of citizenship. Nor did her accepting a title from a royal family whose global colonisation created suffering for countless refugees. In the interview, Mantel made no mention of handing that particular title back, either.
Irony lost
There can be very little doubt that this and previous governments have held the British people and refugees in utter contempt. That record is written in blood. Yet it’s only now that the dame chooses to rethink her citizenship.
All because she’s not happy that yet another British government is anti-refugee? But the real irony is this: just choosing citizenship of another country is a luxury not afforded to the refugees Mantel claims to empathise with. The fact that her views are a gross display of privilege appears to be lost on her.
It’s understandable someone would feel so ashamed of right-wing Brexiteers they’d want to adopt new citizenship. But to have already lived as a British citizen for so many years under right-wing, war-mongering, anti-refugee governments, and not do anything about it, just doesn’t stack up. Nor does the acceptance of a title from a family steeped in colonialism. In the absence of doing something concrete for the plight of refugees, I’m afraid this declaration of solidarity rings hollow.
The 16 Year Old, middle class, privileged, argues that meat and other animal produce are essential for his health, his ability to play sport, and the development of his adolescent brain; besides, one person becoming vegetarian/vegan, won’t make any difference to the environmental crisis.
The total failure to respond in any meaningful way to the environmental emergency rests firmly within the boundaries of such complacency. It can be found in all areas, from politicians and corporate board rooms to small businesses, NGO’s and community groups, education institutions, homes, and, apparently, some teenagers.
Complacency and the refusal to change individual behavior and collective ways of living are stoking the underlying cause of the crisis – Consumerism. Irresponsible Compulsive Consumption, as habitually practiced by populations in the rich nations, principally and excessively by the wealthy, but to a lesser degree throughout all sections of society.
Consumerism is the bedrock of the prevailing socio-economic system and materialistic way of life. Sold duplicitously as the Path to Happiness and Contentment it has poisoned the planet and created unhealthy societies of divided, insecure individuals. Inherent within the Ideology of Division is a methodology and set of values that encourage selfishness, greed and complacency. Sufficiency, cooperation and social responsibility, all essential if the environmental crisis is to be met, whilst routinely spouted by politicians and the like are thin on the ground or, more often than not, totally absent.
The environment cannot wait
Governments and businesses are completely invested in maintaining high levels of consumption; their profitability and continued existence depend on it. Indeed, far from prioritizing the environment and working to change societal behavior and deter individuals from spending, huge resources are expended to persuade and encourage consumption; to expand market share, develop new products and increase profits for shareholders.
It is this poisonous Ideology of Profit, which, in direct contrast to the needs of the environment for simplicity of living, collectivity and sharing, perpetuates, not just rampant consumerism, but widespread apathy and inaction. Governments talk a concerned environmental talk, but policies are determined by economic growth and voters’ concerns rather than CO2 emissions, pollution, or bio-diversity. And most companies, particularly big ones, routinely demonstrate that they don’t give a damn about the environment, unless by doing so sales increase and their annual dividends rise.
The environment cannot wait until governments and business judge that going “green” is more profitable or popular than the destructive status quo, before they act in a responsible manner. It is their insatiable thirst for power and profit, and their deep attachment to the Ideology of Greed – because, while the majority suffer, it has served them very well, that allows collective complacency to persist, and complacency (not money) is the root of all evil.
The final leg in the trinity of environmental neglect is formed by Ignorance or Misinformation. Ignorance of how individual choices impact on the natural environment; Ignorance of the depth and scale of the crisis and Ignorance of the impact of diet on the planet. Such ignorance and lack of awareness exist due to decades of government negligence in countries everywhere (some more, some less). This could be changed with a UN coordinated public awareness campaign; a global project designed to make plain the relationship between consumer-based lifestyles (including animal agriculture) and environmental destruction/climate change.
Unmitigated mess
While it is true that only governments and business can make the needed large scale changes (fossil fuels to renewables, electrification of transportation networks, green production methods etc), individuals can make a valuable impact, and when individuals act collectively large-scale change can be accomplished.
Ultimately ‘we’ are the problem. It is our obsessive ignorant behavior, our complacency, greed and selfishness that has poisoned the planet. And it is up to all of us to act in the most comprehensive way possible to begin to clean up the unmitigated mess we have caused. We are all only ‘one person’, but every day we have a choice, every time we eat, or shop, or travel: Are our actions, our choices and decisions responsible or harmful, is the way we individually live detrimental to the planet or not?
Diet is one area everyone can look at; reducing the intake of animal produce or, better still, moving to a plant-based diet is the single most important step most individuals can take. In some countries there are encouraging signs that people are waking up to this fact, and the number of vegetarians/vegans, particularly among young people, is growing. And according to the Vegetarian Resource Group (US), providing a varied diet is followed, all their nutritional needs can be adequately met. In fact, various detailed studies show that, vegetarians are at lower risk of a variety of diseases and conditions, including: heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, some forms of cancer, (conversely, The World Health Organization has classified red and processed meats as cancer-causing), and obesity. And according to Walter Willett at Harvard School of Public Health, “There is strong evidence that a plant based diet [vegan] is the optimal diet for living a long and healthy life.”
So, cutting out animal produce is not only good for the environment, it’s good for human health. Despite this, globally only some 8% of people identify as vegan, vegetarian, or something in between. Meaning 92% of the 7.8 billion world population consume meat, fish, poultry and all manner of dairy. The environmental result of this obsession is disastrous and multi-faceted.
Animal agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), which are the poisons disrupting natural climate rhythms. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization’s (UNFAO) put the figure at 14.5% of total emissions, but estimates vary, some studies suggesting it’s a good deal higher: Greenpeace e.g. say that, “Livestock and animal feed is responsible for approximately 60% of direct global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”
Whatever the precise number, animal agriculture is clearly a major source, if not the greatest source of emissions (surpassing the transportation industry); it’s also the biggest cause (80%) of deforestation, habitat destruction and species extinction, contributing to soil erosion and water contamination. And it’s driven by the incessant demand for meat, dairy and fish.
A revolution in behavior and values is needed, moving away from excess to sufficiency, from selfishness to group responsibility, from complacency to action. Education and awareness plus a sense of imperative are the keys to igniting such a shift and generating urgent action. Action by government and businesses and action by us, all of us, particularly those of us living in developed nations where the historic burden for the catastrophe rests; action rooted in love, demonstrated as social and environmental responsibility undertaken by each and every one of us.
Those born after 2001 have only known a world “at war on terror”.
This means a generation growing up under under fears and moral panics about Muslims and unparalleled security measures around their bodies and lives.
In my new book, Coming of Age in the War on Terror, I look at what this has meant for young Muslims in Australia as they navigate their political identities at school.
In 2018 and 2019, I interviewed and held writing workshops with more than 60 Muslim and non-Muslim high school students across Sydney who were born around the time of the September 11 terror attacks.
We explored their fears, their levels of trust with peers and teachers and political expression in a post 9/11 world.
No matter how many Muslim students spoke to me about their typically adolescent hobbies and interests, almost every student spoke about the impact of political and media discourse in their everyday lives.
Abdul-Rahman, a 17-year-old Muslim boy at an Islamic school in western Sydney, put it this way:
I’m not afraid of terrorism. I’m afraid of being accused of being a terrorist.
Another student, Laila, told me:
I’ve always had this almost preconceived guilt attached to me […] [It’s] the million messages in the media, politicians, popular culture, all these little things that add up and add up.
‘Countering violent extremism’ For teenagers to talk about themselves as potentially “accused” is devastating, but not particularly surprising.
Graphic: New South Books
For two decades, millions of federal and state dollars have been poured into “countering violent extremism” programmes targeting Muslim youth. There has been no subtlety here.
Counter-terrorism policies have been announced by politicians on the steps of mosques, with a focus on geographic and demographic populations deemed “at risk” (in other words, suburbs with large Muslim populations).
Consultations and round tables with government over “national security” have been highly publicised. Meanwhile, Islamophobic attacks have been condemned by politicians and the police because of how they might “undermine” relationships of cooperation between intelligence and law enforcement and the Muslim community.
The public has been routinely reassured the government is tackling the “problem” of young Muslim Australians, “with strong, deradicalisation programmes, working with Muslim communities”.
The figure of the vulnerable but also dangerous Muslim youth pops up time and time again, from moral panics around young “homegrown” terrorists, to attempts to introduce “jihadi watch” schemes in schools.
The pressure to self-censor This landscape trickles down into young people’s everyday lives, including their schools.
The pressure to self-censor and manage your political and religious expression at school was a common theme among many students, resonating with what academics in the United Kingdom describe in their research.
Young Muslims spoke about how they had to ‘manage’ what they said in class. Image: www.shutterstock.com
Anticipating how their tone, words and emotion would be interpreted by teachers and peers restricted students’ political expression.
This included a young Palestinian girl who had to push back against teachers, who reprimanded her for wearing a “Free Palestine” t-shirt at school, to students who refrained from writing about Iraq or Afghanistan as part of assignments because they had been cautioned not to “bring overseas conflicts into the classroom”.
Other students talked of staying quiet if controversial topics came up in class, such as news of a terrorist attack involving Muslims, or media headlines about Islam.
I also met students who tried to appear as “good” or “moderate” Muslims (which inevitably meant apolitical) and erased all traces of their Muslimness to “fit in”.
Feeling targeted, isolated In 2015, there was a media frenzy about youth radicalisation in prayer rooms in Sydney’s state schools. I interviewed students at a school in north-west Sydney three years later and they spoke about how that controversy had been felt in their school life.
Most of the students from suburbs and schools who came under media and political scrutiny as “problematic” had felt targeted and isolated. One student withdrew from his Muslim peers, abandoned his prayers at school, took different routes to school to avoid being hassled by the media, and “shut down” in class.
I got dragged into an argument with other kids in class about me following the same religion as these terrorists […] but my tone […] I came off very aggressive […] then I was scared, because that’s what people think of as radical extremists […] I felt like I’d be taken straight to the principal and you would have to deal with that. So I shut up.
We need a new approach
After two decades of seeing young Muslims as “problems” to be contained and managed, it is time we approached them in a different way.
Adolescence is a time to encourage critical thinking and support young people navigating their political identities and agency. Young people need to be empowered to work through their political and religious ideas and identities in safe, supportive environments. They need to be seen as individuals in their own right, not members of a demonised, racialised collective. The vast majority of the young Muslims I spoke to were matter-of-fact about the global rise of Islamophobia and racism. They knew about certain jokes and assumptions in the popular vernacular (for example, “Allahu Akbar and bomb jokes” or “terrorist” equals “Muslim”).
Many were concerned about what this meant as they grew up and left school. They worried about facing discrimination at work and being able to practise their faith openly. They also knew how this suspicion and dehumanisation had been triggered by wider discourses and policies over which they had no power.
It is not up to the 9/11 generation to change this. We need teachers, politicians and the media to create a culture where young Muslims feel accepted and secure in their right to express their religious and political identities.
This article was produced as part of Social Sciences Week, running 6-12 September. A full list of 70 events can be found here. Randa Abdel-Fattah will appear in a webinar on the “Implications of 9/11: 20 years” at 6pm on Thursday September 9.
THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE IS A CO-FOUNDER OF THE CHRONIC ILLNESS CAMPAIGN GROUP
There’s been scandal in recent weeks over the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) delaying the publication of guidelines for the treatment of people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). This kind of abuse is nothing new in the chronic illness and disabled communities. So, a new campaign group aims to tackle this systemic problem with direct political action – starting on 20 September outside NICE’s front door. And here’s why chronic illness is a totally political issue.
The Chronic Collaboration
Myself and my partner Nicola Jeffery have launched the Chronic Collaboration (website coming soon). It’s a new campaign group – check out its Twitter here. As we stated on Twitter, it aims to be:
A new resistance movement for chronically ill & disabled people. Joining the dots between conditions. Resisting psychologisation. Fighting for justice & equity.
It’s early days yet. But through lived experience of chronic illness and learned approaches from other types of activism, we aim to change the way our community fights for its rights. First in our sights is NICE delaying the guidelines.
NICE: causing anger and distress
NICE has caused anger and distress across the ME community. In short, there appears to be a problem over a contentious treatment for ME. It seems that some medical professionals who support a controversial style of treatment have objected to NICE removing it from its new guidelines. That treatment is called graded exercise therapy (GET). You can read The Canary‘s full report on the delay of the ME guidelines here.
GET is at the centre of this story. It’s where doctors tell people living with ME to do gradual increases in exercise to improve their condition, but it’s been marred by controversy. It was based on the PACE trial, which was a clinical study into ME that the Lancetpublished in 2011. It said GET and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) worked as treatments for ME. But its findings have beenwidelydisputed. Many patients and doctors havesaid that both treatments are potentially harmful or did not improve people’s conditions. You can read more about GET, CBT, and the PACE trial here.
just a few hours before it was due, the NICE Executive put out a statement saying they needed to “pause” publication. It became apparent that two Royal Colleges (the membership organisations for UK health professionals) were opposing implementation of the new guideline. They believe that graded exercise therapy should be recommended in the guideline, despite the committee’s thorough review of the evidence. …
Why are NICE allowing the Royal Colleges to have this sway when they have completed their own full, systematic review? It is the tail wagging the dog.
Part of the problem surrounding the PACE trial and ME is arrogant doctors thinking that they know better than anyone else and being unable to admit they were wrong.
But this is only one aspect of it. Because the story is ultimately a political one. And if you think it isn’t, then you really need to think again.
Chronic illness: a political issue
For example, one prominent ME doctor reported the PACE trial authors to the regulatory body, accusing them of “scientific and financial fraud”. An MP said it was potentially one of the “biggest medical scandals of the 21st century”. Some of the trial’s authors had conflicts of interest with private insurance companies. The UK social security body the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) part-funded the trial. This led one MP to say:
One wonders why the DWP would fund such a trial, unless of course it was seen as a way of removing people on long-term benefits and reducing the welfare bill.
PACE trial’s science was so bad that some university lecturers teach it as an example of how not to conduct research. Yet its approach has infested other areas of medicine. As I previously wrote, the NHS says that doctors should treat numerous (sometimes genetic) illnesses and conditions with CBT and exercise therapy. Now, doctors are also subjecting people with long Covid to PACE trial-style treatment. The common theme? Most of these illnesses (and ME) have no recognised cure. So, the NHS lumps everyone in together and offers exercise and CBT.
Much of the corporate media also toes the line over the PACE trial. As I previously wrote, PR organisation the Science Media Centre (SMC) is central to UK press coverage of ME. It issues statements in response to medical research. But it also ‘seeds’ (plants) stories in the media (including the BBC). It has a network of journalists it works with. Major corporate media outlets also fund it. So, from articles defending the PACE trial authors to supporting its findings, the SMC and the corporate media often work hand-in-glove.
All these are examples of ‘how’ ME and PACE trial are political issues. But why?
Again: it’s political
For me, the story has various parts. You can read more about them via the links below:
As I have repeatedlywritten, PACE trial is part of a drive by successive governments to reduce the UK social security bill.
CBT is relatively cheap, so it reduces the NHS bill. It also puts the responsibility on the patient for their recovery – so when they don’t get better, ‘it’s their fault’.
It’s an issue of class: poor chronically ill and disabled people are not useful to the capitalist system.
Systemic misogyny: allegedly ‘hysterical‘ women make up the majority of ME patients.
The ruling class in bed with each other: the PACE trial proponent Simon Wessely has a knighthood and led the UK-government’s 2018 review of the Mental Health Act.
So, ME and PACE trial are political issues. And political problems need political approaches.
Enough is enough
The time for just doing petitions and letter-writing is over. Given that NICE has seemingly bowed down to the vested interests of the system, what’s been done before this point clearly hasn’t worked. The situation is similar in the US, where ME advocacy groups have been petitioning and letter-writing to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over it’s views on the PACE trial – and it did little, if nothing, to change the CDC’s mind.
So, the approach to NICE – and the scandal of ME and chronic illness more broadly – needs to be more like the direct action carried out by other groups like Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), Extinction Rebellion, and so on. Being ‘nice’, for want of a better phrase, has so far not worked. Disruption is needed. Change has seldom been won by writing letters and signing petitions.
That’s partly why we’ve formed the Chronic Collaboration; it’s also going to be about more than this, but that will follow.
On 20 September, we and our allies will be protesting outside NICE HQ in Stratford, East London. Note the use of the word ‘protest’. This is not a vigil where we’ll be having a minute’s silence or reading poetry. This is a demo to make it very clear to NICE the physical and emotional hurt, distress, and anger it has caused chronically ill people.
More details will be announced soon.
The community needs allies
But of course, people living with ME and other chronic illnesses often can’t protest in person. If you can’t attend, and someone can’t attend on your behalf, we still want to see you there. Email a picture of yourself to hello(at)thechroniccollaboration.com and we’ll make sure NICE sees your face.
The community needs allies. This is why we want as many people to support this as possible: from NHS workers to other chronically ill and disabled people via non-disabled campaign groups, MPs, and well-wishers. Chronic illness doesn’t discriminate (even if the system does). With the emergence of long Covid, more and more people are affected. It could be you next – or someone you know and love.
Moreover, the abuse of people living with ME and other chronic illnesses sums up the problems with the system: where an elite few have power over the rest of us – ultimately to all of our detriment.
So, we ask you to join us on 20 September at 1pm outside NICE HQ. Enough really is enough. Let the fightback against the PACE trail – and the system’s treatment of chronically ill people – begin now.
All flags are on half-mast in the US of A. The cause is the 13 American soldiers killed in this huge suicide bombing outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday, 26 August.
As it stands, at least 150 people – Afghans, including at least 30 Taliban, plus 13 American military – were killed and at least 1,300 injured, according to the Afghan Health Ministry.
The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the bombing via Amaq Media, the official Islamic State (ISIS) news agency. The perpetrators, the message says, were members of the ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K.
As reported by RT, US military leaders knew “hours in advance” that a “mass casualty event” was planned at Kabul airport. However, accounts from the troops in harm’s way suggest that nothing was done to protect them or the airport. See here.
RT further reports: “The bombing provoked the US into launching two drone strikes, one targeting an alleged “planner” and “facilitator” with the group responsible, and another supposedly wiping out “multiple” would-be suicide bombers but reportedly annihilating a family and children alongside them.
Why was nothing done to prevent this bloody, atrocious attack? In fact, the Pentagon announced just yesterday that another massive attack was likely, meaning they have information that another mass-killing may take place?
In the meantime, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that the last three US military transport planes have departed the Hamid Karzai Airport just ahead of the August 31, 2021, deadline, officially ending the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“The war is over. America’s last troops have just left Kabul airport,” RT’s Murad Gazdiev tweeted from Kabul, adding that the war lasted “19 years, 10 months and 25 days.”
What he didn’t say is that the monetary cost of the war was at least 3 trillion dollars, that about 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians. These figures include (through April 2021) 2,448 American service members; 3,846 U.S. contractors, and some 66,000 Afghan national military and police.
Twenty years of war – and only ten days to defeat the US military.
Really? Is this really the end of the US involvement in Afghanistan? Too many strange events and occurrences are pointing in a different direction.
Let’s have a closer look. The Islamic State — ISIS — claims responsibility. As we know by now and since quite a while, ISIS is a creation of the CIA. The sophistication of the attack, the Pentagon non-interference, despite their prior knowledge, might, just might indicate that this attack may have been a well-coordinated “false flag”?
Who benefits? Cui Bono?
On August 19, 2021, the Washington Post, referring to President Trump’s Peace Agreement with Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, reports:
As President Donald Trump’s administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, he optimistically proclaimed that “we think we’ll be successful in the end.” His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, asserted that the administration was “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.
Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden is pointing to the agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country.
But Biden can go only so far in claiming the agreement boxed him in. It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.
So, again who benefits from such an atrociously deadly attack like the one of 26 August at Kabul Airport?
President Biden, though unjustified, can and does blame President Trump for the chaos he left behind by negotiating this “irresponsible” Peace Deal. Why “irresponsible”? Wasn’t it time after 20 years without apparent “success” – whatever that means, or may have meant at some point in time – to end this senseless bloodshed and destruction of a sovereign Afghan society let alone the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians?
It seems that Mr. Trump may have done the right thing. Peace over war should always win, on the ground as well as in the minds of people, and foremost of politicians. However, there are several reasons, why Peace is not welcome. And chaos and destruction and death as demonstrated by the 26 August suicide attack, and who knows, maybe more to follow, might justify sending back US troops?
There are several other irons in the fire about which hardly anybody talks and the bought anti-Trump and pro-Biden mainstream media are silent.
The Heroin Trade
There is a multi-multi-billion, perhaps up to a trillion-dollar heroin trade at stake, for the US and for the US and European pharma-industry – the huge and deadly opioid-market.
As reported by Michel Chossudovsky on 21 August 2021:
One of the key strategic objectives of the 2001 war on Afghanistan was to restore the opium trade following the Taliban government’s successful 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a 94% collapse in opium production. This program was supported by the United Nations. (For details, see below)
In the course of the last 19 years following the US-NATO October 2001 invasion, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. In turn the number of heroin addicts in the US has increased dramatically. Is there a relationship?
There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan.
By 2016 that number went up to 4,500,000 (2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users).
In 2020, at the height of the covid crisis, deaths from opioids and drug addiction increased threefold.
Both China and Russia have already indicated that they would help the new Taliban regime to gain stability and to develop towards a newly independent, sovereign state. Afghanistan’s border with China, only about 70 km wide, but it forms a crucial connection to China’s western most Province, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It is a vital pivot for China’s Belt and Road, or “One Belt One Road” – OBOR – also called the New Silk Road.
While transit routes already go through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, an OBOR rail and road transit through Afghanistan would connect China directly with Iran, facilitating among other trade, hydrocarbon transport from Iran to China. OBOR would also be an effective development instrument for war destroyed Afghanistan. A reconstruction and economic development scheme for Afghanistan could bring Afghanistan back to a respected nation state — even through the Taliban.
Furthermore, Afghanistan might be prepared for becoming an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), one of the world’s most significant political, economic and strategic defense organizations. In addition to China and Russia and the Central Asian former Soviet Republics, India and Pakistan are already full members, while Iran, Malaysia and Mongolia are, so far, in observer and associate status.
SCO covers almost half of the world population and controls some 30% of the world’s GDP. Afghanistan would be in a solid and guiding association as a SCO member. Afghanistan’s socioeconomic development and improvement of war-damaged people’s standard of living, could benefit enormously.
Washington, however, dislikes OBOR with a passion. They see it as Chinese expansionism and competition. It is actually neither. China has in her thousands of years of history never had expansionist trends, or ambitions, and always respected other countries’ sovereignty. OBOR, an ingenious idea of President Xi Jinping, is patterned according to the ancient Silk Road, a trading route of 2100 years ago connecting Asia with Europe and the Middle East.
OBOR is an instrument to help develop and connect the world, while respecting each nation state’s independence and sovereignty.
The hugely profitable Heroin Trade and the further development of China’s OBOR – and particularly bringing Afghanistan under the wings of the east through association with the SCO – would spoil America’s multi-multibillion heroin trade, as well as another Middle East country would orient itself to the east – and away from the fangs of the ever weakening and crumbling Anglo-US empire.
Hence, commanding US-created ISIS to sow chaos and death in Afghanistan, blaming the Taliban, might be a good reason for Biden to bring back US troops – to fight a new kind of war – fighting for the continuing highly profitable heroin trade and, simultaneously, fighting against OBOR. On top of it all, it would suit Biden and his globalist agenda image and standing in a totally misinformed world.
New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis asks a key question about women’s rights in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover during spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid’s first media conference in Kabul on August 18. Video: Al Jazeera
New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who works for Al Jazeera, has been visiting Kabul International Airport – until last Monday the only access point into and out of Afghanistan.
While locals and foreign nationals alike scrambled to leave the country for the past two weeks after the Taliban takeover, Bellis says she will be sticking around for as long as she can.
Bellis tells Jim Mora she was on the New Zealand evacuation list and saw first-hand how Western nations were trying to manage the chaotic situation.
“Most days you get an email saying, ‘okay, if you’re going to try to get out today, go to the North Gate’, then you get an email saying, ‘no, it’s dangerous, go to the South Gate’, and then an email saying, ‘no, don’t go at all, it’s too dangerous, we’ll get back to you’.
“And then finally an email saying, ‘I’m sorry the mission is over, if you didn’t make it, please email us and we’ll do our best to get you out somehow’.”
The danger reached a peak on August 26 and members of the media then agreed not to return to Kabul Airport, she says.
“Even before that, the Taliban were in charge of guarding a perimeter. They were very tense, and firing in the air a lot, and beating people. I saw them running around with machetes… quite a few people left bloodied,” she says.
“A lot of people were scared off and decided not to even try to reach the airport even those who had the correct paperwork.”
Charlotte Bellis at Kabul International Airport after the evacuation of the last US troops and following the Taliban taking control … disabled helicopters and destruction. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR
Most people heading for the airport were aware of the security issues, Bellis says, but nevertheless many were that desperate to flee.
Al Jazeera’s Charlotte Bellis … “There was a lot of confusion about who should’ve been allowed on the flights.” Image: RNZ/YouTube
“A lot of the alerts we got were in English that were circulated in the expat community. Whether or not that filtered down to everyday Afghans trying to get out, I don’t know,” she said.
“There was a lot of confusion about who should’ve been allowed on the flight. You can imagine Taliban fighters who may or may not speak various languages, trying to read paperwork, I mean it was just an absolute mare.”
The last frontier against Taliban forces at Kabul airport was a group of CIA-funded militia known as 01 Units which have a “terrible reputation” in Afghanistan, Bellis says.
This group was also due to leave, she says.
“[Afghan president] AshrafGhani’s brother told me that [this militia group] are essentially bounty hunters. The Americans gave them a list of names of people they wanted killed and they did it, they did night raids and killed people from their homes.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid … pledging inclusive government to rebuild Afghanistan at yesterday’s media conference. Image” Al Jazeera screenshot APR
“There’s been quite a few stories about them over the years, but they were incredibly secretive … they were running security on the north side of the airport for the last two weeks, I went down there and talked to them.”
The Taliban say Kabul Airport will continue to operate, but without air traffic controllers they have asked Turkey for “technical personnel”, Bellis says.
“But whether the Turkish airlines, Emirates, the companies that usually fly in and out, trust them enough to run the airport is another question.”
‘I will stay here for as long as I can’
An RNZAF C130 in Kabul evacuating a number of New Zealanders and Australians. Image: RNZ/ NZ Defence Force
Charlotte says that working for Al Jazeera, which is based in Qatar where negotiations with the Taliban happened, puts her in a better position than journalists working for American news services.
She has also built media relationships with the Taliban. The group have come to know her now, she says, and have even said they would help her safely evacuate if need be.
Being from New Zealand – a country the Taliban does not have major issues with – also helps, Bellis says.
She says she has told the Taliban she will keep asking questions about their actions.
“They’ve said go for it, as long as you’re objective and fair. We welcome criticism, we want to improve and if you ever have any problems, call us,” she says.
“Hopefully that all plays out and I will stay here for as long as I can.”
While the Taliban have claimed they will give women rights, Bellis was one of the first to speak up at their first press conference to ask about this.
“I’ve said to the Taliban, you’ve got a real problem here, because if you’re going to be successful in running the country you need people to trust you and you need to build that trust and you need to be transparent … I think only time will tell.”
The perception of the Taliban in the West is quite flawed, Bellis says.
“We think of them as this inhumane terrorist organisation when in fact, in the leadership at least, there are quite a lot of educated people, they’re quite rational. There’s also groups who just want to fight, then there’s also politicians who will just tell you what you want to hear.
“It depends on who ends up holding the reigns of the organisation.
“Hopefully it is some of the people who I’ve had dealings with, who are more objective, rational, willing to work with the West, and make compromises on certain things and aren’t as conservative as others.”
Challenges to governing
Al Jazeera’s Charlotte Bellis being interviewed live on Al Jazeera … “this country ran on donations and has done for 20 years and now that has stopped.” Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR
Lack of money and the departure of skilled workers are just a couple of the obstacles facing Afghanistan now, Charlotte says, as the IMF and World Bank hold off funds,” Bellis says.
“They’ve essentially put a stop to any money coming in … this country ran on donations and has done for 20 years and now that has stopped.
“Everyone is holding their money back and saying to the Taliban you have to play ball, we’re not going to give you money and then watch you close down girls’ schools.
“But the problem is how long will it take for them to trust the Taliban? Because in the meantime people aren’t getting paid and the economy is being run into the ground.”
Meanwhile, it appears the Taliban has been building a behind-the-scenes relationship with China for a few years now, Bellis says.
“There’s been a lot of little things happening, that signalled they are ready to build a relationship together. The Chinese, even before the Taliban took over, were preparing to recognise the Taliban as a government.
“The Chinese have had the rights to minerals here for some time, but they haven’t been able to mine because of the war and security. They’ve had reason to want to see the war end.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron told “French” Polynesia (Ma’ohi Nui) that French nuclear testing in the Pacific had not been clean. He pledged truth and transparency in the future.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern issued an apology to the Pasifika community for the race-based Dawn Raids of the 1970s.
I was reminded of the need for another apology as I watched New Zealanders competing at the Tokyo Olympics. These Games were a source of enthusiastic enjoyment and pride for many of us. What a contrast to the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
Some New Zealand spectators at those Games were so ashamed of the country of their birth, that they pretended to be Australians.
In 1976, the All Blacks were in South Africa. They had left for their tour within days of the South African police killing hundreds of black students protesting in the streets of Soweto against apartheid. Apparently no reason there not to tour.
Around 30 countries from an enraged African continent boycotted the Olympics in protest against New Zealand’s presence. It was the first major Olympic boycott of the modern era, and our country had caused it — well, the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU) actually, hugely assisted by Prime Minister Muldoon.
Monotonous claim
New Zealand rugby’s answer to most criticism over this period had been to monotonously
claim that sport and politics didn’t mix. At Montreal, the extent to which they did was
painfully clear.
Author Trevor Richards … as a HART campaigner against racist tours. Image: BWB
New Zealanders had just discovered what a selfish sporting body, devoid of any moral compass, could do to the international reputation of a country.
This was not the beginning of New Zealand rugby’s fall from grace. Nor was it to be the end. For more than 60 years, the NZRFU was involved in what many came to recognise as an ugly and intimate pas de deux with South African racism.
From 1928-1960, rugby authorities acquiesced to South Africa’s insistence that it not include Māori players in any All Black team touring South Africa. Racist South Africa was the puppeteer pulling the strings. New Zealand rugby was a compliant puppet.
From the beginning, many Māori saw it that way.
In May 2010, New Zealand Rugby issued a short statement in which it said “sorry” to those Māori players “who were not considered for selection for teams to tour South Africa or to
play South Africa”. “Sorry” had been very slow in coming. Eighty-two years for star Māori fullback George Nepia.
But does this apology, if that is what it was, even begin to cover other major aspects of what it is rugby needs to address? South Africa was an international outcast. Over a period of more than 60 years, the NZRFU had offered Pretoria high levels of support, often at times when it was most needed.
International outcry
In 1960, an international outcry followed the killing of 69 unarmed black protesters at Sharpeville. Within weeks, the All Blacks were flying off for a three-month tour. In June 1976, amid even worse police violence, the All Blacks were off once again to South Africa.
After the 1976 Olympic boycott and all the turmoil and violence which accompanied the 1981 Springbok tour, the NZRFU still felt able to press ahead with plans to tour South Africa again in 1985.
To growing numbers of citizens, rugby’s insensitivity, arrogance and stupidity seemed limitless.
Unsurprisingly, the hand of friendship offered by New Zealand rugby to South Africa became a lightning rod for increasingly large protests. By 1981, communities and families had become bitterly split. News crews from around the world flooding into New Zealand reported on ugly battles for the soul of a nation.
It was the closest we had come to civil war in the 20th century.
It is 100 years since South Africa first toured New Zealand. How timely it would be if we could start the second century of this relationship with an apology and wipe the slate clean.
In 2006, the NZRFU adopted the brand name New Zealand Rugby. Within rugby, has there been more than just a name change? Is there now a recognition that responsibility for past behaviours needs to be accepted?
These behaviours include years of insult to Māori, the unqualified support extended to a racist, pariah state, the resulting hurt and suffering that support caused black South Africans, the pain, shame, and opprobrium inflicted on New Zealand’s international reputation and the deep and bitter divisions created at home.
If not now for such an apology, how long do we have to wait? The need for it is not going to go away.
Trevor Richards was national chair of the Halt All Racist Tours movement (HART) from 1969-1980 and international secretary from 1980-1985. This article is published with the author’s permission.
In 2021, Equal Pay Day falls on the 31st of August, 61 days past the end of the financial year. I can’t help but imagine the men of Australia sitting on a beach somewhere, sunglasses on faces and cocktails in hand, waiting out the extra two months of work that women have to do to make up the gender pay gap.
The cold hard fact is that this year, women have had to work 61 extra days to earn the same annual pay as men. Last year, it was only 59 days.
The gap between earnings for full-time employees now sits at 14.2%, according to recent figures released by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, an increase of 0.8 percentage points over the last six months. COVID-19 has a lot to answer for.
We are, of course, dealing in averages here, and it is important to note the pay gap plays out differently for people of migrant or refugee background and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Australian women were legally granted equal pay for equal work in 1969, and yet the gap between full-time earnings stubbornly remains, or, in the case of this year, increases. There are the more obvious causes, such as gender discrimination, and then there are more subtle causes, many of which were heightened and exasperated by the pandemic. Women have always been more likely to experience work interruptions, to work part-time and to respond to the demands of unpaid and caring work in the home and community.
A significant chunk of the pay gap between average full-time earnings can be attributed to the gender segregation of the Australian workforce. The She’s Price(d)less report estimates occupational and industrial segregation contribute to at least 17% of the gender pay gap. The Australian workforce remains stubbornly gendered, with women concentrated in lower paying jobs in service industries and the community sector.
Nationally, more than 70% of Community and Personal Service workers are women, and almost 78% of Health Care and Social Assistance workers are women. With so many women in the sector, is it any wonder that the Health Care and Social Service Industry has the highest gender pay gap at almost 25%?
Underfunding the community sector means less pay for a lot of women, both in the sector and across the labour force. For every care and social assistance job that isn’t adequately funded, women are picking up the slack, for free, at home and in the community.
Jane*, a former crisis response worker in Canberra, went to work in the community sector because it aligned with her feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist values and because she wanted to work alongside clients as partners rather than as a bureaucrat, and she wanted to centre the importance of relationships, care, empathy and defiance.
Her ability to care for women and to help them navigate the aftermaths of trauma and violence was seriously hindered by the lack of funding and resources in the organisations she worked for. “The whole under-funding of the sector creates this inflamed feeling, like everything’s squeezed and on fire and the scarcity mindset from widespread competitive tendering means there isn’t much room for empathy in the workplace.
“Under-resourcing took so many forms, not enough workers, not enough pay, lack of robust conditions to keep you safe and well and competent. It’s not just money, it’s architecture, a lack of robust HR systems or ergonomic set-ups, not enough space or natural light.
“For example, we didn’t even have a dedicated safe room at the local court in Sydney, so we had to build one out of screens and I had to patrol the edges and shoo away perpetrators looking to harass the women we were trying to protect and care for.
“There was quite literally no part of the work for which we were adequately resourced,” Jane says.
Australian women were legally granted equal pay for equal work in 1969, and yet the gap between full-time earnings stubbornly remains, or, in the case of this year, increases, writes Gemma Killen.
Even though Jane works in the ACT, which has the second-lowest pay gap in the country at 7%, she found that moving out of the women-dominated community sector and into a male-dominated workplace increased her annual salary by $15,000, doubled her super contributions and landed her an ergonomic desk, paid study leave and reasonable working hours.
In the ACT, costs of living are increasing such that women’s financial access to housing and health services are reduced. We are unable to attract and sustain a good quality labour force in the community sector because we can barely offer workers affordable places to live, let alone promise that their work will be sufficiently funded.
At the onset of the pandemic, women’s total hours worked reduced by 12%, and the gender gap in unpaid work increased by an extra hour every day. According to the Grattan Report on the impact of the COVID crisis on Australian women, released in March of this year, every 1% of GDP invested in the community sector and care work is predicted to increase employment by 1.7%, as women are freed up for work across the entire labour force.
This year, Australia slipped 26 places in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report to sit in 50th place. If we don’t commit to bolstering and supporting the community sector and the women who work in it, we will never close the gender pay gap.
There is a passage in Carmen Maria Machado In The Dream House about going back in time to talk to your younger self. I love it because I am a chronic time-travel day dreamer. I also love it because it made me I laugh out loud at the unsentimental answer Machado gives to the ridiculousness of this preoccupation:
“If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would have listened? You’d like to think so, but …you didn’t listen to any of your smarter, wiser friends…so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn?”
Still, I can’t help but daydream. Often these daydreams focus on medicine and the body. My body. My fragile, strong, pain in the arse body. A body that has been misdiagnosed by doctors. Ignored by doctors. Condescended by doctors. A body that doctors only now, in 2021, have the knowledge to diagnose.
Medicine moves so slowly. On average, outside of a pandemic, it takes from ten to seventeen years to move from concrete tested research findings to routine clinical practice. It moves more slowly again when it comes to women’s bodies. I learnt in my first year of university, with much horror, that women are routinely excluded from drug and medical trials.
We are excluded for having difficult bodies that don’t conform to the controlled environments of experiments. And if you layer intersectionality onto that, even fewer non-white women are included in research studies. Never mind that men actually have quite considerable levels of hormonal variance too. That men might be a little unruly as well; for them it is more hidden – their variances don’t draw blood. And, well, we live in a patriarchy, so this is just one in a very long list of ways in which medicine has mistreated women and their bodies. From the infamous hysteria diagnoses to the on-going underdiagnosing and undertreatment of women’s chronic pain and health issues, ignoring women’s bodies and women’s suffering has a long history.
The inequities run to denying women treatments routinely available to men. Testosterone replacement therapy is known to help women as well as men, but it’s only on the national pharmaceutical benefit scheme for men. Viagra, which is helpful for treating problems with the lining of the uterus, is also not covered for use by women, though the government will happily subsidise a routine erection. Women are even excluded from universal health services: at the time I write this, only 37% of people receiving benefits from one of the largest social and health welfare programs in our history – the National Disability Insurance Scheme – are women. This is despite the fact that our population statistics indicate that disability is at leastequally split between men and women.
When I nearly bled to death in a storage room in a Sydney hospital, the director of the emergency department allowed me to spend as much time as I felt I needed speaking to him about the incident. This was my compensation for nearly dying because of medical neglect. It didn’t feel like much compensation, but I made of it what I could.
I grilled him on the differences in health care received by men and women: no, he did not know women underrate their pain when it is likely higher than men’s. No, he did not know that women are less likely to be treated for heart attacks when they present to emergency. No, he did not know that women are less likely to be listened to when they present with health problems – from chronic pain to serious disability. This, I told him, is why a woman in her thirties came moments from losing her life in your ER – “because you didn’t see me, you didn’t hear me. Because of my gender, you disregarded me”.
Globally, in our fight to overcome the gendered biases in medicine, women have dedicated whole months to specific female diseases in the hope that that doctors will be unable to continue to ignore them. We have endometriosis month, post-menstrual dysphoria month, polycystic ovary awareness month, amongst months for other long ignored but serious conditions.
We give months in an attempt to overcome years of medicine not taking women’s pain and health seriously.
I have had an adventurous time with my body. I tell each new doctor I see ‘I’ve collected every reproductive health condition there is’. And they laugh, until I list them off and they realise I wasn’t making a joke and it’s probably not great practice to laugh at the multiple, life altering, diagnoses of your patient.
First, I got endometriosis which is pretty well known now; it’s when the lining of the uterus grows on, and into, organs and in the abdominal cavity. It’s painful and can cause significant damage to women’s organs in some cases. Soon after that diagnosis, I developed some variant of polycystic ovarian syndrome that at the time they weren’t sure about because “only overweight women have PCOS” (a statement now known to be completely untrue). Later on, when trying to get pregnant, I found out I had adenomyosis; a disease I describe as the evil cousin of endometriosis. It is endometriosis growing inside the muscles of your uterus. It is exactly as messed up and painful as that sounds. And somewhere back there in that mix I also developed post-menstrual dysphoria disorder, before we had a name for it.
When I was twenty, and three endometriosis surgeries had not cured my pain and none of the treatments made the PCOS systems liveable, a doctor put me on a drug that induced menopause. When I came back several months later and said “this is amazing, you’ve given me my life back. The pain is gone. The fatigue is gone. My moods feel stable and normal again”, he nodded.
He then said, “I wasn’t sure if you had a reproductive health problem or a psychiatric problem”.
I wanted to yell at that doctor. I wanted to slam my first on his desk and say ‘seriously?! You’re telling me you haven’t believed the things I’ve been saying to you for years?! And you think I should trust you as a doctor, trust you with my health… still?’. But I also wanted to prove it was a reproductive problem, not a psychiatric problem, and I wanted stay on the drug that had transformed my wellbeing and my life. So, I didn’t say anything. I just nodded back, gathered my script and left his office.
How often have women not said something, because we are socialised to not speak? To not make a scene? To not challenge male authority figures?
In the famous book ‘Men Explain Things To Me’, Rebecca Solnit wrote about how any woman in any professional field knows, more often than not, their male counterparts won’t listen to them. That male authority figures will speak down to them. I have found far too often that this overconfidence extends to knowing women’s bodies and bodily experiences better than the woman who inhabits that body. And this silencing, in reaction to that over confidence, extends to speaking out about our own bodies – because at best we might not be heard, and at worst our words might be used against us.
I argued with doctors for years to stay on that one menopause drug that helped me. I described my body as being “allergic to its own hormones”. Artificial were fine, but if I came off the menopause drug and started producing my own again everything went sideways. When I described my experiences, I was told ‘hormones can’t do all the things you say are happening to you’. Time travelling me would like to go back and say ‘hormones can cause psychosis, so I think that proves they can do pretty much anything’. It’s true, while rare, post-partum psychosis can be brought on by hormones that flood the female body after pregnancy. Of course, saying the word ‘psychosis’ in a medical setting is, in itself, a dangerous thing as a woman.
I remember spending a whole day ugly crying on my living room floor in during when they said they wouldn’t let me stay on the drugs for more than 6 months. By the end my day of crying I decided I would have a hysterectomy at all of 22, because I would not go back to what my life was like before. And then I cried some more, because it felt so unbearably unfair that this was all medicine could offer me.
When I asked for the surgery, the doctors yielded and gave me the drug. All of a sudden, the un-doable was doable. No doctor wanted to leave a woman in her early twenties sterile. Women’s ability to reproduce matters, their quality of life does not. That’s what 22-year-old me learnt from those doctors.
I then spent years feeling as though I was some kind of ‘unnatural woman’ for being hormone supressed, and kept it a secret from most everyone I knew.
That girl in her late teens, three surgeries down and still in pain.
That young woman who felt there was nowhere to turn when the best women’s health doctor in the country said he’d been thinking she had a psychiatric disorder not a pain disorder.
This woman in her early twenties who wept on the floor of her living room for six straight hours because if they refused her a drug, her only option was removing her entire reproductive system.
The women in her late twenties still hiding she had medical conditions so severe she was chemically menopausal.
This is who I now daydream of going back in time to speak to. I want to go back and tell her she is right. That one day a doctor will say “we find some women react very strangely to their own hormones… it’s almost like they’re allergic to them”. I want to tell her that doctors will say “we believe you”. That “treatment options are limited. But we believe you”. Because there is such power in being believed. In not feeling like you are in an endless fight with a system much larger and more powerful than you.
Solinit argues that to be a woman is to face your own annihilation in numerous ways, because we live in a society that relishes women’s erasures. Reflecting on her youth, she said “The fight wasn’t just to survive bodily, though that could be intense enough, but to survive as a person possessed of rights including the right to… dignity”.
The failure of medicine to listen to women, to invest in the health of women, is an attack on both our bodies and our dignity. And our struggle is not just to receive treatment, but to be seen as worthy of treatment. To matter enough, individually and collectively, that society will not tolerate medical complacency.
Eventually, medicine does and will catch up – which is to say, eventually society catches up. For medicine and society are enmeshed; society reinforces medical views of women, and in turn medicine reinforces societal views of women. Women were diagnosed as hysterical when it served the broader social project of keeping women subservient. Women don’t need drugs such as testosterone cream when it serves the neoliberally governed public purse not to finance them.
Almost every doctor I’ve met is loath to admit it, but medical knowledge is cultural.
The fact that it is cultural, however, means that it changes and can be changed. The story I have told here is a personal one, of personal problems. But the cure is not personal – it is cultural and communal. So many women have begun to speak both privately and publicly about their pain. About the things we are meant to keep hidden – bleeding, periods, hormones, and what it’s like to experience them all going wrong.
When we collectively use our voice, we make complacency unacceptable. And in doing so, better treatments will come; medicine will catch up. We must continue to rebel against the erasure of our suffering.
Feature image of Gemma Carey at home, by Hilary Wardhaugh.
Both chronic stress and manipulative abuse can lead to an impairment of cognitive functioning. Whenever humans experience ongoing anxiety, their prefrontal cortex will generate increasingly higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps us deal with threats and danger. If stress — real or perceived — becomes chronic, we can get stuck in this state of high alert. The brain cannot differentiate between real and fake news. It initiates and sustains the body’s stress response for as long as you feel anxious, tense, worried, or scared.
The projected overall 2021 poverty rate is 13.7 percent of Americans.
78 percent of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.
Roughly 30 million Americans are without health insurance.
Americans collectively hold about $81 billion in medical debt.
Approximately 325,000 Americans (age 12 or older) are sexually assaulted each year — about 1 every 93 seconds. As for those under 12, 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of reported child sexual abuse. Keyword: reported.
The top three causes of death in the U.S. would be mostly preventable in a society that included economic stability, access to quality health care, protection of the environment, an emphasis on healthy eating habits, and even a modicum of humanity. Instead, each year, heart disease kills about 650,000, cancer kills 600,000, and the third leading cause of death is (wait for it) medical error — taking out at least 250,000 Americans per year. The powers-that-be test their corporate medicines and procedures on us while granting themselves immunity from liability.
63 percent of Americans reported that the future of the nation is a significant source of stress
62 percent were stressed about money
61 percent were stressed about work
51 percent were stressed about violence and crime
43 percent were stressed about health care
Fifty-six percent said that the mere act of staying informed by following the news causes them intense stress. Three out of four Americans reported experiencing at least one stress symptom in the last month — and this survey was taken BEFORE the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns.
Prices go up. Rents go up. The number of billionaires goes up. Everything goes up… except wages and quality of life. I could go on but you get the idea. Everyday life in the Home of the Brave — by definition — keeps the vast majority of its residents in a state of deep distress and high anxiety.
High anxiety = high cortisol. High cortisol negatively impacts our executive functioning, e.g.:
Inability to pay attention
Decrease in visual perception
Feeling agitated and unorganized
Memory loss
Loss of emotional regulation and rational thinking
This explains why so many of us jammed into supermarkets to fight each other for the right to hoard inordinate amounts of toilet paper when the dangerous and unnecessary pandemic lockdowns were implemented.
When stress is chronic and cortisol is raging, we make exponentially more mistakes. We struggle to complete tasks, we lose concentration, we forget basic information, and we repeat ourselves in conversation. Since life itself in this corrupt culture is a source of relentless anxiety, most of us live in an altered state of inefficiency and confusion. However, this reality is so normalized that it’s become invisible and we often think we’ve got it good. After all, look at all these neat gadgets we own and get to stare at all day, every day.
Think about it: We’re alive because our ancestors were the ones who used anxiety and hyper-vigilance to survive. The more casual or reckless early humans weren’t around long enough to pass on their genes. So, here we are — hard-wired with a hair-trigger fight-or-flight response — and we’re stuck in a world in which simple acts like breathing air or visiting a doctor are unhealthy or possibly lethal. Translation: We are the ideal subjects for a grand social experiment.
If you were a member of the elite class — or the proverbial 1% — wouldn’t you prefer that the masses were pliable, easily controlled, and happy to settle for crumbs? Why wouldn’t you rig circumstances in such a way as to keep billions of potential challengers off-balance, frightened, and divided? What better way to maintain power and control than to implement an insidious form of group manipulation? It’s what cult leaders do. It’s what domestic abusers do. It’s what dictators do. And what are those in power if not abusive and narcissistic sociopaths?
I know, the easiest and most alluring path for you right now is to dismiss this as a “conspiracy.” I get it. Life seems far more palatable if you choose denial. It feels so much simpler if you choose to believe those on top are not abusing you. You may even tell yourself that people never do things like create an oppressive, unfair system just to keep their fellow humans subdued and passive. If that’s your premise, let’s explore it for a few minutes.
Would the folks who run things in God’s Country ever coerce people through abusive behaviors? You might want to ask the detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay. As reported by the New York Times, the U.S. hired “two C.I.A. contract psychologists” to create a program that used “violence, isolation and sleep deprivation on more than 100 men in secret sites, some described as dungeons.” Tactics included waterboarding and cramming men into small confinement boxes. The idea here was to induce so much chronic stress, it would break their resistance.
Human Rights Watch has documented other devious and abusive red-white-and-blue techniques paid for by your hard-earned tax dollars; e.g., mock execution by asphyxiation, stress positions, hooding during questioning, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and use of detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce debilitating stress.
The Land of the Free incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. The Center for Constitutional Rights reports that such prisoners are “repeatedly abused by their guards, fellow prisoners, and an ineffective and apathetic system. They suffer beatings, rape, prolonged solitary confinement, meager food rations, and frequently-denied medical care.” All in the name of punishment and pacification.
Perhaps the best comparison for America’s brutal molding of its citizens is domestic abuse. The United Nations defines domestic abuse as “a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner.” Read that again: a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control.
Abusers, says the UN, use actions or threats of action to influence others. This includes any behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure, or wound someone. Are you frightened by the lack of financial stability? Are you terrorized by the threat of sexual assault or injury by medical error? Does the possibility of eviction, homelessness, and poverty manipulate you into making choices you abhor, choices that violate your deepest values and individual freedoms?
If you declare “the system is broken,” just about everyone will agree with you for one reason or another. But what if it’s not broken? What if it’s running exactly as it’s designed to run? A minuscule percentage of humans make the rules and thus reap virtually all the material rewards. The rest of us suppress our desires, our individuality, and our dreams in the name of survival — in its most meager sense. We’re wounded and intimidated into submission, too programmed and fearful to even think about rebellion… let alone solidarity with all the other victims.
Pro tip: All it takes to flip the script is for each of you to change your mind. Demand more pleasure instead of less pain. It doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it can’t be like this if we take off the blinders and see the ugliness of reality.
“To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant,” writes Noam Chomsky. “Difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are often not only ugly but also painful. To understand the truth about these matters is to be led to action that may not be easy to undertake and that may even carry a significant personal cost.”
Truths like those discussed in this article are ugly and painful but that’s why the big lies are invented in the first place. On that note, I leave you with this from the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few.
As soon as I heard Biden say, “We will hunt you down,” about the Afghan airport bombers, I knew that the US would immediately kill some Afghan women and children. The US will slaughter women and children at the drop of a smallpox blanket, an H-bomb, Agent Orange or a reaper drone. When the rampaging trillion-dollar-a-year military and surveillance empire feels it has been wronged there is no limit to its blood lust.
So today we have the report that the US drone-striked an Afghan family, killing six children, ages two to ten, and three adults. The empire’s mockingbird media will spin this as unfortunate but necessary and, no matter how much evidence the empire offers to the contrary, US serfs will believe that they have rights and freedoms and are a “model” for the world. So another story today won’t faze them any more than dead Afghan children:
Today former New York Times science writer Alex Berenson was permanently banned from the intelligence agency tentacle known as Twitter. Berenson tweeted that the covid vaccines do not prevent infection and transmission — which is exactly what the vaccine pushers themselves have said previously — the vaccines only lessen symptoms — but the little people aren’t allowed to tell truths about lockdowns or vaccines — vaccines developed and marketed at “warp speed” and so obviously harmless, useful and necessary that tens of millions of people have to be bribed, brainwashed, threatened, vilified, censored, entered in million dollar lotteries, thrown out of work and smashed back to feudalism in order for people to take them.
“Covid” is no more going to end than the war on terror ended. It’s too profitable, it’s a gold mine. Covid even has a bigger market — a potential 7 billion customers shot up with yearly boosters. Whenever the government declares a war something — Communism, drugs, cancer, terrorism — the war will be endless, highly profitable for a few, and send the working class majority running in fear farther and farther away from truth, health and answers.
The vaccine is your God. The vaccine is your government. The vaccine will decide how much 1st Amendment you get. The vaccine will decide how much freedom of movement you’re allowed. The vaccine is the be-all and end-all and you will have this piped into your brains 24/7 from every direction. If you want your Social Security checks and Medicare, take the shot. If you want to see a movie or eat at a restaurant, take the shot. If you want to travel, take the shot. If you want out of your house, take the shot. If you want us to let you live at all, take the shot. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” was one of the funniest jokes we ever told you. So long and so many freedoms ago…
Fighting a civil war about this suits us just fine. We have many more things we’d like to do to you as we get ready for the homeland calamity (not security) of the US dollar losing its reserve currency status. Unlike you beggars, we plan ahead. Many of you don’t even know where your next meal or tent encampment is coming from. We want this vaccine as bad as we wanted the Iraq War and if you don’t like it, you’re a traitor to health, freedom, old people and children — you are a pestilence that’s destroying our way of life. It feels really great to concentrate all of our problems on powerless little vermin like you. If you were gone, everything would be all right.
Probably sacrificing a bunch of you will make this plague go away. Follow the science. It’s not like we’re superstitious witch doctors. Wear your mask in the restaurant when you walk to your table because the virus floats up there whether you’re seven feet tall or five feet tall — when you sit down at your table, take your mask off because the virus isn’t there. Basically, the virus likes you sitting down, lying down, shutting up, staying home, shooting up, obeying and making Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos richer. What’s good for them is good for you and what’s good for you is doing everything we say when we say it even if it contradicts something we said five minutes ago — beating you down and getting you mindless is where we want you.
But the one true God is the vaccine. Take the poison, goddamn you. The Rev. Tony Fauci don’t know nothin’ about no gain of function research. Jesus, even people at Jonestown were more cooperative than you are. But we love you, we’re concerned about you. That’s why we prohibited millions of you from working and then watched you go broke, losing your jobs, homes and savings. That’s why we gave you Medicare for All. Oh, wait…
Just take the shot, we’ve got all kinds of things in store for you if you don’t. We’ve only just begun to fight, doctors and nurses will be our armies, they will vanquish you, hospitals will be our castles and the drawbridges will be pulled up on you unvaccinated polluted rabble. And stop being paranoid and libelous about good people like us, we’re the best people, we are so superior to you, it’s infuriating that we even have to explain ourselves — you’d think that we’ve maimed and killed people with DES, Oraflex, Vioxx or the Swine Flu vaccine — or killed innocent women and children with reaper drones. Alarmist know-nothings!
“Two weeks to flatten the curve…” If you were gone, everything would be all right. Hurry up and take the poison, goddam you. We have to make more progress. Tomorrow belongs to us!
To cover up the humiliating defeat for the United States and its allies in Afghanistan, the Anglo-American media is spinning tales of a great “humanitarian” airlift to save Afghani women from assumed brutality when the Taliban consolidate their power across Afghanistan.
But, at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, last week the Chinese changed the narrative, calling for the US, UK, Australia and other NATO countries to be held accountable for alleged violations of human rights committed during the two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
“Under the banner of democracy and human rights the US and other countries carry out military interventions in other sovereign states and impose their own model on countries with vastly different history, culture and national conditions [which has] brought severe disasters to their people,” China’s ambassador in Geneva Cheng Xu told the council.
“United States, the United Kingdom and Australia must be held accountable for their violations of human rights in Afghanistan, and the resolution of this Special Session should cover this issue,” he added.
Amnesty International and a host of other civil society speakers have also called for the creation of a robust investigative mechanism that would allow for monitoring and reporting on human rights violations and abuses, including grave crimes under international law.
They have also asked for the mechanism to assist in holding those suspected of criminal responsibility to justice in fair trials.
However, they were looking at the future rather than the past.
Adopted by consensus
The UNHRC member states adopted by consensus a resolution which merely requests further reports and an update by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in March 2022.
China was extraordinarily critical of Australia in May this year when the so-called Brereton Report was released by the Australian government into a four-year investigation of possible war crimes in Afghanistan by Australian forces.
The findings revealed that some of Australia’s most elite soldiers in the SAS (Special Air Services) had been involved in unlawful killing, blood lust, a warrior culture and cover-up of their alleged atrocities.
It came as a surprise to an Australian public, which believes that Australian military engagement in Afghanistan was designed to keep the world safe from terrorists.
Today, Australians and the rest of the world are fed by a news narrative that the West saved Afghani women from the brutality of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime, and now they need to be airlifted by Western forces to save them from falling into the hands of the Taliban again.
Rather than airlifting Afghans out of the country, China’s ambassador Xu told UNHRC: “We will continue developing a good neighbourly, friendly and cooperative relationship with Afghanistan and continue our constructive role in its process of peace and reconstruction.”
Reporting this, Yahoo Australia pointed out that Afghanistan was sitting on precious mineral deposits estimated to be worth US$1 trillion and the country also had vast supplies of iron ore, copper and gold. Is believed to be home to one of the world’s largest deposits of lithium.
The report suggested that China was eyeing these resources.
Accountability for the West
However, such suspicions should not come in the way of calling for the West to be accountable for its war crimes in Afghanistan, which have been well documented even by such organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The UNHRC has not taken up these issues so far, fearing US retaliation.
Speaking on Sri Lankan Sirasa TV’s Pathikade programme, Professor Prathiba Mahanamahewa, a former member of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission who went to Afghanistan on a fact-finding mission on the invitation of the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission in 2014, argued that Western nations had been instrumental in creating terrorist groups around the world like the Taliban to destabilise governing systems in countries.
“At the core of the Taliban is the idea of spreading Islamic fundamentalism and they have inspired similar movements in the region; thus, it is a big threat to countries in Asia, especially in South Asia,” argued Professor Mahanamahewa.
“There are parties that pump a lot of funds to the Taliban.”
He said that in 2018, Sri Lanka (with several other countries) fought at the UNHRC to come up with a treaty to stop these financial flows to terrorist groups.
“Until today, nothing has been done,” said Professor Mahanamahewa.
Producer of opium and hashish
He added that Afghanistan was a large producer of opium and hashish, and the West was a big market for it, thus “Talibans would obviously like to have some form of relations with the West”.
In April 2019, the International Criminal Court (ICC) rejected its prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s November 2017 request to open an investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity during Afghanistan’s brutal armed conflict.
Such an investigation would have investigated war crimes and brutality of both the Taliban and the US-led forces and activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The panel of judges concluded that since the countries concerned had not taken any action over the perpetrators of possible “war crimes”, ICC could not act because it was a court of last resort.
In March 2011, the Rolling Stones magazine carried a lengthy investigative report on how war crimes by US forces were covered up by the Pentagon.
After extensive interviews with members of a group within the US forces called Bravo Company, they described how they were focused on killings Afghan civilians like going to the forests to hunt animals, and how these killings of innocent villages who were sometimes working in the fields were camouflaged as a terror attack by Taliban.
The soldiers involved were not disciplined or punished and US army aggressively moved to frame the incidents as the work of a “rogue unit”. The Pentagon clamped down on information about these killings, and soldiers in the Bravo Company were barred from speaking to the media.
Documented incidents
While the US occupation continued, many human rights organisations have documented incidents like these and called for independent international investigations, which have met with lukewarm response.
Only a few were punished with light sentences that did not reflect the gravity of the crime.
After losing the elections, in November 2020 President Trump pardoned two US army officials who were accused and jailed for war crimes in Afghanistan. While some Pentagon leaders expressed concern that this action would damage military discipline, Trump tweeted “we train our boys to be killing machines, then persecute them when they kill”.
It is perhaps now time that the US indulged in some soul-searching about their culture of killing, rather than using a narrative of “saving Afghani women” to cover up barbaric killing when the US-led forces were involved in Afghanistan.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of one of India’s top think-tanks, the Centre Policy Research, argued in an Indian Express article that terrorist groups like the Taliban or ISIS were “products of modern imperial politics” that was unsettling local societies, encouraging violence, supported fundamentalism, thus breaking up state structures.
He listed 7 sins of the US Empire that contributed to the debacle in Afghanistan. These included corruption that drives war; self-deception like what happened in Vietnam and now Afghanistan; lack of morality where the empire drives lawlessness; and hypocrisy, a cult of violence and racism.
It is interesting that the Rolling Stones feature reflected the last two points in the way the Bravo Company went about picking up innocent villages for killing. But Mehta argued that “the modality of US withdrawal exuded the fundamental sin of empire. Its reinforcement of race and hierarchy”.
‘Common humanity’
He noted: “Suddenly, the pretext of common humanity, and universal liberation, which was the pretext of empire, turned into the worst kind of cultural essentialism. It is their culture, these medieval tribalists who are incapable of liberty”.
Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, writing on the Al Jazeera website asked: “What can the Taliban do to Afghanistan that it and the US, and their European allies have already not done to it?”
He described the Doha deal between the US and the Taliban as a deal to hand Afghanistan back to the Taliban.
“As for Afghan women and girls, they are far better off fighting the fanaticism and stupidity of the Taliban on their own and not under the shadow of US military barracks,” argued Professor Dabashi.
“Iranian, Pakistani, Turkish and Arab women have been fighting similar, if not identical, patriarchal thuggery right in their neighbourhood, so will Afghan women.”
Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.
Could an atrocity have been arranged by some of Baradar’s men at the request of the CIA?
Three days before the bloody carnage at Kabul airport, CIA director William Burns held a secret meeting with a top Taliban commander in the Afghan capital. That is only one of several suspicious events this week in the countdown to the dramatic U.S. evacuation.
At least 13 U.S. troops guarding an entrance to Kabul airport were killed in an apparent suicide bomb attack. Dozens of Afghans waiting in line for evacuation by military cargo planes were also killed. A second blast hit a nearby hotel used by British officials to process immigration documents.
It was not the main ranks of the Taliban who carried out the atrocities. The militant group which swept into power on August 15 after taking over Kabul has ring-fenced the capital with checkpoints. The explosions occurred in airport districts under the control of the U.S. and British military.
A little-known terror group, Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), claimed responsibility for the bombings. IS-K was barely reported before until this week when the U.S. and British intelligence services issued high-profile warnings of imminent terror attacks by this group at Kabul airport. Those warnings came only hours before the actual attacks. President Joe Biden even mentioned this new terror organization earlier this week and pointedly claimed they were “sworn enemies” of the Taliban.
How is an obscure terror outfit supposed to infiltrate a highly secure area – past “sworn enemy” Taliban checkpoints – and then breach U.S. and British military cordons?
How is it that U.S. and British intelligence had such precise information on imminent threats when these same intelligence agencies were caught completely flat-footed by the historic takeover of Kabul by the Taliban on August 15? When the Taliban swept into the capital it marked the collapse of a regime that the Americans and British had propped for nearly 20 years during their military occupation of Afghanistan. Could their intelligence agencies miss foreseeing such a momentous event and yet less than two weeks later we are expected to believe these same agencies were able to pinpoint an imminent atrocity requiring complex planning?
What is the political fallout from the airport bombings? President Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are adamant that the evacuation from Kabul will be completed by the deadline on August 31. Biden said the atrocity underscores the urgency to get out of Afghanistan, although he threw in the token vow that “we will hunt down” the perpetrators.
To be sure, the president is coming under intense political fire for capitulating against the Taliban and terrorists and for betraying Afghan allies. Some Republicans are demanding his resignation due to his overseeing a disaster and national disgrace. It is estimated that up to 250,000 Afghans who worked with the U.S. military occupation will be left behind and in danger of reprisal attacks.
There seems a negligible chance that the deaths of 13 U.S. troops – the largest single-day killing of Americans in Afghanistan since a Chinook helicopter was shot down in August 2011 with 38 onboard – will provoke an extension of the Pentagon’s mission in the country. Even after the bombings this week, the Pentagon advised Biden to stick to the August 31 deadline. The Taliban have also stated that all U.S. and NATO troops must be out of the country by that date.
Polls were showing that most Americans agreed with Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan – the longest war by the U.S. was seen as futile and unwinnable. The sickening bomb attacks this week will only underscore the public sense of war-weariness. Hawkish calls for returning large-scale forces to Afghanistan have little political resonance.
This brings us back to the secret meeting earlier this week between the CIA’s William Burns and Taliban commander Abdul Ghani Baradar. The Washington Postreported that Biden sent Burns to meet with Baradar in Kabul. It was the most senior contact between the Biden administration and the Taliban since the latter’s takeover of Afghanistan on August 15. The details of the discussion were not disclosed and some reports indicated other Taliban figures were not aware of the meeting.
Baradar is one of the founding members of the Taliban. He was captured by Pakistan intelligence and the CIA in 2010. But at the request of the United States, Baradar was released from prison in 2018. Thereafter he led the Taliban in negotiations with the U.S. on finding an end to the conflict. Those talks culminated in a deal in February 2020 with the Trump administration agreeing to troop withdrawal this year. Biden has stuck to the pullout plan.
From his career path, there is good reason to believe that Baradar is the CIA’s man inside the Taliban. Let’s say at least that he has the agency’s ear.
Why else would CIA chief Burns meet Baradar at such a crucial time in the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan? To get Taliban assurances of security measures safeguarding American troops as they exit? That obviously didn’t happen.
What else, then? Could an atrocity have been arranged by some of Baradar’s men at the request of the CIA? The objective being to shift focus from a shambolic, shameful retreat to one of necessity due to terror threats. It seems uncanny that U.S. and British intelligence services were warning of an event only hours before it happened in a way that was precisely predicted. The other consequence of benefit is that the droves of desperate Afghans queueing near Kabul airport are dispersed out of fear of more bloodshed. The beneficial optic is that U.S. and British military planes will take off on August 31 without the harrowing, pitiful scenes of Afghans running down the runway after them. Hence, the empire wraps up its bloody criminal war, with a little less shame than otherwise.
A suicide bombing near Kabul airport on Thursday added another dimension to the chaos in Afghanistan as Western forces rush to complete their evacuation.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the blasts that killed at least 175 people, including 13 US soldiers, challenging the Taliban’s hold on the capital.
Either group is bad news for Afghan women and girls, and anyone with links to the former government or exiting armies.
Taliban officials are on a charm offensive in international media, with one suggesting to Newsweek the group could contribute to fighting climate change if formally recognised by other governments.
Don’t expect the Taliban to consign coal to history any time soon, though. The militant group gets a surprisingly large share of its revenue from mining — more than from the opium trade — and could scale up coal exports to pay salaries as it seeks to govern.
Afghan people could certainly use support to cope with the impacts of climate change. The UN estimates more than 10 million are at risk of hunger due to the interplay of conflict and drought.
Soldiers helping kids and a former British marine trying to get rescue animals out of Kabul. These have become some of the dominant images of the western evacuation from Afghanistan. They’ve started to conceal brutal truths – decades in the making – some of which I witnessed there as a soldier and journalist. That cannot be allowed to happen.
We continue to support vulnerable civilians in Afghanistan as they prepare to fly out to safety. As well as helping to secure the airport and evacuating civilians, we've provided blankets, food and water, sanitary packs and baby milk for vulnerable families. pic.twitter.com/2yUqNb5Vy5
The images are heart-warming and sickly sweet. This is precisely the point of them: to humanise and soften a pointless, 20-year war that wreaked untold havoc on one of the poorest nations on earth.
The life of every animal is precious and quite rightly the public is completely behind the hero that is @PenFarthing. Please support @Nowzad and the mission to get his team and animals back to the UK from Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/bexHgzqnWv
As an Afghanistan veteran who has worked as a journalist in the country, I think it’s worth reviewing what that record is before this sickly sweet PR comes to dominate. To do that we can take a look at just a few aspects of the war.
Death toll
Brown University’s Costs of War project, as reported by the US magazine Task and Purpose, registers an astonishing death toll in Afghanistan up to October 2018. Especially for a war which was meant to ‘liberate’ people.
This toll includes 2,401 US military deaths, 3,937 contractor deaths, 58,596 Afghan military and police deaths, 1,141 allied military dead, and (a conservative estimate) 38,480 civilians killed. The number of wounded across all sides – both mentally and physically – is difficult to pin down.
These figures don’t include the scores of Afghans killed and wounded at Kabul airport yesterday on 26 August. Nor the reported 13 US troops who died in the attack claimed by the local branch of ISIS.
BREAKING: A British defence source said it is “highly likely” Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) was responsible for the attacks outside Kabul airport.
Drones became a signature weapon of the War on Terror and were widely used in Afghanistan. Due to the secretive nature of their use, figures are hard to pin down. But The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) maintains a database to map and count deaths and strikes fairly accurately.
TBIJ projects that between 2015 and today over 13,000 strikes have been carried out in Afghanistan. These resulted in between 4,126 and 10,076 deaths over that period. Drones, however, have been in use for much longer. I can recall as a young soldier posted to Kandahar Airfield in 2006, missile-laden Predator drones taking off and landing were a daily sight.
Reports on the reality of the drone war, and its innocent victims, are widely available.
Bombs
The air war was another big part of the Afghan war – distinct from the drone war. As foreign troops drew down in recent years, bombing intensified in support of Afghan military operations. For instance, as reporter Azmat Khan toldDemocracy Now:
the United States was bombing heavily parts of that country where there were fights against the Taliban raging. So, just to give some context, in 2019, the United States dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any previous year of the war. So, I think it was something close to — more than 6,200 bombs that year, as they were trying to negotiate.
The use of air power, she pointed out, boosted recruitment for the Taliban:
You know, many of its more recent recruits were people who did lose loved ones and really wanted revenge for those casualties.
House raids
Night raids on Afghan homes were another key feature of the war. These involved special forces descending on Afghan’s houses at night, supposedly in search of terrorists. These became highly controversial. In fact, former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s own cousin was killed in a raid.
Later this role was handed to CIA-controlled Afghan death squads known as Zero Units. In 2020, I went back to Afghanistan to report on them. We met families whose relatives had been murdered in their homes. Another community was attacked in a night raid resulting in several deaths. This included a young boy whose father dug his body from the rubble of a mosque days later.
Skewed
There is no doubt that the working class soldiers in Kabul airport want to help the kids there. And clearly puppies and kitten have enormous appeal for the British public. But there’s a danger that these images skew our idea of what the Afghan war was actually about. The real story of the conflict is not one of rescuing kids and dogs. It’s one of twenty years of imperial violence and failure in a war that never needed to be fought.
The Three Minute Thesis is an academic research communication competition developed by The University of Queensland, Australia.
Three Minute Thesis heats were held across the University of Canberra’s faculties throughout July. The six finalists from across four faculties, are now progressing to the UC 3MT Finals where they will present their thesis at an online, livestreamed event in front of a panel of judges. Competitors must explain their research and convince the judges and audience of its significant in no more than three minutes, for a chance to win the $4,000 first place prize, $2,000 for the runner up, and $1,000 people’s choice prize.
BroadAgenda is SO EXCITED that Jane Phượng Phạm, who is currently completing her PhD with us at the the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation at the University of Canberra, is a finalist.
Wooohooooo! Did we mention how proud we are?!
Read or watch her wonderful presentation below. And then vote for her here. Go on. You know you want to.
Take a look at this beautiful river. Doesn’t it look refreshing? Inviting? Full of life.
Now, imagine you were swimming in it. Now, here’s the thing. You don’t actually know what’s underneath. That’s exactly how female academics leaders feel in Vietnam. Their lives are like a river, it flows on but no one knows what’s below the surface. It’s difficult to see the full picture. My study explores the under-representation of female academic leaders in Vietnam. There are 171 universities, but only 13 female presidents. That’s tiny 7.6%. The number can tell us what’s happening, but they can’t tell us why.
In the West, a number of metaphors have been used to describe women leaders’ barriers. You would be familiar many of them. There’s glass ceiling, sticky floor, or the labyrinth. But they make little sense for an academic leader like myself.
To understand the challenge that female leaders have in Vietnam requires qualitative study. I use a method called photo elicitation which involves asking participants to bring in photos that reflected their lived experiences as female leaders.
In doing so, I learnt about their wishes, desires, feelings, motivations, belief systems. I found that my participants conceptualised their career as a journey, but their journey is not on land, it’s in the water, in the river. One dean told me that she found herself swimming in the river on her own without any life boat. The other found herself stuck in the water wheel, trying to balance work and family care. All of my participants saw the uncertainty of the river’s flow which could lift them up, drag them down or wash them ashore.
For me, the adverse environment that female academic leaders face is better understood by researching the language that they used. The river metaphor will provide a clearer understanding of their lived experiences as female leaders and shed light on the challenges that they have to navigate in academia in Vietnam. Vietnamese women are like raindrops. We were born from the water, and we die to the water. Where our lives turn out depend on where the raindrops fall. And my research is finally telling their story.
Alex Lascu with Jane Phuong – both finalists in UC’s Three Minute Thesis. Their mate Dua’a Ahmad (not pictured) is also a finalist.
Feature image: Nho Que River in Vietnam. Picture: Ngoc Nguyen
There is something decidedly sinister about the way the right-wing media is pursuing the “elimination strategy is madness” argument so doggedly. Yes, it’s always interesting to discover what people are saying about New Zealand overseas, but The New Zealand Herald republishing anti-Jacinda Ardern editorials from the Daily Telegraph — mouthpiece of the British Conservative Party — points to an altogether more disturbing preoccupation.
These misgivings are only reinforced when one considers the near unanimous hostility directed towards the Prime Minister and her government by New Zealand’s talkback hosts.
At the most superficial level, one could argue that the right-wing media’s editorial hostility is generated almost entirely by bottomline anxieties. With most of its advertising revenue generated by realtors, retailers, the hospitality industry and tourist operators, the big media outlets must experience significant financial pain whenever New Zealand and/or its most important economic hub, Auckland, goes into lockdown.
The pressure brought to bear on the media bosses to get the doors open for their advertisers’ paying customers is easily imagined.
More than anything else, commercial enterprises hate surprises. Certainty and predictability are what they need to go on generating profits for their shareholders. The sudden appearance of covid-19 in the community, followed by lockdowns of a severity to make the eyes of overseas commentators water, bring with them consequences that are costly, disruptive and generally bad for business.
Unsurprisingly, a significant fraction of the business community would very much prefer that covid-19 was responded to in a fashion less injurious to their financial health.
Those business leaders less bound by the short-term selfishness of their colleagues take a more responsible position. They understand how very bad it looks for businesspeople to convey the impression that they care a great deal less about people getting very ill, and quite possibly dying, than they do about making money.
Short, sharp, uncompromising lockdowns
They also know that New Zealand’s style of short, sharp, uncompromising lockdowns protect the economic interests of the business community a whole lot more effectively than the loose, dangerously porous, lockdowns on display in the UK, the USA, and across the Tasman in Australia.
Not that anything as mundane as “the facts of the matter” have ever slowed the government’s critics down. Neither New Zealand’s extraordinary success in keeping the number of covid-19 deaths below 30, nor the powerful bounce-back of its economy, cuts any ice with the “elimination strategy is madness” brigade. Indeed, the obvious success of Jacinda Ardern’s elimination strategy only seems to make them madder.
So what is it? What drives Ardern’s critics so crazy?
Sadly, a great many of her right-wing opponents seem to be inspired by nothing more edifying than sexist antipathy towards a young, female prime minister, from a tiny and powerless country at the bottom of the world, who has outperformed (by a wide margin) the male leaders of much larger and more powerful nations.
Something about this picture is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Young women are supposed to defer to the “big dogs” of the international community — not show them up. Ardern has produced a disturbance in the conservative “Force” that makes them shudder: as if an entire political ideology suddenly cried out in indignation and was rudely silenced.
They fear something terrible is going on.
And, in a way, they’re right. From the perspective of those responsible for creating a world in which the interests of business take precedence over even the ordinary person’s right to stay safe and well (some might say especially over the ordinary person’s right to stay safe and well) the sight of a young, female prime minister putting the interests of ordinary people first is a terrible thing.
Ardern’s “kindness” works way beyond neoliberalism’s explanation Because Jacinda Ardern’s “kindness” doesn’t just work a little bit, it works way beyond neoliberalism’s capacity to supply a credible explanation.
Take Sweden, for example. For a while it was the “who needs lockdowns?” brigade’s poster child. But Sweden, with just twice the population of New Zealand, racked-up a horrifying 14,000+ covid fatalities. Had Ardern followed the Swedish prime minister’s example, her country would have sustained upwards of 7,000 deaths.
By following its leader’s strict elimination strategy, however, New Zealand’s “Team of Five Million” kept their country’s covid death toll to 26.
On the Right, however, this sort of science-guided, humanitarian response to covid-19 just doesn’t compute. Conservatives around the world react by accusing Ardern of political cowardice. She simply doesn’t have the balls to adopt a strategy that will lead directly to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.
Look at the Brits; look at the Yanks; they had the courage to condemn tens-of-thousands of their people to early and unnecessary deaths; they know that “you can’t live in a cave forever”; that, in the end, the economy must come first.
This is the upside-down world towards which the right-wing media’s wayward editorial decisions are dragging its readers, viewers and listeners. A world in which saving New Zealanders’ lives is the wrong thing to do. A world where “freedom” means nothing more than being able to go shopping wherever and whenever you want – without a mask.
That the big media companies haven’t quite arrived there yet is because there are still some executives who understand that, ultimately, the news media relies on ordinary people to read its copy and listen to its broadcasters’ opinions.
Ordinary people who, if right-wing editors and producers ever get around to actually swallowing the insanity-inducing Kool-Aid swishing about in their mouths, will be offered-up to deranged conservatives (and the advertisers) as unavoidable human sacrifices to the Moloch god of the free market.
The only elimination strategy the right-wing media will ever wholeheartedly support.
This essay, by Chris Trotter, was originally posted on the Bowalley Road blog of Thursday, 26 August 2021, under the title: “A Disturbing Preoccupation: Why the Right-Wing Media Hates Jacinda’s Covid Elimination Strategy”. It is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the permission of the author.
Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need – new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.
— Rudyard Kipling (1899)
The 2011 UK census recorded that Asian groups together numbered roughly 7% of Britain’s population, Black people 3% and mixed-race 2%, making a BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) total of 12%. In various combinations they are the decedents of people who’ve once been owned, colonised, lost their lands, original culture, languages etc, and in modern societies have little or no collective institutional or financial power, to combat their ghettoisation in the lower reaches the UK class system. The reason they are here, subject to western structural racism, is because the Tony Blairs of the 18th and 19th C slaughtered and enslaved their ancestors. Throughout this period of the slavery and racist-imperialist gravy-train – and as Rudyard Kipling’s famous sentiments demonstrate – this oppression was represented as doing indigenous peoples some sort of service or favour.
Elites abandoning the post-war decolonisation consensus in our era, returned to this racist faked foreign policy benevolence, force-feeding the public the narrative, that from intrusive Iraq, Afghanistan wars and elsewhere, ‘America is spreading democracy’. The extent to which America is itself a democracy is up for debate, but this marketing is simply a rehash, of the 19th C ‘Onward march of western civilisation’ expansionist ideology. When asked, Ghandi is reputed to have mocked the notion of western civilisation saying ‘I think it would be a good idea’.
Modern racist-imperialists – prominently Blair, his former ministers and his media enablers – blatantly reuse tropes of the same racist propaganda. As the US project in Afghanistan grinds to a halt and tragedy overtakes the country, this propaganda practice has again gone into overdrive. The BBC and most of the corporate media continue to re-spin the years of western domination of Afghanistan as about, educating its women and children. In light of the new US withdrawal position, this is not just last year’s Orwell-like Ministry of Truth-style propaganda, but also a racist narrative that’s again hundreds of years old. During the period of the 18th/19th C imperialist gravy-train, western conquest was similarly represented as ‘civilising the primitive savage’ and justified by narratives of supposedly ‘teaching the ‘w*gs/ darkies Christianity’. Obscuring the slurs of implied ethnic primitivism from modern media presentation, hardly changes the truth of the material and ideological dynamic.
The ‘educating Afghan women and children’ narrative would, as public discourse, be treated with the shocked incredulity it deserves, were indigenous Afghan casualties, from western conquest and occupation, not as a editorial agenda frequently media played down, effaced and censored from representation, No matter how many Afghan mothers protest the western killing of their children, this phenomenon has been mainly absented from prominence in news agendas.
When the UK Times unusually broke ranks reporting a 2009 US atrocity, it was left to campaigning scrutiny site Media Lens to follow up in 2010, writing… “American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed.”
The extent of the problem meant in 2011 after a further nine children died in a NATO air strike, even President Karzai – an ambitious local politician in effect, simply a western satrap – was forced against potential self-interest, to embarrass General Petraeus publicly stating “On behalf of the people of Afghanistan I want you to stop the killings of civilians” and the subsequent apology was “not enough”. The France 24 news site covering Karzai’s statement, also referred to the similar indigenous 65 non-combatants killed during operations in Kunar province’s Ghaziabad district; six civilians killed in neighbouring Nangarhar province, and the hundreds who took to the streets of Kabul protesting the killing of children, all by western forces.
The brutal Taliban shooting of Malala Yousafzai was used as a propaganda boost to the ‘advancing civilisation’ narrative by western media and political elites. But it is perhaps significant that the Taliban who are hardly public relations sophisticates, felt they need only appeal to the lived experience of indigenous people in Afghanistan and the bordering area of Pakistan – in a 2013 response to the surviving Malala, publicly questioning…
if you were shot but [by] Americans in a drone attack, would world have ever heard updates on your medical status? Would you be called ‘daughter of the nation’? Would the media make a fuss about you? Would General Kiyani have come to visit you and would the world media be constantly reporting on you?… Would a Malala day be announced?… More than 300 innocent women and children have been killed in drones attacks but who cares… (numbers unverified).
Even career politician former President Karzai was similarly in line with grassroots experiences, after this year’s withdrawal announcement, telling Russia’s RT (UK) “The US has lost the war in Afghanistan…years ago, when it bombed Afghan homes”. And that this western violence had recruited for the indigenous Afghan Taliban and enabled them. “Things went wrong. They (Taliban) began to re-emerge and the part of the population went with them.”
Given that women and their children are most often the first victims of war, there has never been a significant grassroots pro-imperialism feminist movement. In fact, in contrast to the attempts by pro-war neoliberals to camouflage their atrocities in the clothing of women’s concerns, a generational spanning tradition of anti-war feminists exists, including figures like Jane Adams, Ruth Adler, Vera Brittain, Betty Reardon, and Sylvia Pankhurst who opposed the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. Current media spin about supposedly helping women in Afghanistan also deliberately side-lines significant figures like CodePink’s Medea Benjamin who recently commented…“A shout out to all who joined CODEPINK and other peace groups to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan. From Bush to Obama, we called for our troops to come home. Now we have to stop the military-industrial complex from dragging us into new wars.”
Another issue is can altruism – particularly with regard to educating indigenous women and children – be remotely believed as a motivation for those responsible for the West’s conquest of Afghanistan? Education has been comodified in George W. Bush’s America, and resulting student debt is at record levels. Similarly, in contradiction to previous UK Labour Party traditions, the governments comprising PM Tony Blair, Chancellor Gordon Brown and their cabinets abolished the mandatory student support grant and even introduced fees for what had previously been free education. Consequently, the marketing of the state education policies of Blair et al were frequently parodied by Party grassroots supporters as instead ‘Exploitation, Exploitation, Exploitation’. Blair’s New Labour cuts to lone parent benefits – primarily harming single mothers and their children – is frequently cited as the moment Labour’s traditional support realised they had been betrayed by neoliberal entryism. Would Britain’s neoliberal political elite attacking domestic lone mothers and working-class opportunities, really expend financial resources just to help Afghan women and their children?
Historian David Stannard has documented 100 million dead indigenous people of the Americas as victims of the largest holocaust in human history, occurring as a result of the overall conquest of the continent. For its part the US currently has a population of 331+ million people. There are only 6+ million Native Americans left as part of this population, whose life chances are largely limited by the constraints of the Reservation system. Native Americans are practically un-findable, excluded, in most US cities, and invisible on film and TV. If President George W Bush wanted to help indigenous people, he could have started at home.
If Bush simply wanted to ‘do good’, given former manufacturing city powerhouses like Detroit are wastelands, suffering from the export of US manufacturing jobs to global sweatshop economies, he could have fought poverty and the resulting homelessness crisis. Perhaps most significantly he could have tackled the economic underpinnings of the ongoing post-19th C Black human rights crisis. Are then we really supposed to believe his US conquest of Afghanistan was about some sort of ‘white man’s burden’ altruism?
In contradiction to the western white man’s burden narrative, both Bush and Blair presided over torture programs victimising Muslim people-of-colour. One victim of the UK Blair torture regime – Fatima Boudchar – was actually pregnant when kidnapped along with her husband for rendition. In Afghanistan torture was carried out at Bagram which corporate news outlets largely misrepresent as simply an airbase. Most of the news outlets now pretending to be outraged by human rights concerns under the new Taliban, spun western torture under the entirely new invented term ‘water boarding’ as if it were akin to harmless surfing. For decades prior to this it was simply known as a Nazi torture technique. Not particularly a secret given it was represented even in popular film culture. In Battle of the V1 (1959), a Polish female partisan subjected to Nazi water torture dies after her heart gives out. In Circle of Deception (1960), it’s features, similarly used on a Canadian officer played by Bradford Dillman. Yet, when the victims are simply Muslim people-of-colour, the status of the torture technique suddenly changes.
So what are the real incentives behind the US-led conquest of Afghanistan? On 9/11 the Pentagon and Twin Towers were attacked by 15 violent Sunni Whabbist Saudi Arabians and four other Muslims. It was suggested that Saudi Whabbists had used the Afghanistan wilderness as a training ground. The extent of cultural collusion between the Pashton Afghan Taliban and Whabbist Saudi Arabs is often disputed. In any case Osama Bin Laden was found in neighbouring Pakistan. The question is if you want to combat violent Saudi Arabian Whabbists, why not stop their export and go to source – Saudi Arabia itself? Saudi Arabia is not only the source of the 9/11 attackers but its appalling human rights on the oppression of women and judicial punishment arguably exceeds that of pre-invasion Afghanistan. In fact, since 9/11 the US instead of dealing Saudi Arabia which coincidentally is also its long term regional ally and oil supplier, has attacked or militarily threatened numerous countries that either have nothing to do with the country, or even in ethnic terms have an adversarial relationship to the Saudis – among these predominantly Shia Iraq, Syria, Iran and Berber Libya.
The approach Julian Assange and Wikileaks took to the issue in 2011 was to follow the money, and consequently put some flesh on the notion of a ‘Forever War’ that President Biden is currently citing in justifying US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.
What Assange and Wikileaks are alluding to is a form of ‘Military Keynesianism’. Keynesian economics originated as a method of circumventing the dictatorship of the marketplace, for societies to instead allocate value to things deemed socially functional – sometimes this is augmented by printing money to maintain particular activities. It was supposed to help society’s poor and working-class. In our era it has been a way of redirecting money to the corporate rich – here particularly the military industries. The money printing supporting this – like so many things – has been relabelled, and now termed ‘Quantitative Easing’, but condemned as Welfare or Socialism for the Rich by working-class activists.
This is not the end of the incentives Afghanistan offers. The corporate media are now suggesting the indigenous Afghan Taliban might be motivated by the country’s wealth in Lithium – vital for cell phone products – and Copper deposits. Strange in two decades of coverage, it has never been suggested this was a motivation for the US to go halfway around the world.
It is also worth looking at how Afghanistan fits into the entire Neo-Con agenda. Globalised capitalism is very good at internalising its profits, while externalising its costs onto the general public and society at large. Economically, globalised capitalism doesn’t’ actually work unless subsidised by unfeasible levels of fossil fuel supply at therefore unfeasible low cost levels. The general public has to bear the social cost, the environmental cost, the cost of wars for oil and the potential national security cost of not having localised manufacturing production.
In keeping with this and in contrast to any genuine post-9/11 agenda, US Neo-Con wars have predominantly had two functions – attacking oil rich and/or Russian allied nations. It only takes a casual look at the regional map to show that a US military presence in Afghanistan provides a useful jumping off point for a war or simple military intimidation of Iran. It also gives access to gas powerhouse Turkmenistan and potentially moves America’s military ever closer to Russia’s borders. Predictably, despite Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, at no time during the US-led occupation did the corporate media query the military’s relationship to the country’s borders in the manner that they are doing now the indigenous Taliban are in charge.
Fuel prices are close to record highs, something that is regarded as a detriment to global trade. As Biden announced his intention to go through with the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, OPEC said they were willing to increase global supply. Iran seeing the knife about to taken from its throat seemed believe they were about to be let back into the global oil market, and boasted of being able to boost production. Israel contrived a dispute with Iran over a tanker, apparently believing that this might have a negative effect on any potential ongoing US/Iran negotiations, designed to bring the country in from the cold.
If this conjunction plays-out the way it appears, then Biden ironically for equally capitalist materialistic and environmental hazardous reasons, is going to be the first prominent Democrat in decades, to open up clear blue water between himself and the Republican pro-war Neo-Con agenda, but at least hopefully we will be avoiding attacks on Iran and other future wars.
In the meantime those like Tony Blair who have hitched their careers to the Neo-Con imperialist wagon train will continue to impotently stamp their rhetorical feet, while demanding that their ridiculous white saviour narrative be believed. While aided and abetted by the BBC and corporate media, seemingly unaware they are doing last year’s Ministry of Truth propaganda, and repeating century old racisms.
Afterword:
In reaction to Tony Blair’s latest media temper tantrum, Peter Galbraith, former UN deputy special representative for Afghanistan, said:
In terms of what was imbecilic, frankly it was the strategy that was followed for 20 years, which was to try to build a highly centralised state in a country that was as diverse – geographically and ethnically – as Afghanistan, and to engage in a counterinsurgency strategy without a local partner and the local partner was corrupt, ineffective, illegitimate.
This is beginning to sound really weird coming from a former prime minister, especially one who has spent over two decades in the top seat of Samoa’s government, and is supposed to be cognisant with how democratic governments function or are supposed to function before and after a general election.
However, we’ve grown accustomed in recent weeks to how Tuila’epa has been reacting to his party’s defeat in April’s general election, and his caretaker administration’s removal from office by the Court of Appeal last month.
And his finger pointing has been spectacular to say the least: starting with the judges of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal to the Chief Justice, His Honour Satiu Sativa Perese; to the former Attorney-General Taulapapa Brenda Heather-Latu and her husband and lawyer George Latu; and the former Head of State, His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi.
But the latest one, with Tuila’epa accusing the head of a foreign government of plotting his government’s downfall based on a feminist agenda to install Fiame Naomi Mata’afa as Samoa’s first female prime minister, takes the cake.
Appearing in a TV1 programme on Sunday night, the former prime minister said he always had suspicions about the involvement of New Zealand, and its leader Jacinda Ardern, in Samoa’s election.
“The government [of New Zealand] has been heavily involved,” he said during the televised programme.
“It got me thinking about a lot of the things that have happened recently.
“It looks like the New Zealand Prime Minister wanted Samoa to have a female prime minister.
“Which has blinded her [Jacinda Ardern] from seeing if it’s something that is in line with our constitution.”
Tuilaepa’s evidence? Ardern’s congratulatory message to Fiame immediately after the Court of Appeal ruling last month, which happened too fast for the 76-year-old veteran politician’s liking.
“The proof is, as soon as the decision was handed down, the Prime Minister of New Zealand immediately sent her congratulatory message.
“The way I see the whole scenario, it looks like a concert they have worked on for a long time.
“The fact that she quickly sent Fiame her well wishes makes me think that they had planned all of this.”
So did the New Zealand Prime Minister have to wait a day, a week or a month before sending Fiame her congratulatory message?
In fact, with Samoa in recent months engulfed in a constitutional crisis — a result of Tuilaepa’s illegal actions supported by various state actors — the timing of Ardern’s congratulatory message was perfect.
At that time esteemed members of the judiciary were under attack, and the former Prime Minister and his cronies were on the verge of usurping the powers of the courts, and thus creating a case for the international community to intervene.
Therefore, the recognition of Fiame and the Court of Appeal’s ruling that installed her Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) government was critical, in order to assure Samoan citizens and the world that the rule of law would prevail despite the months-long trepidations.
And Ardern’s congratulatory message did just that: it restored confidence in the judiciary and the rule of law in Samoa.
So did Tuilaepa conveniently forget that his party doomed themselves at April’s polls by bulldozing through draconian laws that restructured the judiciary last year despite public opposition; opted to endorse multiple candidates under the party banner; chose to overlook the significance of social media-focused campaigning; and downplayed the campaign strategy of the FAST party?
Hence there is much more to the congratulatory messages from the New Zealand Prime Minister and other world leaders and international organisations, following the court’s installation of the FAST government.
It is an acknowledgement by the international community of the evolution of Samoa’s democracy, noting that while there could be bumps along the way, but with functioning institutions of governance such as a robust justice system we have the ability to pick ourselves up and continue the journey.
Accordingly, the claim by the former Prime Minister of a plot against him by a group of feminist leaders, can be added to the growing list of conspiracy theories Tuila’epa himself has concocted since his exit from power.
But the problem with conspiracy theories is they continue to be spread and if repeated become validated.
The fact that the senior membership of the HRPP has stood by and watched, without lifting a finger to question Tuila’epa’s misinformation, says a lot about the current state of the party.
In fact the 42-year-old party’s failure to censure its leader makes them equally responsible and complicit for the spreading of misinformation, relating to April’s general election and the crisis that followed.
And lest we forget the caution against misinformation by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw: “Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”
Samoa Observer editorial on 26 August 2021. Republished with permission.
For many thousands of Victorian parents, Saturday afternoon was spent contacting bosses, rearranging calendars and sending each other stress-face emojis. I know, because I was one of them. With childcare centres in the ACT also largely closed, and parents in NSW being urged to re-consider their childcare needs, this is an experience becoming all too familiar to parents around the country.
The closure of childcare centres to most children will mean some brutal trade-offs for families. And while I, like many others, may suffer some sleep deprivation in the short term, the real risk is that those with the least capacity to adapt – especially single parents – will be the ones who will bear the long-term scars.
The average child in long day care attends for about 30 hours per week. Most are there because their parents are working during those hours. Parents working full-time may be accessing 40 or more hours of care a week to manage their workload.
As every parent – or casual acquaintance of a parent – knows, caring for young children is a full-time job. It’s not something you do ‘on the side’ while participating in a Zoom meeting or responding to emails.
This means many families are needing to find an extra 30, 40 or even 50 hours in their week to care for their children. That’s a big ask for anyone, but parents with young children already have the highest workload – paid and unpaid hours – of any group, clocking in at an average of 80 hours a week.
If parents maintain the same paid workload, the only way they can make the equation balance is by significantly cutting into their already limited leisure time – or by sleeping less.
The ‘only 24 hours in a day’ reality is currently biting in my own house: my partner and I have a 5-year-old daughter and we both work full-time. If we share care equally, and I maintain my work hours, I can expect to ‘enjoy’ four hours of sleep a night.
For many women it’s worse, because care usually isn’t shared equally.
During last year’s lockdowns, we saw both mothers and fathers shouldering a big increase in unpaid hours thanks to remote learning and childcare closures. But mothers took on more of the extra care, on top of an already higher load.
For single parents, who often have no capacity to share additional care, the reality is even more brutal.
Given workarounds such as using leave – if there’s any available – or cutting sleep can’t be sustained forever, long lockdowns risk locking in more permanent choices.
And again it’s women’s paid work that is most likely to be sacrificed. Studies of lockdown time-use in a range of developed countries showed that the average woman with children cut back hours of paid work, while fathers maintained theirs. A 2020 US McKinsey survey suggested that 17 per cent of women with children under 10 were considering downshifting their careers, and 23 per cent were considering leaving the workforce altogether. These were significantly higher rates than for fathers, or for women without children.
During last year’s lockdowns in Australia, mothers – but particularly single parents – left the workforce in droves, with workforce participation down by 10 per cent for single mothers, and 3 per cent for mothers in parenting couples. Workforce participation for fathers was unchanged.
Decisions made to cope with the rise in the care load can have long-tail effects. Reduced participation in the paid workforce reduces immediate income, but also impacts a worker’s future earnings trajectory. The longer lockdowns persist the more likely we will see these ‘scarring’ effects for mothers. And any reduction in paid work will further widen the already gaping $2 million difference in lifetime earnings between men and women with children.
We all have a stake in minimising these costs. Here are some things that could help:
First, employers should find ways to help reduce the stress on their employees. Flexibility and reduced output expectations should be the default and actively extended to fathers, as well as mothers.
Second, state governments should extend essential worker status to single parents. We cannot keep asking an already vulnerable group to give up work every time we have a lockdown.
Finally, we need a mechanism to circumvent wholesale school and childcare closures, while protecting children’s health. Rapid antigen testing is being used elsewhere to control spread in schools. We should investigate how we can roll out in schools and childcare as a matter of urgency.
Parents with young children, particularly mothers, are currently taking one for ‘Team Australia’. We owe it to them to recognise the challenges they’re facing and do what we can to help them make it through. The alternative is to see gender equality set back by a decade.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) is currently protesting across London as it aims to “target the root cause of the climate and ecological crisis – the political economy”.
The “Impossible Rebellion” began in Covent Garden on 23 August, and is scheduled to continue for the next two weeks. One of its targets will be the City of London, otherwise known as London’s financial district. The protests intend to disrupt a sector of the UK economy that is a huge contributor to the emissions causing the climate crisis. As XR’s call to action states:
We need to build pressure on the biggest financial institutions that are fuelling this emergency, targeting those who have a legacy of funding the toxic system that oppresses marginalised communities at home and around the world.
And if we’re serious about tackling the climate crisis, then XR is bang on the money in taking its action to the heart of financial district.
City of London
The UK’s financial sector funded almost double the whole UK’s annual carbon emissions in 2019 alone. Banks and asset managers in the UK financed 805m tonnes of carbon dioxide that year, meaning they were responsible for more emissions than the entirety of Germany.
The WWF and Greenpeace have said that finance should be designated a ‘high carbon sector’, warning that analysis didn’t even include emissions produced by activities like underwriting.
On uncovering the City of London’s emissions, Greenpeace UK’s executive director John Sauven stated:
Finance is the UK’s dirty little secret. Banks and investors are responsible for more emissions than most nations and the UK government is giving them a free pass. How can we say we’re ‘leading the world on climate action’ while allowing financial institutions to plough billions into fossil fuel production every year? The claim is almost laughable.
Holding to account
Under the Paris Agreement, the UK has agreed to set policies to try and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
However, according to Greenpeace, the financial sector is not regulated in the same way as other high carbon sectors such as oil and gas. This means there is no legal requirement for banks to make sure their activities comply with the UK’s emissions targets.
Instead, we have to depend on banks and asset managers volunteering to cut down their emissions. Meanwhile, greenwashing is rife among big companies.
Many big banks lending to emitting industries have not detailed net zero plans. Analysis last year by PwC revealed that only 5 of the 17 UK banks it surveyed had net zero targets.
Trying to set a path to net-zero emissions without tackling the UK financial sector is like sticking a plaster when the patient needs open heart surgery. …
The UK financial sector could be the first in the world to be aligned with the Paris Agreement targets – and reap the rewards as global business shifts towards clean, green investments. But it’s clear voluntary pledges aren’t getting the job done.
The UK Government must show the global leadership expected of the COP26 Presidency and commit to mandating all financial institutions to have net zero transition plans that cover their investments in every corner of the globe.
So ahead of us hosting COP26 in November, what is the government doing to put pressure on the finance sector?
Plans for finance
In short, the answer is too little, too late.
The government and the finance sector are engaging in some ways, with the government announcing the introduction of a ‘green bond‘, which are designated bonds for climate and environmental projects.
And the City of London corporation has pledged to reach net zero emissions on its own operations by 2027. However, it’s planning to reach net zero across its supply chain and investments by 2040.
But there’s little sign of the government planning to make it mandatory for all financial institutions to have plans to reach net zero.
Justified action
We cannot just wait and hope they’ll be such a mandatory requirement, protest is our only option.
Announced in the wake of the latest terrifying IPCC report, the current XR protest is demanding the end of all fossil fuel investments. As XR International Solidarity Network’s Esther Standford-Xosei said:
Those of us in the UK have the responsibility to call governments to account for their furthering of the climate and ecological crisis. This rebellion is about us merging with those communities of resistance in the Global South already pushing back.
We need to recognise the role of the City of London not just in the financial system, but also its role in the enslavement of indigenous and black people. The majority of humanity is poised to support this rebellion.
Our financial sector is one of the largest contributors to ongoing emissions. Our planet is on fire. Action must be taken.
“We haven’t done this because we have no other options. We’ve done it because it’s a better way of life,” 33-year-old Ailsa Gardner told the Mirror. After paying stupid amounts of rent on penthouse apartments, Gardner and her partner now live in a converted school bus.
Their alternative way of living earned itself pride of place in 20 August’s The Sun, too. The newspaper said of the couple:
with their rent costs halved, they gained the freedom to spend more of their lives on the road.
The mainstream media is no stranger to covering stories on van life. There’s also 34-year-old Amy Nicholson, who dipped into her £5,000 savings to buy a second-hand van. The Sunboasts that Nicholson lives life “on the open road”, saves £1,500 per month on rent and pays no bills.
Gardner and Nicholson are just a few of the young women who are gracing the pages of the tabloids, as more and more people take to living in vans. The Sunpoints out that with house prices booming since the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic began, camper van sales increased by 150% last year.
Classist, racist, sexist
Now, my gripe isn’t with Gardner or Nicholson. If they escape landlords’ clutches and live a lifestyle that gives them more freedom and more connection with nature, that’s great. My gripe is with the hypocrisy of the media, glorifying van life because it is done by young, white people who look socially acceptable, (or are acceptably beautiful), and who are from a socially acceptable class background.
Yet it is quick to vilify van life when it is done by the very Traveller Communities who were born into an alternative way of living. Can you imagine the Sun celebrating that an Irish Traveller saves more than £1,500 per month on rent by living in a vehicle? Of course not.
Let’s compare a couple of tabloid headlines. This first images depict Gardner and her new bus:
This second image shows just one of many racist and xenophobic headlines about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community that have graced media pages over the years:
And on 23 August, just three days after the Gardner story, the Sun shouted:
This contrast is nothing new, following on from what probably amounts to hundreds of discriminatory articles about the GRT community; from accusing them of “soaking up the sun…outside £2 million homes” to stealing children. And, of course, there’s the usual rhetoric of Travellers leaving faeces and rubbish behind, while at the same time local councils aren’t providing people with enough sites to live on.
This prejudice is something that the GRT community has to live with daily. And as the media peddles xenophobia, it is therefore responsible for building up public hatred towards GRT people, making life unsafe for Travellers. And the more hatred there is towards Travellers, the more incentive a council has to evict them off land.
On top of this, discrimination and bullying makes it much more difficult for children from the GRT community to thrive at school, or land a good job when they leave school. Whereas I can’t imagine Gardner or Nicholson will have any problems getting job interviews because they have chosen to live in a van.
“Cultural genocide”
Through their headlines of prejudice, the tabloids are peddling the government’s agenda: to cleanse our society of the GRT community. The government is currently in the process of passing the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which will make it a criminal offence in the UK for a person to trespass with the intention to live in or near a vehicle if they have caused, or are likely to cause, significant damage, disruption or distress. And this is where the racist headlines have an impact because “likely to cause” is subjective and feeds off people’s existing prejudices around the GRT community.
Ruth, who is part of Traveller Pride, has spoken out about what the bill means for the GRT community. Speaking at Brighton’s recent mass trespass to fight for our right to roam, she said:
For Romany travellers, Irish travellers specifically, [the bill] is an act of cultural genocide. The Tories don’t want us to exist the way we exist, and governments have been doing that for decades, by restricting where we can live, restricting where we can park up, and now it will become illegal to stop anywhere with the intent to reside.
And what that means for traveller families is that they can have their house seized, they can face imprisonment, they can face impossible fines…and for our community, there’s no safety net underneath that.
The bill is one government tactic that it hopes will be the final nail in the coffin for GRT communities. This follows on from the tactic of stealing Traveller children from their families and putting them in care, or up for adoption.
Van dwellers need to unite with the GRT community
While new van dwellers such as Gardner and Nicholson are also at risk of being persecuted by the policing bill, it is the GRT community that the government is aiming its legislation at, and who will bear the brunt of the new laws.
As the number of people living in vans increases, it’s essential that this new generation of people taking to the road make links with the very communities who have been persecuted their whole lives for living in a similar way.
As Ruth says:
Travellers have a long history of living with the land. We have a long history of contributing to this country, and it’s been written out.
If you’re a new van dweller, learn about this history, make the connections, and show solidarity. Get to know GRT communities in your area and be their ally. United together, we can fight racism and prejudice. But it takes all of us to recognise our privilege and stand with those who don’t have it.
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
It’s become clear to me that almost anyone penning anything that gets stuffed into any number of hundreds of “news” or “opinion” digital dungeons believes that their take on the world, on global affairs, on the political nightmares, on the various financial and military and digital happenings and what have you is, well, somehow theirs is a uniquely formed commentary to add something new and penetrating to the already hundreds of daily articles on Afghanistan or on the Pan-Plan-En-DEMIC.
I’ll give it to them, for sure, but how many pieces containing more or less 90 percent similar views and “facts” on a given subject really do much for humanity. I see the world from a different lens, and sure, it’s fun to rumble in the jungle looking at Biden-Wall Street-MIC-Trump-Celebrity Culture-Scientism-Entertainment-Media-Medicine-Et Al, but when I get down to brass tacks, I look at the ground level stories, sometimes about one person or family or situation at a time, to understand the larger issue of this perverse, predatory and people-killing Capitalism.
Yep, of course, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Earth Charter, and the Golden Rule, those are great starts to abide by. Survival International, looking at and from indigenous communities’ perspectives and needs, that too is A-Okay. Yet, sometimes, it’s one person at a time to understand the fragility of belief systems, or economic systems that not only rape-pollute-colonize land-air-water-soil-life, but put so many of my fellow women and men behind the eight ball, AKA, in the sights of those ruthless elites and their armies of Eichmann’s and thugs.
A mark and sucker and victim and limping along-useless-eater-but-useful-exploitable-breeder may be born every nanosecond in the eyes of the overlords of corporations and the boardroom beasts of banks and Military Everything/Everywhere Industrial Complex, but to winnow through that and spend time with one of those soon-to-be-victims-of-capitalism, for me, that is the narrative flow and truth I am more interested in these days.
Big City Boy in a Townie Coastal Hamlet
It does feel lonely out here, even among the 600 harbor seals just outside our door, on sand spits in their haul-outs after going for the salmon running up and down the Alsea River. A hundred bird sightings, sure, in a month. Green hitting the Pacific. A constant snake of cars and RVs and logging trucks up and down Highway 101. A pretty cool bridge just outside the window on the near horizon.
I’ve written about this area, the original home of the Alsi Tribe, a place, like in most of Turtle Island, which was never given or sold to and rented to the white man. We are, in so many places, entrenched on sacred and holy ground, on burial mounds.
This day, a few days ago, I was kicking up speed on the bicycle when I saw a fellow — big, nice sternum-touching beard — unloading cedar pickets from a truck into a garage. It’s a nice family home on a corner near the USPS, and I have been trying to get help putting up a cedar fence, so, much so that it’s been four months, or three, since the first fellow came out, said he’d do it, and never followed through. Two others came out, and two others failed to follow through.
Let’s call him Clint, and I said hello, and he seemed a bit skeptical of me showing up inside his fence, but soon, we hit it off. I asked about his fence, and he gave me the names and numbers for a landscaping team, father-son, that did his work for him. He made sure to let me know they were not bonded, and, well, that’s the way I want to go. The father-son is Mexican. The son, let’s call him Enrique, went to school with Clint. The middle school in Waldport.
“When he was first here, all he’d do is draw farm equipment and fields of corn. He didn’t speak English, but he did say, ‘I want go home Mexico.’ He’s my friend, and he speaks and read English so well that he helps his father with he contracts and bills and translation.”
While I was anxious to contact Pedro’s Landscaping, I spent time with Clint to learn his story. That is how I roll, and within one 25-year-old’s story the entire country and entire financial and entire educational and political system sometimes are anchored.
He was on a two-month respite before resuming the Alaska fishing he’s been engaged in shortly after he dropped out of high school. He’s got buddies who also dropped out, but who also got hooked into the drug scene, boozing and helping justify the criminal injustice systems of cells, ankle bracelets, militarized cops, overpaid arrogant judges, DAs who lie, and all the attendants in the system.
Clint never got into drugs, and he said his drinking — not super heavy — just interfered with his relationship to his girlfriend who is the mother of their six-year-old daughter. So he quit.
Clint was brought up by an alcoholic mother and never had much to do with a violent and absent father. Clint did not like school, and he says he probably had this or that learning “issue,” but in the end, Clint got his act together, left school at 16, never looked back, and never got a GED. He stated that he bought the house I was at age 22, and that last year he made upwards of $130,000 as a fisherman for Alaskan fleets. For most of his friends who did graduate high school, they are living poor lives, working for minimum wage, still living with parents; and some with college, they are straddled with minimum wage jobs and huge school loan debts.
This story is not the story of those elites from the Ivy League or the top (sic) 100 schools. I know because I have been to a few of them (not getting my degrees from them, however), and I have family that tends to rah-rah those schools, as if they are the Holy Grail. I have met with and interviewed many people (authors, scientists, creatives) from those so-called elite institutions. I have organized for a union at Georgetown U. I have been to a huge conference in Mexico City with higher education people, mostly adjuncts, many of whom come from elite schools. Even in my three degree programs at state colleges/universities, many of my professors were graduates of the elite schools. I was never impressed with those laurels.
But the point is that I consume so much from the elites’ research, from their books, from their journalism, and from their literature as in fiction. It is a daily reminder of the chosen few either leaving out the 80 percent of the USA population, or writing about us. Writing about Adverse Childhood experiences, ACES. Writing about socio-economic determinates of life, success, failure, perseverance, incarceration rates, poverty, medical health outcomes. The elites writing about high blood pressure, about African Americans’ weathering taking them out earlier than their white counterparts; about racist environmental policies. The elites and chosen ones even write the scripts for Breaking Bad shit, or all the novels and such penned in American Mainstream Literature. The elites take our pulse in the doctor’s offices, in the school offices, in the financial offices. The elites prosecute us, persecute us, penalize us, tax us, redline us, vilify us, joke about us.
So Clint is there, working hard, even offering to help me pick up cedar pickets and the supplies two hours away in Eugene, to save a buck. Clint with his eye toward fixing up the place and selling it. “I want to get out of this town. I’ve lived here my entire life.”
He’s got American Terriers, or bulldogs, what a lot of people mislabel as pit bulldogs. He had Pedro’s Landscaping build a fence, and he had it go six feet tall facing the road for the dogs. Under penalty of Waldport City ordinances, however, it has to be 42 inches, with 48 more or less allowed. The judgment was/is to cut it down to 42-48 inches. The verdict is to fine a $1000 a day for the violation. He was in rough waters in Alaska, fishing for those elites loving their fish fresh. Imagine that, the city code Nazi’s, at a $1000 a day. Similarly, the fine for some elderly disabled woman up the road, in Newport, was $1500 for front yard grass too long. This is the elites’ game. City managers with binoculars, and now drones with CCTV, looking in people’s yards, looking for weeds, or old automobiles propped up on bricks. Looking for fences too high (sic) or buildings on the property bigger than 10 x 20 feet that will need a permit pulled, a permit that, of course, costs money.
[So, this fellow in the trailer above, set up along the beach, in Waldport, and it was in daylight. I am not sure if he intended to camp there for the night, but the City Manager called the rent-a-sheriffs. They forced him off the property. I talked with the two deputies. They say more and more people are “squatting.” They talk about how it is a $3000 bill to the county and cities for removing trailers or broken down RVs. They seemed sympathetic, but at $30 an hour plus double, $60, an hour overtime, the cops are making out like bandits in a county that still pays $13 an hour at checkouts and in hotel rooms as maids.]
That’s an aside, for sure, since it was a day before I met Clint, but it is, again, emblematic of the failures of empire, and I don’t need no stinking commentary to add to the failures of Afghanistan, of the money managers, of the World Economic Forum. Failures of the Trump and Biden camps, spewing bullshit. I don’t need to add to the discourse on how bad Canada is/was with Haiti. Add to the EU’s sickening siding with USA on Venezuela. Do I need to add to the Israel question? Just wading into that muck gets one not only cancelled, but Mossad-ed out, Eighty-Sixed.
If I penned something like this, from Linh Dinh, I’d be Googled out of existence in USA:
When Ichiro played in the Major Leagues, he was always hounded by a mob of Japanese journalists and photographers, starting with the first day of Spring Training.
Sick of this, he told an interviewer he wished they would just disappear.
“From your life?”
“No, from this earth.”
The USA, though, is not being pestered but deformed, debilitated and, well, frankly destroyed by a host of people, many of whom you may not have heard of, so let’s us:
Imagine there’s no George Soros, No Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch or Klaus Schwab, too. No Jeff Zucker, Mark Zuckerberg, Arthur Sulzberger, Jonathan Greenblatt, Larry Fink, David Solomon, Robert Iger, Charles Scharf, Jamie Dimon, Steve Schwarzman, Jeremy Zimmer, Len Blavatnik, Andy Slavitt, Jeffrey Zients, Anthony Fauci, Jessica Rosenworcel, Janet Yellen, Gary Gensler, Betsy Berns Korn, Mort Fridman or, what the hell, Nancy Pelosi also, mostly because she’s so icky.
Even more than most lists, it’s highly incomplete, but you get the idea. Or maybe not. It’s too eclectic, you say, if not confusing. What do they have in common? They are all social engineers, out to remake America in ways that have nothing to do, at least initially, with the wishes of its majority, so there goes your democracy. As new norms are relentlessly propagandized, legalized then imposed, most Americans will learn to embrace their newly cowed, castrated selves.
The point is that Clint has a family, and is dealing with the Man in many forms. Fence too high. Viscous dog ordinance, even though his dogs are not vicious. He even almost got run over by some business woman, while Clint was on his Harley. He posted that fact on the local city Facebook page, and, well, it was taken down. No cussing, no threats, and respectful, but that was too much for the FB administrator.
Like many in his camp, who dropped out of High School and ended up doing something, working hard, yes, in a dangerous profession, Alaska fishing, he wants a few acres out of town, to grow food, raise a family, home school children, and maybe get a rig so he can move logs and such to keep money flowing in. We are talking about age 35 as his goal.
I taught in those schools where he and his Mexican friend, Enrique, went. The K12 system before the planned endemic was bad-bad-bad, and now, it is a complete shit show. This fellow works, his wife works and he is honest. The systems of oppression have not gotten him yet, nor have they gotten him down, and he is a success. And another load of Elites will write about that guy, the white guy, though, as I found out, he is from a Guatemalan Spaniard father.
Elites (white, many identifying as Jewish) writing about poverty, about the white protestant in the USA, about the poor, the druggies, about the criminals, about Latinos and Blacks and Asians. These Elites, the Chosen Ones, have a direct line to publishers, producers and the like. And they will write on and on about all those demographics they themselves are only witnesses to, or somehow involved in from the middle/upper middle/rich class point of view.
Millionaire union heads, like that one with the American Federation of Teachers. Look at her:
[Viewpoint: AFT’s Refusal to Challenge Democratic Establishment Leaves Every Teacher Behind — AFT President and Biden. Lovefest!]
Again, Enrique and Clint, they are the Americans, the ones working hard. Before I shift to Enrique, the final moment in Clint’s driveway was when we both heard a blood curdling scream. A 12-year-old boy was screaming across the street. “Oh, that’s Alan, and he is severely autistic. He lives with his grandmother. His mom was a meth user while she was pregnant, and his father is a piece of shit, violent, a thief.”
It turned out that Alan was messing with a T-ball bat, and hit a rock accidently up to a second story window, and broke it. “No, no, no,” he screamed and cried. “I can’t pay for that. I am in trouble. I can’t pay for that.”
His grandmother came out, and settled the boy down. I recognized Alan (pseudonym) from my substituting up the hill at the middle school, in the special education room. The grandmother was wrinkled before her time, and she had to get to a PT appointment, but had no car, no driver’s license. She told us that the apartment owners will just tell her to pay for a window installer. “The owners do nothing around here for us.”
Autism, drug abuse, all those elite doctors and psychiatrists, all those practitioners, all those TED Talk celebrities, lecturing the world on childhood diseases, all the intellectual disabilities, all the chronic illnesses, chronic depression, chronic poverty, chronic criminality, chronic failures, yep, expect another load of books coming out during this endemic, from the white elites, mostly east coast, many, the Chosen People, making their money and lecturing us, even high-horsing people like me who is just as educated in the college sense, and more traveled, and, hell, more experienced in many more fields than the elites who have podcasts or get onto Democracy Now or CBS or CNN.
Back Breaking But Honest
Enrique and his dad, Javier, came out, and we talked about the fence project. In Spanish. Javier has been in USA for 20 years. Five children, four born in Mexico. His hat was emblazoned with Hildago and the eagle and the serpent. He and I talked a lot about Mexico, since I have traveled all over, and we swapped stories about the jungle, la selva, and places like Palenque, and where his family hails from, Mexico City. He works hard, pays workers $25 an hour, under the table, and we talked about narcos and politicians and why Mexico, with 80 percent of the population good and hardworking, family oriented, how it is that the military, corrupt mayors/governors/senators/presidents and the drug kingpins and their thugs have overtaken the land. All those drugs in the noses and in the veins of North Americans, Europeans!
We talked about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.
Pancho Villa
If there is not justice for the people, let there be no peace for the government.
I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.
The land belongs to those who work it with their hands. Emiliano Zapata
[The Palenque builders used plaster to obtain a smooth finish, unlike the usual Mayan tooled-limestone construction. However, they used carving on the interior walls; the best examples are on tablets affixed to the walls with plaster. Stucco and terra-cotta images have been found. The elaborate palace complex includes three parallel walls housing two corridors covered with pointed vaults of the Palenque style.]
This is reality, and Javier states that he can’t find young guys to work as landscapers and fence builders. At $25 an hour. “They’d rather work minimum wage in a fast-food restaurant. Inside. Watching their phones. It is not how I grew up.”
Complicated, my relationship with Mexicans, people of the land, manual laborers. They to me, in most instances, are princes, when they are good and loyal and don’t end up drinking and womanizing. In any case, I have more robust conversations with guys like Javier than I do with any number of liberals or Trumpies or friends who identify as woke and hippy.
I have nothing in common with the very people I ended up in a graduate program — regional and urban planning. Code enforcers. The developers’ amigos. Cushy jobs with cities and counties. Beautiful people. Hikers and bicyclists. Professional Managerial Class who travel here and there and talk about walkability, about New Urbanism, about sustainability design. But at the end of the day, they are facilitators of the construction (building and paving) tycoons. They talk a nice game around LEAD Platinum and Climate Change mitigation, but in the end, they, for the most part, are just cogs in the system. Not squeaky wheels. Very disheartening for me.
These fellows — Clint, Enrique and Javier of Pablo’s Landscaping — they are not going to read this blog, they are not going to buy my books, they are not going to attend a literary reading planned for August 27 in Portland. That is the shame and the sham of this Capitalist society — that my bright idea on community spaces, on education, on collectivism, on intentional and shared communities isn’t scaled up — generating the various levels of strata, casts, deplorable people, disposable people, all the useless breeders/breathers/eaters, in the minds of the elites.
Imagine a world where right out the gates we have pre-school in gardens, in teepees, around fires, with others older there, to teach. Outdoor experiences. Learning to grow, fish, harvest, can food. Building tiny homes for the houseless. Doing the work of cutting wood and making woodcut art. All the hands on learning, and the play acting, the art, the music. Real teachers, and real communities, and, from cradle to cradle. No more warehousing of youth. No more jobs just for the shitty health insurance. No more school-to-complaint little or big Eichmann enforcer or follower. No more warehouses for the poor.
Yeah, this is still a land of Bubbas and Sweet Mean Charlottes. A land of ignorance and just plain mean, and racist. But look at Clint. Look at Enrique. Look deeper into the hearts of these people who are for all intents and purposes NOT mainstream subjects for the elites’ studies or projects. Do all people need to write poetry? Well, maybe. Play music? Of course. Create art and sculptures and blow glass and use a potter’s wheel and grow lettuce and learn how to guy fish and poultry, learn how to build a fire on the land, and in the belly. Yep!
Of course, a majority of the 80 percent will respond with dignity, interest and collective knowledge way beyond any cabal of elites determining the futures and histories and lives of us, the lowly Eighty Percent.
A new American president is presenting a program for renewal of human values in the marketplace unheard of since the 1930s but still projecting American military domination and environmental destruction far beyond the awareness of most Americans. Continued insistence that Russia and China are major global threats to everyone and not just American monopoly capitalists resonate not only in the cosmic void between the ears of our mentally disabled foreign policy experts but echo in the minds of innocent Americans since that’s all they get from major, and all too often minor media.
The charge that China is conducting genocide on its Islamic people coming from the butchers of hundreds of thousands of Islamic people in the middle east would be a dreadful sick joke if not so incredibly evil, but poor souls condemned to network media remain stuck in a misinformation chamber amplifying our ruling power’s message day in and day out. The fact that growing majorities have little or no faith in government or media is a hopeful sign but until we totally clean out the sewage system much of corporate news has become, the stench that wafts up remains a carrier of the information pandemic.
While alleged economic threats from China actually do offer market competition to the empire – and market competition is supposed to be good, according to the theology preached by the priest-rabbi-therapists of the church of capital – and China is under the control of communists who at least try, not always with success, to force it to work for the common good and not just the minority of Chinese capitalists, why and how and to whom is that a threat? Only to America where majorities exist in numbers of those in debt but never those who vote nationally. This is called “our” democracy by many wishful thinkers still unaware that the political process is owned and operated by the wealthiest minority, which spends billions to maintain political control by purchase and rental of candidates and office holders. Citizens innocently proclaiming this hustle as “our” democracy are like past slaves referring to “our” plantation. If they were the minority house negroes of the time they could afford such fantasy but the overwhelming majority who toiled in the fields and suffered the most brutal treatment had no such luxury.
And as if the treatment of these two powerful nations didn’t show enough imperial idiocy, that of a nearly helpless tiny nation currently, as usual, under assault, is greater indication of lunacy bordering on stark raving insanity.
After 60 years of a murderous attempted strangulation of the Cuban political economy, that tiny nation survives with the support of the overwhelming majority of governments on earth. Recently at the United Nations 184 countries voted to end the filthy American embargo with only Murder Inc. headquartered in the USA and Israel still, as always out of step with the overwhelming majority while spouting humanitarian rhetoric and practicing murderous brutality. This still finds well meaning people waving flags and quoting bibles and constitutions as though these fabled symbols clean up the reality of degenerate social practice as hypocritical as a rapist claiming victims only to assure they do not suffer sexual frustration.
The anti-Cuban lobby, second only to that of Israel in its control of American foreign policy, was originally a creature of the Cuban upper classes who escaped to Miami from the revolution that was working to spread education, jobs, health care and other necessities of life to the greatest number of people who had long been denied by American partnership with Cuban ruling power. They loom large in the current scenario of an alleged uprising against the terror and horror of millions of people eating, going to school and getting health care despite the ugly embargo and other violent attempts to smother the island of 11 million so that capital might again profit from gambling and drugs, as it did before 1960.
Meanwhile, another bloody lie in Afghanistan has ended with the Taliban, the group we were allegedly protecting poor afghans from, has taken over the government of their own country. This after billions have been spent and hundreds of thousands murdered in pursuit of profits while good people here have been fed stories about emancipating women and educating Afghans to the joys of democracy like ours, where hundreds of thousands of Americans live in the street while we spend trillions to kill people and billions to care for pets.
And far beyond wretched national policies looms the global curse of what private profit industrial and war marketing are doing to the environment shared by humanity and not just one or anther national identity group often claiming super status with a special connection to deities ranging from Santa Claus to the Easter bunny for all they are worth in the material world. Words about democracy are not balanced by deeds of mass murder, oppression and absolute support for rich minority rule that assures continued profit making from exploitation of workers whether they clean toilets, drive buses, pilot airplanes or walk dogs. Like the sex workers who use their private parts to create private profits for their entrepreneurial pimps, those who create, package and deliver the consumer goods that are the foundation of the economy are doing it for the benefit of owners and investors rather than their own which would be far better served if they owned and ran the businesses they form the foundation for while others get rich on their labor.
Facing horrible news at what the future of humanity looks like under the environmental stress called climate change, more people than ever are working to end foul methods of economics that assure disaster for humanity but trying to do so while maintaining market rules of private profit assures further destruction or worse, simply throwing people out of work they do only to survive and thus destroy hope of survival. The future must be to keep people alive by assuring the public good before any pursuit of private profit. We do not need professional economists to explain that capitalism is the only answer to social problems all the while collecting fat salaries and investment opportunities while society fails more quickly under their rule.
In truth, if workers are doing dirty work that affords them salaries so they can pay their rent, mortgages and other life supports, but it costs society billions to have to clean up the mess they create, we would all best be served by paying them to not go to work. We’d be saving the billions we’d have to spend to clean up the mess they created in service to private profiteers and assure their survival by using those mammoth savings to help them learn and get better jobs for them and everyone else, that serve all of us and not simply minority investors. As the world grows more threatened and conditions become more dangerous with the USA holding several hundred military bases in foreign countries and surrounding Russia and China with troops and war ships, immediate action must be taken to both confront environmental conditions that threaten us all and war like preparations that are profitable to a criminal minority while threatening the planet and all its people.
In short, we need global democratic communism before anti-social capitalism destroys us all.
Religious cults have always seemed weird to me. Political cults, equally bizarre. But I’ve never encountered anything quite as dangerous or strange as the current medical cult of eugenicists running wild upon the earth. A nihilistic death machine masquerading behind a mask of health care. But peel back the thin veil and it’s all really just a sick joke. Get it?
I always wondered how in the world people like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could have ever risen to power and been provided with the opportunity to unleash their systems of methodical human extermination. But the mainstream “pop” culture of the modern era has put all doubt aside in my mind regarding that question. Because I now realize perfectly well how it happens.
The psychology of the general public allows it, even cheers it on, even joins in to parrot all the propaganda they’re fed from the approved authoritative sources, mouthpieces, and talking heads.
Fascism and communism are no longer far-off ideologies being implemented by adversarial forces across the pond that we can point toward and warn about as being slowly approaching threats. They’re now staring us straight in the face on a regular basis in the newfangled form of technocracy, transhumanism, and globalism. It’s called the New World Order, darling, and its tentacles are sinking deeper by the day.
The part about this whole ordeal that shocks me the most is just how well-coordinated and effective the suppression of free-flowing information has been in the public sphere, despite the fact that everyone connected to the internet has access to and the ability to find the truth if they only put in the effort of seeking it out.
Partly, the problem arises from the fact that a certain percentage of people don’t actually want to hear the truth because once knowing it they are then presented with having a larger responsibility to actually do something about it in their lives. So it is much easier for them to just keep a low profile and flow with whatever the consensus bias happens to be at any given moment and simply go along to get along without causing any disturbance or drawing any unwanted attention to themselves.
Of course, we’re all familiar with the quote from Thomas Gray, “Ignorance is bliss.”
Well, there’s another quote from Thomas Jefferson that I find appropriate for those who want to keep their heads buried in the sand:
The amount of tyranny you get, is the exact amount you put up with.
In that vein, the more insidious, draconian aspect of this corrupt situation doesn’t involve people’s willingness to set aside their critical thinking, but rather is a direct product of the censorship being enforced by the corporate media, social media, and government institutions. Basically, anyone who tries to speak out and raise truth up to the surface level gets their voice silenced and online presence axed out of existence.
We’ve watched it play out with the thousands of doctors and nurses who bravely touted the effective nature of hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin as treatments for the virus. They were swiftly demonized by the system and banished to realms not easily observed by the mainstream. Now we’re witnessing the same basic theme repeat with people like Dr. Robert Malone, Michael Yeadon, Dr. Peter McCullough, and so many others who are warning about antibody-dependent enhancement and the adverse effects of the mRNA spike protein.
Regardless, the data is still readily available and provided directly from different governments’ own systems. It can be accessed by anyone. The most alarming statistics are found in the weekly reports released through VAERS in conjunction with the CDC here in the US which shows that from December of 2020 through July of 2021 there have now been over 12,000 reported deaths and 545,000 adverse reactions (of which over 70,000 are serious injuries).
It boggles my mind that more people are not aware of this information, but it just goes to show the type of stranglehold the Beast System has over the public discourse and narrative. It’s unfathomable, really.
One of the great ironies and tragedies of human psychology is the propensity of our minds to facilitate behavior that is self-destructive and irrational in its nature.
And so, when a mistake is made, it is common that a person, instead of assuming responsibility and altering their course appropriately to avoid the same pattern from being repeated in the future, will, rather, shun such responsibility and project blame outwardly on others or on the world at large or on God or on nature or on any other force that can be raised up in their consciousness to point at and target as a scapegoat.
And, instead of viewing the situation from a logical perspective, they will enter into a state of cognitive dissonance, denial, and learned helplessness that allows them to block out the problem and not have to deal with it. A sort of Stockholm Syndrome where they begin to subconsciously identify favorably with the very circumstances that have caused them harm to begin with, thus entering into a vicious loop where the oppressive energy remains in control.
Basically, the concept is that upon realizing they are in a hole, instead of climbing out when it is still relatively shallow, they continue digging even deeper, hollowing out the space for their own potential grave.
This is why it is not unusual that people are unable to alter their lifestyle until they have reached rock bottom. I happen to have learned this lesson repeatedly in my younger years so I speak from experience.
The theory doesn’t only apply to individuals, though. It can be extrapolated out to better understand collective organizations as well. And we are, indeed, at that point as a society and a species.
It is now a matter of life or death in the eugenics-based Beast System of the New World Order. Those who do not realize the implications of continuing along in obedience to its methods of persuasion and propaganda will wind up wandering straight off the edge of a cliff. Those who resist, assume responsibility for their own destiny, become fully informed, and make wise decisions will at least stand a chance of surviving and making it through to the other side.
Not the cheeriest message I’ve ever delivered, but certainly the most somber and realistic.
We are – to weave another metaphor into the thread – in the belly of the whale. So one can either curl up in a fetal position and wait to drown in the abyss or muster up a bit of courage and begin to claw their way out of the monster to then swim back up to safety on the surface.
There will never be a more welcome and peaceful breath that purifies the lungs than that first inhalation after breaking loose from the shackles of tyranny and escaping the grasp of the technocratic transhumanist agenda to fully embrace the blessing of true sovereignty as renaissance reignites upon the earth.
Humanity can only be submerged for so long before survival instincts kick in and start working on overdrive to make up for lost time. Such are the signs being seen recently as concerned citizens take to the streets to protest in France, Italy, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the UK. A beautiful sight to behold as massive waves of hundreds of thousands of people point the way toward a great awakening here in the age of Revelation.
Well, I say the signs have been seen, but only by those who are actively seeking. Because footage certainly isn’t being served up on a silver platter by the corporate media or Big Tech oligarchs. The truth about reality on the ground is still kept hush-hush in those circles. But the control mechanisms of the corrupt Priest Class are breaking down at an increasingly accelerated pace and so they won’t be able to keep the lid on this boiling pot for much longer. The scenes are, however, being broadcast widely on platforms that remain free and open to transparent communication. I’ve been feasting on a steady diet of late, and my digestion has never been smoother.
Despite all the lunacy underway in this world right now, honestly, I’ve been having the time of my life so far this year. When you were spit out of the womb with a rebellious streak slashing straight through your soul, existence tends to take on a heightened sense of meaning and more purposeful intensity once the chaos really starts ramping up. These trying times are just a test of character in the end. So, as I continue to say, walk steady with a sturdy spine in good spirits. Hallelujah.
Earlier that year, he had been part of the Rainbow Warrior mission to relocate the Rongelap Atoll community in the Marshall islands who had suffered from US nuclear tests.
After that UK-born Edward sailed as chief engineer on several expeditions, including the Antarctic.
Since his sailing career, Edward returned several times to Greenpeace, and left Greenpeace in the early 1990s.
Since 2007, Davey Edward had filled the position of technical manager. Several times he left for other opportunities, although his passion for Greenpeace brought him back every time.
Edward always got back to his passion to fight for the environment, and always wanted to be on side to ensure that the ships would be ready for their next mission.
He also played a big role in the building of the new Rainbow Warrior and was at the construction in 2010.
About 5 years ago Edward was diagnosed with cancer – and the prognosis was very bad. The doctors told him he probably only had several months left, and he battled the cancer with the same determination and spirit that he had for his environmental battles.
He continued to work and support Greenpeace in the background after he left for Australia/ New Zealand for treatment in 2016, and surprised the doctors with his determination, strength and optimism during this fight.
Meanwhile, he continued to enjoy life, refurbishing a house in New Zealand and enjoyed good Belgian and other craft beers.
Davey Edward also played a big role in the building of the new Rainbow Warrior and was at the construction in 2010. Images via Justin Veenstra/Greenpeace
Crew planner Justin Veenstra at Greenpeace International recalls:
“When I talked to Davey last month, it was the first time in many years I heard serious doubts in his voice. He wanted to remain strong and positive, but got out after a hospital admission and it seemed that the doctor’s message that he had to start ‘making arrangements’ was a message he had to consider seriously.
“He mentioned he still hoped to go to his lovely wooden house in The Netherlands and catch up for a beer and discussion about the world and GP, but unfortunately he never made it.
“Last night, I got the message from his wife Patti that Davey had passed away at 0500 [Friday] morning. Things went down very quickly in the last few days and weeks …”
Waiheke Island environmental campaigner and author Margaret Mills, who was relief cook on the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 at the time of the bombing and Edward’s best friend over many years, recalls:
“When we last met on Waiheke, no matter what we talked about we always found something to laugh about. We both agreed that we loathed the expression ‘passed away’ because, as Davey said succinctly, ‘We aren’t going anywhere, we just die.’ He talked almost non-stop about all sorts of things — Taumarunui and how much he loved the place.
Davey Edward with a fish he caught of the side of the Rainbow Warrior in May 1985. Image: David Robie/APR
“We had been down to stay with him when he had nearly finished his massive restoration job. As with everything he did, he gave it everything he had and had done a magnificent job. At that time he was fighting cancer.
“His car, a Triumph, was to be sold because it is now worth a considerable sum. He had taken it to Timaru where there was an old mechanic who could get parts in the UK, but the car has now been inherited by John.
“I knew Davey and his family on a more personal level than anyone else. I babysat John, I found them a place to rent on Waiheke. John thinks of me as his grandmother.
“They were happy days on board the Rainbow Warrior.”
Eyes of Fire author David Robie remembers Davey Edward as a determined, courageous and principled campaigner, “always dedicated to improving Greenpeace’s marine protest and ship strategies no matter what”.
“One of the old school campaigners, he will be sorely missed by his colleagues and friends.”
Edward is survived by his wife, Patti, his son John, and his two granddaughters.
Thanks to Justin Veenstra, Margaret Mills and Martini Gotje for this tribute.
RNZ reporter Ben Strang was on the streets before the latest lockdown when he was attacked, and writes that it feels like there is more animosity towards the government and media this time around.
Despite living largely free of restrictions in New Zealand compared to almost every other nation for the best part of this covid pandemic, it is apparent that some people have no intention of living under level four restrictions.
Hours into the first day of lockdown, Billy Te Kahika, Vinny Eastwood, and their loyal legion of conspiracy theorists launched a number of protests against the measures set out by the government.
Te Kahika and Eastwood pitched up with about 80 others outside Television New Zealand’s headquarters in Auckland.
Some of their views may seem idiotic, but neither of them is an idiot.
The decision to protest outside TVNZ served many purposes: It’s a central Auckland location; it was guaranteed to get them a level of media attention; and they could try to make a point to the media who, apparently, ignore their salient points about the truth of covid-19, vaccines, Bill Gates, the moon landings, and whatever else.
It feels like part of a rising level of resentment over government action on combating the pandemic. Patience can wear thin, it might be hard to see an end point and we are left wondering when we will return to “normal”.
Trusty black face mask
“On Tuesday night, five hours before the restrictions were about to snap into place, I was tasked with talking to people on the streets of Wellington about the impending lockdown.
Wearing an RNZ jacket and my trusty black face mask – and armed with an RNZ flagged microphone – I greeted people as I always do, by telling them I was an RNZ reporter.
That’s when I was attacked.
A tall blonde man tried to rip my face mask off, grabbed my ear and around my head.
He yelled that covid-19 was a myth, aggressively asked why I needed the mask, and said none of the pandemic was real.
Fortunately, I know how to handle myself and got out of the situation quick smart, but these situations are not isolated.
Other reporters have talked about overly aggressive anti-lockdown, covid-19 conspiracy theorists confronting them while they’ve been working.
Usually, we only see it online through social media, or in our email inbox from the brave few using creative pseudonyms.
Tide is changing
But if Tuesday night is any indication, the tide is changing. And it is not just the media who are noticing the swell of covid-19 discontent or disbelief.
Police arrested three people involved in an anti-lockdown protest in Christchurch on Thursday, after a group of 10 people gathered on the Bridge of Remembrance on Cashel Street.
Last time out, the police took an “educational approach”, telling people to pull their heads in and head home.
This time, they are acting far quicker in locking them up.
That is because they see the rise in this behaviour too, want to send a clear message to those who believe in “alternative facts”, and want to knock it on the head.
It has also been noticed by supermarket workers, bus drivers, airline staff, and any number of frontline workers across the country.
There are reports of people being kept off flights because they refuse to wear a mask.
Arrested in Northland
Police arrested two people in Northland on Wednesday for that very offence, and because they acted in a threatening manner towards supermarket staff at a Pak N Save.
The protests, the arrests, the number of people requiring “education” from the police are small compared to the vast numbers who are complying with restrictions.
But they are the tip of a digital iceberg, with a large online community which is consistently growing, feeding on the idea that covid-19 is either a hoax or perhaps a plandemic.
We all have an uncle, or a sister-in-law, or a neighbour, who tries to tell us the truth as they see it.
But how many people do they convince? How many people are now second guessing getting a vaccine because of misleading scientific “evidence” one of these people has been talking about?
It’s a dangerous situation we find ourselves in.
With anger and misinformation swelling like a tumour, there is added pressure on the government in these coming days and weeks to make the right decisions in steering the country through this current outbreak.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
It is said that Afghanistan is the grave yard of Empires. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Empire of Great Britain, the Soviet Union and now the American Empire and its NATO allies have all suffered defeat at the hands of the fiercely independent Afghans.
As the World watches in disbelief, the American-backed government in Afghanistan, and its American-trained army, has melted away before the advances of the insurgent Taliban forces. For many, the chaotic American evacuation of South Vietnam in 1975 has obvious parallels to today’s events.
The American occupation of Afghanistan has lasted 20 years and has cost the American tax payer more than $2 trillion on war and reconstruction. This information is according to the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, set up to monitor the situation in Afghanistan.
According to SIGAR there also is the human cost of 2,443 U.S. troops killed and 20,666 more injured in the conflict. In addition there were 1,144 allied troops who died. It has been even worse for Afghans, with at least 66,000 members of its military dead and more than 48,000 civilians have been killed, and thousands more injured. The Agency estimates that these statistics are both likely far below the actual figures. The destruction of Afghanistan and the environmental damage to the country will affect Afghanistan’s future for decades to come.
Many informed observers have been predicting the disaster that we are witnessing today. It is only the public statements of the American military, American politicians which are dutifully reported by the American corporate press that has promoted the myth of winning the war in Afghanistan. The result is that the American taxpayer, and voter, has been fed a barrage of lies and half-truths in order to justify a policy that had little or no merit and little chance of success.
The only people who benefited from the Afghan War were the United States Military Industrial complex, its paid lobbyists, the American Generals who get well paid jobs with arms manufacturers after they retire and the politicians who depend upon political donations from the corporations that profit from the system of endless war.
The rational for invading Afghanistan “reportedly” was the attacks on 9/11 and America wanted to avenge those terrorist crimes.
The problem is that preparations for invading Afghanistan were taking place long before the 9/11 terrorist incidents. The politicians and the corporate media repeated the mantra that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks and America demanded revenge.
The second major problem is that the United States and Britain trained and armed the Islamic resistance against the Soviet presence in the country. This Islamic resistance evolved into the Taliban who imposed Islamic rule on the country. It was this Islamic resistance that defeated the liberal and socialist elements that were trying to modernize Afghanistan.
The United States issued an ultimatum to the Taliban to turn over bin Laden to the Americans. Bin Laden had been trained and armed by the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Bin Laden was a hero to Afghans because of the role he played in liberating the country from Soviet Occupation. The Taliban did not refuse the request but asked for proof that bin Laden had been involved in 9/11.
The Americans did not provide any proof, instead they started bombing Afghanistan and then invaded it, driving the Taliban from power and starting a 20-year-long insurgency against the American and NATO invasion.
According to the FBI, Osama bin Laden was not behind the attacks on 9/11. They report that Khalid Sheik Mohammad was the architect behind the 9/11 attacks. He confessed after being water boarded more than 160 times. In terms of actual attackers identified by the FBI, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from Lebanon and one was from Egypt. No Afghans were directly involved.
Immediately after the attacks on 9/11, US Vice-President Dick Cheney said that the United States had to invade Iraq. US Secretary of State General Colin Powell responded that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11 and Saddam, who ideologically was an Arab nationalist, was a mortal enemy of the Islamic ideology espoused by Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban.
There was no talk of bombing or invading Saudi Arabia, and, in fact, there was no serious investigation into who was behind the 9/11 attacks. Once bin Laden was accused there was no need to investigate further. Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded as the United States launched its war on terrorism. Other countries that were in America’s cross hairs included Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
There is no credible evidence that any of these countries were involved with the 9/11 attacks. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that were funding the Islamic insurgents against the countries targeted by the US as “supporters of terrorism” were not investigated for involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
There is an ongoing court case in the United States that is suing Saudi Arabia for its “alleged” involvement with the 9/11 attacks. However, the United States government has been fighting the case and not co-operating with the judicial proceeding.
Now after 20 years of occupation and failed “State making,” the United States and its allies are fleeing Afghanistan and leaving in their wake a destroyed country. The cost in human terms has been terrible. Perhaps as many as one million Afghans have been killed and injured and millions were turned into refugees.
Can you imagine what you could do with the two trillion dollars in the United States where there is a desperate need to build infrastructure, to address income inequalities, fix a failing education system and create a publically funded health care system for all Americans?
The United States is not really a democracy but a plutocracy, or even an oligarchy, where money controls the political system and dictates policy. Only a tiny percent directly profit from the War economy. Similar arguments can be made about the money wasted and lost lives as a result of the War in Vietnam. It seems that that the United States does not learn the lessons from its own history and realistically assess the reasons for its decline.
I groan at the screen when I see my kids watching one of the typical portrayals of the ‘modern dad’. Perhaps the most common depiction is the well-intentioned, loving but equally clueless, hopeless and bumbling father. I grew up on this imagery courtesy of Homer in The Simpsons in the 90s and now that I am a father, the representation has not changed much at all. This type of dad is in way too many stories and shows.
My two children have loved Peppa Pig, where Daddy Pig is doing not much of anything, except falling over and lazing around. Of course, there’s the dad who is off working all day and comes home ready for dinner and a cuddle. In my home, we recently discovered the animated show, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, with its surprisingly scintillating British voice cast, and catchy tune from Robbie Williams. Even though the show is based on a 1968 book it doesn’t appear dated in 2021 because so little has shifted culturally. Then there’s the emotionally distant, aloof or altogether absent father who doesn’t tend to his children at all. Almost every Disney movie fits this category.
The fact is, kids love storytelling. Reading a book, watching an adventure-filled show or creating some fantastic backstory for a new game to play, storytelling adds colour and vibrancy to childhood experiences, instils children with lifelong values and passions and significantly influences their cognitive development. But what are kids learning from stories about the role of dads in their lives?
This Facebook post is a classic example of dads being shown as hopeless and incapable of doing their share. It’s meant to be funny. But what message does it really send?
Research demonstrates all men are capable of providing the physical and emotional support children require to develop into skilled, confident and socially adjusted people. Yet one of the great parenting myths is that men are thoroughly incapable and inattentive, and women naturally attuned to children’s needs. We are feeding that myth to our kids every day because it remains deeply ingrained in our popular culture and children’s entertainment.
If we go back to popular culture again, sadly, Bandit Heeler on Bluey (pictured above), the loving, emotionally involved and active dad, is the exception to the rule. He is doing almost all the heavy lifting to change the perception of fatherhood. While we all celebrate this show, we can’t expect one gorgeous animated blue heeler and his adorable family to change perceptions alone. And we can’t just let the next generation passively absorb such counter-productive tropes. Role modelling inside our homes offers a much more positive depiction of fatherhood than books and screens ever could, and is an absolute necessity. Our kids must experience dad nourishing them, playing games, nursing them on sick days, and counselling them with vulnerability, sensitivity and affection when problems arise. Our children need a high-definition dad ‘for real life’ as Bluey and Bingo would say.
Equally, we must help our children develop a healthy curiosity about how gender norms are depicted. When we bump up against the unhelpful depictions of dopey dads and overworked mums, we can pause and inquisitively ask our kids whether this reflects their life, and even whether they think it’s fair only one parent runs the home. One of the best qualities we can gift our children is the capacity to question the order of all things, especially gender norms. Ginger Gorman, author and editor of BroadAgenda, says she finds herself regularly engaging in such a commentary with her kids,
“Not long ago one of my kids brought home a home reader. And mummy was cooking everyone breakfast and getting the kids to school, meanwhile Daddy just walked out of the door to go to work. This kind of cultural indoctrination teaches very small kids that in heterosexual relationships, this is what can be expected from Dads – they don’t share the domestic load and put the burden entirely on their partner.”
Ginger says she can see the progress she’s made within her family, “I’ve taught my kids to be gender literate, and my then 6-year-old daughter instantly picked up on this disparity. At the time, she said: ‘Why is mummy doing all the housework and daddy just goes off to work? That will make mummy cranky and tired, and she won’t have time for a shower before she goes to work [herself].’ It was cute that she could so clearly see the issues. But also infuriating that little people are being taught this gender inequity from such a small age”.
The culture inside our homes is as important as anything portrayed in a book, show or game. Every family can reshape the representations of fatherhood by taking concrete action every day. If we do this, over time, hopefully our children start creating more empowering and enlightening stories of their own.
The war on Afghanistan has been anything but. It’s actually been a money grab for private security firms and arms traders. There’s been a grab at resources and infrastructure. Most importantly of all, it’s been a decimation of Afghan people.
And, really, there’s no reason to assume that these things won’t continue on the part of the West.
Understanding the war on terror
You can’t really understand Afghanistan without having, at the very least, the context of the last 20 years of the so-called ‘war on terror.’ 9/11 started a concerted campaign headed by the US that’s been the latest breeding ground of suspicion and surveillance against Muslims. The foreign policy of Western nations can’t be understood without this context – that’s how central it is to global politics.
It’s almost 20 years since 9/11, and 20 years of injustices have followed. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen these countries ransacked and gutted. Cultures, histories, and peoples have been decimated. Torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib. Illegal detainments in Guantánamo Bay. Surveillance of Muslim communities globally.
Point out a major Western nation, and you can point out foreign and domestic policy stitched together with a deadly suspicion trained at Islam and Muslims.
Debates on outcome
Historically, many nations around the world have had the British invade and then ‘leave’ at some stage. The last 20 years of the ‘war on terror’ are full of multiple instances where the British and the US have invaded and then left a country.
The latest instance has had the usual crowd of ex-soldiers, foreign policy ‘experts’, and other assorted whites offering up their opinions.
As usual, these opinions pay no attention to the colonial interests of invading militaries. The fact that the US left Afghanistan after 20 years and the Taliban took over in 10 days has been pointed to as a reason why the whole thing has been a failure. People have also pointed to how this means lots of soldiers died for nothing.
They didn’t die for nothing – they died to preserve Western interests (financial or otherwise). They died to allow the West to assert control over a region which has had more written about its women, culture, and religion than George W. Bush has done dodgy paintings in his retirement from being a war criminal.
These efforts in Afghanistan are about the West’s power and control over so-called developing nations. They’re about the West sustaining itself on the resources, people, and cultures of nations who’ve been outstripped by the machine of neoliberalism.
It’s imperial fantasy wrapped up in modern day coloniality.
Civilising mission
Despite what all those foreign policy experts are saying, there was only ever one desired outcome: a civilising mission that took centre stage while Western nations ransacked the place backstage.
Western exceptionalism underpins the machinery of war and the theatre of civilising missions that fuels countries like the US and Britain. Western exceptionalism uses Afghani women as symbols of how civilised, democratic, and free white and Western women are.
Afghanistan was never invaded to save women. It was invaded to cement the identity of Western nations as civilised, peaceful, and freedom loving.
It was never about women. The endless pieces on Afghani women who skate, or the pictures of Afghani women in hijab – the cheap novels featuring heavily lined eyes staring out from a veil – all of these products exist to reinforce certain values. These values try to tell us that Afghani and Muslim women are backwards – other. Caught in the fantasy of aggressive and uncultured Brown men who control them, these women are just puppets for Western values.
White people in the West need to think of women halfway across the world as inferior, backwards, and repressed. We think we have it bad over here, but look over there! We could never be that oppressed! Let’s go and save them! By bombing them!
As usual, these types of views say more about colonisers than they do the colonised.
Clash of cultures
Which takes us to where we are now.
It’s little wonder that people are constantly wringing their hands in Britain about race relations, ethnicity, diversity, or multiculturalism. You can understand why British people as a society are so racially illiterate. Just like clockwork, there’ll be another moral panic about race. The same red-faced talking heads will froth at the mouth about political correctness gone mad. And so the cycle goes.
They simply don’t have the range to understand the weight of colonialism and the impact it has now.
Afghanistan is the latest version to be in British news cycles. All the discussion of refugees and heart-wrenchingly desperate people clinging to a moving plane has been set in motion by a decades-long campaign that has displaced millions of people.
This is who Britain is
These Western values are about world-building. It doesn’t matter if it’s documentaries, novels, images, or news media about Afghanistan. If it’s made in the West, it tells us more about the West than it does about Afghanistan.
Gargi Bhattacharyya, a sociologist who works on racial capitalism, writes:
As long as the great men believed their own stories, they felt justified in using violence to maintain their privilege; after all, this was the right and natural order. As long as the rest of the world believed at least some of the great men’s stories, they remained feeling sad and powerless, unable to imagine routes out of social structures which accorded them no value.
Much of the coverage of Afghanistan has been dripping with Islamophobia and racism. That changes how we understand the narrative of Afghanistan. It also changes how we understand the people of Afghanistan. They’re not stories, or lessons, or warnings. They’re humans who have been terrorised by Western nations.
The very least the rest of the world can do is to imagine pathways out of the stifling narratives presented to us.
— by definition — keeps the vast majority of its residents in a state of deep distress and high anxiety.
(@DefenceHQ) 
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