Walking through Parliament, I head to my office in the press gallery, passing gilded portraits of reporters who came before, and I recall that the people who adorn these walls were the same people who published some of the most racist rhetoric that has ever been printed, rhetoric that has shaped our society and the way the public perceives my people.
That’s how I feel every day walking into my office and, while there are days I feel numb to it, there definitely are days when it shakes me and makes me feel alone – because not only does the space not look like me or represent me, it also celebrates those who oppressed the very thought that someone like me could exist.
A good friend of mine often reminds me that “growth and comfort cannot coexist,” and, ultimately, that’s why I continue to put myself in this uncomfortable environment because I know my people deserve to have their perspectives represented.
I know growth exists here because, for me, comfort sure as hell doesn’t.
However, the discomfort level has felt even more oppressive than usual over the past couple of weeks as Māori have been the centre of attention in parliamentary debates, with Māori-focused health initiatives being called separatist.
Attempts by Māori to claim tino rangatiratanga, the right of self-determination as promised in te Tiriti o Waitangi, are scoffed at.
High-level political banter follows that basically amounts to: “Shut up, Māori. You’re not special. You’re lucky to have us managing you so just try to conform. Try to be a Pākehā like us and your life will be much better.”
It’s about me and my whānau While some New Zealanders probably see this debate as robust and necessary, I don’t believe they understand the overwhelming effect it has on Māori personally.
This is because while non-Māori may hear phrases like, “Māori are more likely to be diagnosed with type-2 diabetes than non-Māori counterparts,” what I hear is that I am more likely to be diagnosed with type-2 diabetes.
When you hear that Māori are twice as likely to die from cancer as the average New Zealander due to inequities in the health system, what I hear is that my siblings are more likely to die of cancer.
When you hear that Māori will probably die seven years younger than other nationalities, what I hear is that my parents will probably die seven years younger than my friends’ parents.
To non-Māori, these are just statistics. But for Māori, it is literally a case of life and death.
So why wouldn’t Māori want to see more money and energy put into Māori health? Why wouldn’t Māori want a health system created and managed by Māori?
The very existence of disparities is racist. It makes sense that we would want to pull away from a system where it seems that just being Māori is a deficit.
Stop the rhetoric This is the reality we know and understand too well. This is also why hearing non-Māori debate what is good for Māori and whether it’s a viable option for New Zealand is sickening. It’s painful and once again it’s uncomfortable.
While my years in journalism have taught me to avoid making assumptions, I often think that parliamentarians must know how their words influence and affect the country, resulting in discomfort at best and outright racial discrimination at worst.
Hearing the echo of their own words in hate speech on the streets must be enough for them to take care with how they speak about Māori.
If people dying directly from the outcomes of racial discrimination is not enough to stop the rhetoric, what will?
These thoughts are my reality, the reason I make that lonely walk through the press gallery every day.
Because the fact of the matter is that while the majority of our national leaders talk about how Māori can be better, I have to live it and be one of the bridges between the political world and the public and ensure that te iwi Māori is informed on the issues that affect us all.
I don’t get to hang my Māori hat up at the end of the day. Walking away would be the easy option.
But when that thought rears its head, and when unseen voices whisper at me that it’d be easier to just give up and try to fit in with the Pākehā instead, I remember the wise words of another Māori who challenged the rhetoric of what a Māori should be, and I get on with the job:
“It is preposterous that any Māori should aspire to become a poor Pākehā, when their true destiny, prescribed by the creator, is to become a great Māori.” – Tā James Himi Hēnare
Rukuwai Tīpene-Allan is a journalist for Te Ao Māori News. She has also worked on Te Kaea, Kawekōrero and Rereātea. This article first appeared on Māori Television’s website and has been republished on Asia Pacific Report with permission.
What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
We used to research the cup of coffee. School. Mostly community colleges, but at two universities — UT-El Paso and Gonzaga. A lot of evening classes I taught. Even on military compounds, and in prisons, and in the bowels of twin plants in Juarez.
In the old days, sleeves rolled up, adults and young people in classrooms, computers, paper and white boards at our ready, would get comfortable and uncomfortable. It was not an easy class, those Composition 101 and 102 mandatory (sometimes ONLY) writing classes for college students (I am so for mandatory 12 classes on writing, thinking, media, rhetoric, propaganda, etc.). Food and drinks, music during essay writing, and face to face consternation and confrontation. Cooperation.
That cup of coffee from the earliest look at where that bean came from originally intrigued the students. Who would have known (we talked about the Colombian exchange, the Doctrine of Discovery, food, animals, other things that came to the Imperialists). Think of the spice islands on steroids:
The original domesticated coffee plant is said to have been from Harar, and the native population is thought to be derived from Ethiopia with distinct nearby populations in Sudan and Kenya. Coffee was primarily consumed in the Islamic world where it originated and was directly related to religious practices.
Fun stuff, this sort of research and writing, and deep dive. We turned these assignments into poetry, poster illustrations, research papers on the diseases of coffee, on the power of coffee like so many thousands of other foods and products, crossing oceans. Many a product of empire and racism, and the coffee paper also turned into “Is There Slavery in Your Chocolate?” essays.
In recent years, a handful of organizations and journalists have exposed the widespread use of child labor, and in some cases slavery, on cocoa farms in Western Africa. Since then, the industry has become increasingly secretive, making it difficult for reporters to not only access farms where human rights violations still occur, but to then disseminate this information to the public. In 2004, the Ivorian First Lady’s entourage allegedly kidnapped and killed a journalist reporting on government corruption in its profitable cocoa industry. In 2010, Ivorian government authorities detained three newspaper journalists after they published an article exposing government corruption in the cocoa sector. The farms of Western Africa supply cocoa to international giants such as Hershey’s, Mars, and Nestlé—revealing the industry’s direct connection to the worst forms of child labor, human trafficking, and slavery. (Source)
So much has happened since I first hit the streets as a newspaper journalist in 1977, and so much has changed since I started teaching college classes in research writing and writing and journalism (1983). The “see, speak, hear no evil” paradigm is the destiny of capitalists. It is the way of who we are every waking nanosecond of our lives. Boycott Divest Sanction my ass. This is where I also pretzel myself into contradiction after contradiction. I should be on an island, or just on 20 acres I have near Mount Adams. Eating mushrooms and stitching moss and bark clothing.
Capitalism is the cancer, virus, prion, the tapeworm, the carrot and the stick. It is the blood sucker of all concepts. Slavery is Capitalism. We talked about this, in so many ways, not always me railing overtly with my anti-Capitalist thesis. I would bring to class small business owners, restaurant owners, ex-military, nonprofit directors, friends who were homeless, living in garages, artists, and dissidents of many kinds. Another thing that is DEAD in the water.
Now, you have to get people vetted and approved to come to a classroom. This is the sickness of our lefty culture. The rightwing has already played this card, too. “Why the hell are you bringing a person from Planned Parenthood to your class? Illegal. Stop. I’m calling the president.”
That coffee, now, looking at a cup, the ecological footprint, the energy used to get a cup of coffee to say, my Spokane students. Because Spokane loves its coffee. The amount of water used to grow a cup of coffee. We’d look at the coffee in Central America, or Colombia. Where that plant is grown. What was bulldozed to bring that plantation there. Who works the finca? Which indigenous group of non-Spanish speakers in Guatemala work these plantation, tends the bushes, picks and dries the cherries. Species lost, pesticides used. Water diverted. And, food crops denied.
Again, young and older adults, blown away in my classes, since I was teaching them to look deeper at any number of topics, and develop critical thinking and discourse skills, in whatever watered down version I’d get with many students who were coming to college ill-prepared to really write “essays.” Variations on a theme. Just the cup of liquid, first grown and processed in poor countries, takes about 38 gallons of water to grow.
We’d try and research more and more on the life-cycle of a ceramic cup or Starbucks thermos, and the life cycle and life span of a coffee maker. Embedded energy, waste, mining, slave warehouses, metals, all that fossil fuel to move those metals, cook them, mill them, ship them around the world. Sure, we could look at at sack of dried but not roasted coffee cherries coming from the Guatemala Highlands, and then where it gets shipped by boat, and then moved by truck, and then the actual cleaning and roasting of the coffee. Packaging, and then, that journey is crossing back and forth, over land, in the air, over seas.
The assignment blows many students’ minds, as it should. In the classroom, and I’d bring in a coffee person, with coffee and snacks, and she’d talk about farms in Mexico and Africa she’s visited. Talk about the flavor, the various types of coffees.
We’d look at Fair Trade, Beyond Fair Trade, Shade Grown and the like. Socially responsible coffee. I’d talk about how Vietnam — where I had gone and worked — was cutting more and more forests down to grow coffee. Coffee pests and diseases, and soil enhancements with fertilizers. The entire life cycle analysis of as many things we could extract from the coffee history and production, well, it blows students’ minds, and it only works in person. Don’t fool yourself with the fucking mouse, keyboard and Zoom camera/mic.
We need to talk about the environmental and human and ecological costs of plantation, mountain-razing coffee:
This pathetic Zoom and remote learning (sic) formula is the deadening of the brain. Recall, Americans already have three quarters of their brains (or more) colonized by lies, propaganda, hate, myth, plain stupidity, largely from terrible K12 (prison with smiling teachers) and all the marketing, and a government whose job is to fleece the masses for the company men, and fleecing includes culling thinking and deep analysis.
All this work, for coffee? Nope, because the students then do some of their own research on any manner of things. Cause and effect, solutions, pro-con, classification, expository, digital rhetoric, and deeper position papers. Research, and while we share sources and do all sorts of things at home, in groups, the big thing is getting the classroom energized, talking, arguing. Debate every minute. We even meet out of class in a, well, coffee shop, and coffee roaster.
Thinking about origins and perspectives. This is a full-time job as an instructor, in the class with all sorts of human beings there taking in and reacting to the work, the talks, the learning and the discourse. This Zoom shit is the death of humanity as I knew it. Radical Pedagogy, 2003 article!
Always with food, something in the class, mostly evening classes.
In 1960, the University of Missouri published a short “Guide for Television Teachers.” Across the country, over 100 different colleges offered nearly 500 televised courses to a half a million students. So professors needed pointers about the best way to teach in this burgeoning new medium.
“Relax,” the Missouri guide underlined. “Try to be yourself.” Male professors should wear “conservative” ties, the guide added, while women should avoid necklines or hemlines that might “cause discomfort or embarrassment” if they leaned over a counter or sat in a low chair. Once they were properly attired, they could loosen up and let their real character shine through. “Remember that the TV camera projects your natural personality best,” the guide urged, “and the more relaxed and natural that you are, the better you will reach your viewers.”
Who are these children forced to work the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast?
Shit, those were the days. And here I am, suffering at age 64. I am feeling the burn, the beat-down burn, of more and more people around me stupid, mean, see-speak-hear not evil when it comes to this fucked up Empire, This War Machine. Those were the good old days? Is that my new mindset and refrain?
It is the contradiction to be an American totally — North American, Canadian or citizen of the USA. Every waking and sleeping minute we are covering the world in blood, exploitation, penury, death. Pain and misery is the way of the land. The hollow media, the celebrities in music and film, oh even more viral than the politicians. They are the elite, or the elite’s house boys or house girls.
“So what can we do but go with the flow? Just let it go. They have all the power, so just live your life as best you can. It’s not that bad. If we don’t bomb the world, steal the minerals, colonize space with weapons, then someone else will. What about China, Russia? I want a family, a job, and just a chance to live on weekends and kayak and smell the moose dung.”
I am down — really depressed — because of what that cup of coffee assignment represents: I am old. I am no good as a teacher because it is a digital and PC and cancel culture study body. I am down because most of the people I would have worked with years ago on political issues, as artists, well, they are either dead, or brains deadened by the struggle and the losing. I am depressed because that cup of coffee assignment is not lauded. The entire Western Civilization or Western Culture is in various forms of mental illness. That illness grouping includes a million wrong ways to medicate or mediate the illnesses of the minds.
I am not that, but I am alone, it seems. Now, the coffee, and where it comes from. Do I invest in Folgers Coffee (a division of J.M Smucker Company)? This is what’s depressing me now — my spouse and I are moving some money saved into some investments. Now I have to decide how to put some of it away, or as they say, to invest it. Because there are no interest rates, the average person can’t go to a state bank or any institution and put money into a municipal bond to do some good for society and make a few percentage points above zero. What’s wrong with 4 percent or 5 percent interest? That is the crime, zero or negative interest rates. Criminal. Imagine, there is not one thing on planet Earth, planet Wall Street, planet Retirement Fund which is not heavily tainted with DDDD: death, disease, destruction and destitution. We have been relooking at Socially Responsible Mutual Funds, or ESG’s, and the picture was never pretty:
Oh, you can say, “Broker, find me a fund that isn’t into war, weapons, mining, prisons, guns, germs, exploitation, banks, insurance companies.” It is virtually impossible. You might not want Walmart stock in the mutual fund, but then Amazon and Facebook and Kraft Foods might be in it. Microsoft, Boeing. Any amount of honor or commitment to NOT engaging in investing that gives money to the murderers, the exploiters, the ocean-soil-jungle-forest-wetland-river killers, it is all lost because they all are wrapped up into one big fat thievery corporation — BlackRock and Blackstone and the top 100 banks, hedge funds, and so many other “if-you-can-make-6-or-12-percent-on-yearly-return” investment products are so embedded in the master slavers in Fortune 1000 circles, and even within the 10,000 largest corporations.
[Modern-Day Robber Baron: The Sins of Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman]
The system is rigged for brokers to use brokerage houses, big ones, and those fees — buy, sell, trade, manage — more money and profits made for NOT producing one potato or bicycle. Yet, MBAs and the others in this crew believe that they don’t want their precious children to work the slave fields of Ivory Coast, or to be soccer ball stitchers, or to be at the wrong end of a toxic waste discharge hose. But invest in Hershey’s, or Nike, or Smithfield, well, out of sight, out of mind. Yep, they would not want their precious families bombed with the amazing number of components tied to an amazing number of businesses wrapped up in one missile. Screws, wires, capacitors, metal shrouding, telemetry, paint, seals, nuts and bolts, precision metal parts, tubes and coils and electronic guidance systems and batteries and, well, you get the picture. But goddamn, you can make bank on investing in defense (sic) companies because there is an endless demand by governments to have that shit in stock. We the taxpayer pay for those Hellfire’s:
Lockheed Martin, Boeing (previous second source), and Northrop Grumman (seeker only for AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire) Unit cost US$150,000 (FY 2021)!
It’s much more than just those three companies making bank for these missiles. There is an entire contingent (armies) of companies and service economies tied to this murder weapon:
In the past, I have studied mutual funds I have invested in, to squirrel away some savings, and the picture is pretty ugly. There are no SRI’s that are nothing more than just market washing. Socially Responsible Investing, NOT:
Look at what Warren Buffett owns as part of Berkshire Hathaway. Products — Diversified investments, property and casualty insurance, Utilities, Restaurants, Food processing, Aerospace, Media, Toys, Automotive, Sporting goods, Consumer products, Internet, Real estate, Railroad
So the average Joe and Jane, if they get a mutual fund or two for some long-term investment, this is the reality — you might be a social justice warrior, an anti-racist campaigner, an anti-war proponent, an environmentalist, community crusader, a socialist, an anti-capitalist, but if you stick your toe just a bit into the pond for minimal investments, just to protect a few thousand dollars here and there, this is what you get — money into the pockets of madmen: school to prison pipeline experts, war lords, surveillance capitalists, drug pushers, bad loan chieftains, medical fraudsters, real estate thugs, polluters, mountaintop removers, river toxifiers, land thieves, propaganda priests.
I am so serious about this now — where does the money go, and which company is being supported by stockholders shoveling money into their companies? Look at the union busters, at the price gougers, at the political lobbying arms, all these giant corporations and their networks of bunkos!
You can turn blue in the face decrying Monsanto (Bayer) for its pesticide poisons or Exxon for climate change propaganda or Sackler/Purdue Pharmacy for opioid addictions, but if you have a mutual fund, there is a chance that somehow those companies are entwined somewhere in the formula of a “strong mutual fund.”
The corporate giants are also demanding that Congress allow the repatriation of about $2.5 trillion stashed abroad without paying more than 5% tax. They say the money would be used to grow the economy and create jobs. Last time CEOs promised this result in 2004, Congress approved, and then was double-crossed. The companies spent the bulk on stock buybacks, their own pay raises and some dividend increases.
There are more shenanigans. With low interest rates that are deductible, companies actually borrow money to finance their stock buybacks. If the stock market tanks, these companies will have a self-created debt load to handle. A former Citigroup executive, Richard Parsons, has expressed worry about a “massively manipulated” stock market which “scares the crap” out of him.
Banks that pay you near zero interest on your savings announced on June 28, 2017 the biggest single buyback in history – a $92.8 billion extraction. Drug companies who say their sky-high drug prices are needed to fund R&D. But between 2006 and 2017, 18 drug company CEOs spent a combined staggering $516 billion on buybacks and dividends – more than their inflated claims of spending for R&D. — Ralph Nader
We all are sinners in capitalism — just paying our tax bill: death and destruction raining down on Palestinians, for example:
Seven deadly sins: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Science without humanity, Knowledge without character, Politics without principle, Commerce without morality, Worship without sacrifice.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Oh, we all think we have found the formula for living in this insane and murderous country. Oh, we have to put nose to the grindstone. Follow the leaders. Get the jab. Do as you are told. You home is not your castle. There are no 40 acres and a mule. No handouts. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Pinch your nose, cover your eyes, plug your ears, muffle your mouth!
So, you end up throwing in the towel — no purity test, no selective boycotting of this or that product or service. No true anti-Imperialist leaning, when tax filing time comes. Nothing free in this un-Democratic land of thieves, murderers and thugs. Almost every step you take in America is full of landmines, cow pies, toxic puddles and electrified fences. The horizon is one theater of the absurd after another. The amount of nonsense and self-congratulatory verbiage from all manner of people who think they are enlightened or vaunted or above the dirty, scab-sucking, ripoff fray of capitalism, well, that is the self-delusion, the big lie.
So, the role of k12, and of higher education? One of the key foundations for a society — good education, robust, and deep learning, deep thinking, and systems thinking growing. Under capitalism and consumerism and conformist ideology that is US of Amnesia, there are so many broken things about face to face education, and I have written tons on this. Taking it to Zoom, to televised classes, remote learning, well, all the bad gets funneled into this new normal-abnormal.
In addition to education, colleges and universities provide indoctrination in the values and shared beliefs that our society deems important. These commonly shared values and tenets must be instilled, importantly beginning in grade school and before (the Jesuit boast, variously stated, is “Give me the first seven years and you can have all the rest”), and continued and reinforced through high school and college.
It is at the university where young men and women of indoctrinated conviction are most typically apt and able to respond to what is going on in the world around them, perhaps even take to the streets. Indoctrination can be overt or subtle.
— George Heitmann
The newly elected Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Edwin Poots has said the removal of the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) will be his number one priority. The fact his priority is at odds with the DUP’s government partners Sinn Féin doesn’t appear to matter. Nor the fact that it’s also at odds with two of the other five political parties in the Northern Ireland Executive.
Both the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the Alliance Party want the protocol to work. But I guess ‘democratic’ means different things to different people, given this debate has taken place several times over the last five plus years.
So as we approach the north’s contentious marching season, the DUP’screationist leader-to-be presents a ‘new’ hardline policy. A policy that could see the 2021 marching season as the most violent in some time.
And since marching season is typically marred by some kind of violence, this may not worry the DUP faithful too much. But what should be worrying Poots’ believers is that the DUP’s 50th birthday celebrations could be the beginning of its own post-mortem.
Hardline unionism leads to conflict
The DUP’s roots are in “hardline Protestantism”. A similar hardline brand that used gerrymandering to prevent Irish republicans participating in democracy. It also discriminated against republicans in housing and employment. Indeed, the Northern Ireland statelet’s discriminatory pro-unionist/anti-republican behaviour since its foundation in 1922 was a catalyst for the north’s bloody 30-year conflict which caused:
just under 3,500 deaths and 48,000 injuries, the equivalent by population size of 125,000 deaths and nearly 2 million injuries in Britain, or roughly half the British death toll during WWII.
On the wrong side of public opinion
Just as it opposed several agreements beforehand, the DUP opposed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA). And it opposed it because it refused to share power with Sinn Féin. But, as announced this day 23 years ago, voters in the north overwhelmingly accepted the GFA. And 23 years on, the GFA forms the basis of the current power-sharing agreement, which the DUP is still a part of.
Similarly, when it backed Leave during the 2016 Brexit referendum, the DUP was out of step with the majority of voters in the north. And despite being on the winning side of that vote in the wider UK, it’s still unhappy with the result. Worse still from a DUP point of view, popular opinionindicates an increase in support for a United Ireland as a result of Brexit.
Sinn Féin constantly gaining ground
When the Northern Ireland Executive collapsed in January 2017, it further created shaky ground for the DUP. The collapse came from the DUP’s Arlene Foster refusing to step aside as first minister pending an investigation into the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) financial scandal.
Foster’s refusal forced Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness to resign as deputy first minister. The elections that followed led to Sinn Féin closing the gap on the DUP in the north’s Assembly.
Attempts to restore it in 2018 appeared to collapse when the DUP got cold feet on committing to an Irish language Act. This act would have protected the development of the Irish language.
Then, on 22 May, a LucidTalk poll predicted Sinn Féin would win the next Assembly elections. This would mean Sinn Féin, or any other Irish republican party for that matter, holding the first minister position for the first time in the north’s history. And while that would clearly be a democratic decision, it seems the DUP may not accept that either.
Marching season approaching
All of this is happening as we approach the summer. Followers of politics in the north will know that means marching season. A season when the unionist Orange Order marches through towns and cities in the north. A number of these marches lead to violence and intimidation of local Catholics.
And as the reality of the post-Brexit NIP dawns, the sinister face of unionism re-emerges. In what can only be described as a bizarre appearance at a Northern Ireland select committee, a representative of loyalist paramilitaries threatened a return to violence should the NIP remain in place.
And while this is in keeping with the loyalists’ March announcement to withdraw from the GFA, it sets a dark tone for the summer ahead. Because just as increased loyalist violence followed Belfast City Council’s controversial vote to limit the flying of the union flag in December 2012, the same could happen this year too.
A failed and dangerous strategy
So with this in mind, Poots’ hardline position makes little sense. Not least because there doesn’t appear to be a workable alternative to the NIP. But also because the DUP’s priority is to:
maintain and enhance Northern Ireland’s constitutional position within the United Kingdom
Yet the hardline position has had the opposite effect. If the DUP wishes to self-destruct then so be it. Not too many this side of the political divide will mourn that. But if it faced up to the north’s weakening position within the UK, then that could prevent us mourning something much more serious. It’s time the DUP woke up to that.
“This is clearly a terrible, terrible morning for the BBC” said Andrew Marr on his show on Sunday 23 May. He was referring to the princess Diana Spencer/Martin Bashir story. But “miserable” is perhaps an understatement. Because the BBC is now little more than a lame horse that needs to be put out of its misery.
The Bashir scandal
There’s been a media frenzy in recent days over the 1995 Panoramainterview with Spencer. The BBC put in place an independent inquiry into the show. This was after Diana’s brother, earl Charles Spencer, accused journalist Bashir of lying to get the interview. Now, head of the inquiry lord John Dyson seemed to agree. As the BBC itself reported, Dyson found that:
Bashir seriously breached BBC rules by mocking up fake bank statements to gain access to the princess
He showed the fake documents to Earl Spencer, to gain his trust so he would introduce Bashir to Diana
By gaining access to Diana in this way, Bashir was able to persuade her to agree to give the interview
And as media interest in the interview increased, the BBC covered up what it had learnt about how Bashir secured the interview. Lord Dyson said this “fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark”
The fall out has been seismic – if insipid.
The usual MO
Whistleblowers who tried to expose all this years earlier have slammed the BBC‘s attitude to them. As The Canary previously reported, BBC bosses sacked former Panorama producer Mark Killick within 24 hours when he raised concerns. He called Bashir a “dishonest reporter” who “lied and lied”. Killick also said BBC bosses ran “a smear campaign” against people who spoke out. He explained:
The culture of fear that was established then, it was a long time ago, but they sent a clear message to everyone in the BBC, ‘do not refer up, do not bring the BBC bad news’.
This is hardly new. For example, BBC bosses spent years protecting serial child rapist Jimmy Saville. BBC employees accused senior managers of “still trying to cover their tracks” as recently as 2012. But still, much of the corporate media and the Tory government have had a field day over the Bashir story. A Sun columnist (don’t click the link!) wrote that:
the BBC will carry on slurping at the trough watered by around £4billion a year of licence fee payers’ money, promoting its sneering anti-British agenda, lavishly overpaying its second-rate stars.
But the Corporation has Diana’s blood on its hands.
And if the BBC was a national newspaper, it would be getting closed for ever.
Ironic, from the ‘alleged’ royal family phone-hackingSun. Meanwhile, the middle class liberal commentariat have rallied to defend the BBC.
Enter the liberal defenders
Guardian columnist Marina Hyde tried to deflect some of the blame to the “great British public”; Guardian-speak for ‘stupid, working class tabloid readers’. She accused us of not ‘owning our own actions’:
Millions bought insatiably into Diana’s pain… The pall of blameless sanctimony [says Hyde, ironically going full-on sanctimonious] that descended after her death was a stunning exercise in mass hypocrisy. People were simply incapable of imagining that they too had been part of the ecosystem
Then, the Observerwrote in an editorial that it thinks the government will use this to:
increase control over the BBC, direct its policy and personnel and influence its reporting. Leading Tories and their commercially self-interested Fleet Street cheerleaders have long claimed, absurdly, that BBC journalism is run by a leftwing cabal. … Now, in a sick reprise of the past, they seek to use Diana and her sons, coupled with Dyson’s findings, as a club to batter down the doors of honest, independent reporting damaged by Bashir.
But the Observer‘s limp yet sanctimonious defence of the BBC is of course nonsense. Because the BBC‘s conduct, and the Tories’ response to it, is actually nothing new.
An arm of government
As I previously wrote, during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic the BBC went onto a war footing. It was a similar MO to the one it had during WWII. It’s also the same one that led it to it being directly involved in espionage during the 1953 Iranian coup. It’s the same MO that led Marr to stand outside Downing Street at the end of the Iraq invasion in 2003 and say:
it would be entirely ungracious, even for [Tony Blair’s] critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.
And it’s the same MO that saw the government fund the BBC to push Western propaganda in North Korea. The point being, the BBC has often worked as a propaganda arm of government; regardless of whether that government is Tory or Labour.
I’m almost bored of saying that the BBC is not impartial. As I wrote for the CommonSpace around five years ago, it:
is essentially held to financial ransom by governments of every political persuasion, with the media moguls at the top in their publicly-funded ivory towers obviously wanting to keep themselves in the lifestyles that they have become accustomed to.
Boring
But here we are, having the same conversations again. Therefore, the fuss about the Tory government sticking its nose in to ‘reform’ the BBC rings hollow. It rings even more hollow when the chair of the BBC Richard Sharp is a half-million pound Tory donor. And it’s hollow when the BBC‘s director-general is Tory-supporting Tim Davie. So the Tory government getting involved in how the BBC operates is hardly a threat.
Its journalists are from the Marr school of bias: entrenched so deeply into the system they barely even realise the narrow, establishment-defined parameters within which they operate. The BBC‘s editorial team frames everything through a Western, imperialist lens: compare and contrast the BBC‘scoverage of Israel’s apartheid-led atrocities in Gaza to Sky News’s.
Of course, what’s interesting about the Bashir interview is that it went against the establishment at the time. The then-tory PM John Major reportedly made a concerted effort to protect the royal family. But the Panorama interview did tie in with the soon-to-be incoming PM Blair’s broader views and relationship with Spencer. He had been having “secret meetings” with her before the 1997 general election on tactics to win it. So, was it that the BBC was acting with a tabloid hat on when it decided to do the interview? Or did it detect the winds of change coming in government and therefore set out its stall accordingly?
Either way, there is no reforming of the BBC.
The most noxious of media outlets
The BBC always has been, and always will be (to paraphrase Hyde) part of the establishment “ecosystem” in the UK, and globally. This makes it the most noxious of media outlets.
The Daily Mail and the Sun proudly wear their right-wing, racist, xenophobic hearts on their sleeves. They don’t hide their political bias. They’re private entities; therefore in our corporate capitalist system their bias is entirely up to them. But the BBC is meant to be a public service broadcaster. It’s supposed to be the bastion of impartiality: free and fair, presenting all sides of the argument. The problem we have with the BBC is that it’s none of those things.
But the biggest problem is that the BBC is still the most used news source in the UK. Overall, it has dominance and therefore is actually more dangerous than the Sun and the Daily Mail. People still believe that it’s a bastion of impartiality. They believe what they’re reading and watching is accurate, and a fair reflection of the situation.
So the Bashir furore is really the thin end of the wedge. The BBC doesn’t need reform – because it has never really changed. Its job is to serve the establishment. Therefore, much like the people it serves, it needs razing to the ground. And until there is proper recognition of that fact, anything else is just lip service.
If winning a military battle is defined by the accomplishment of one’s military objectives, then Hamas won the current round of violence with its very first ballistic barrage on Jerusalem ten days ago. Israel, on the other hand, won’t win, can’t win and doesn’t even dream of winning. Like in recent ‘rounds’, all Israel hopes to achieve is an ‘image of victory.’ Despite its military might and destructive enthusiasm, Israel can’t prevail militarily because it doesn’t even remember what military objectives are or what they look like.
In the last seven decades Israel has worked relentlessly to divide the Palestinians in an attempt to dismantle their ability to resist as one people. This project had been so successful in the eyes of the Israelis that many of them started to believe that the Palestinian cause had evaporated into thin air. But then, completely out of the blue (as far as the Israelis are concerned), Hamas managed to unite the Palestinians into a unified fist of resistance: on Tuesday every Palestinian between the River and the Sea joined a strike called by Hamas. Such a collective, multi-sectorial strike didn’t happen in Palestine since 1936.
Military victory is not measured by the carnage you inflict on your foe. It isn’t measured by the number of casualties or the residential towers one reduces into dust. Admittedly, there is no room for comparison between Israeli military capabilities and Hamas’ firepower. Israel is one of the most technologically advanced military forces in the world. Hamas is decades behind, yet it wins over Israel in every round of violence.
The reason is simple. Hamas’ military objectives are simple and modest. Hamas has vowed to keep the resistance alive. It fulfills its promise. By achieving this goal Hamas has positioned itself as the Palestinian unifier. Israel, on the other hand, can’t decide its military goals. We hear Israel’s Defence Minister vowing to bring security to the Israelis but Hamas proves him wrong, continuing to rain Israel with rockets at a growing rate. Israel brags about its precision bombing of Hamas’ tunnels, yet rather cynically, Hamas keep operating from tunnels that seem intact and operational.
It doesn’t take a military genius to grasp that in order to stop Hamas, Israel needs to deploy ground forces and to engage in a fierce battle in the streets of Gaza. But this is exactly the one thing the IDF refuses to do and for a manifold of very good reasons. Firstly, the Israelis are fearful of a house-to-house battle. Second, Israel doesn’t want to control 2.5 million Gazans. Third, not one Israeli military leader is willing to face the relentless Israeli mothers brigade. In the region, however, Israel’s reluctance to send foot soldiers to Gaza is understood as cowardice and weakness.
For Israel, Gaza in particular and Palestine in general is a no-win situation.
But there is a deeper reasoning behind Israel’s hopeless situation. Israeli decision makers (both within the political realm and in the military) subscribe to the power of deterrence. For Israelis, the power of deterrence means punishing the Arabs so heavily that their will to fight would practically stop existing. For one reason or another, the Israelis manage to clumsily zigzag through their troubling history in the region in an attempt to validate this doctrine. For instance, Israel works hard to convince themselves that despite their military fiasco in Lebanon in 2006, Hezbollah has been reluctant to enter a new round of violence with Israel because it is intimidated by the consequences.
Examination of Israeli history actually defies the Israeli doctrine. When Arabs are defeated and humiliated in the battlefield they keep fighting until they win. When Arabs win, they often lose their motivation to keep fighting. They occasionally seek peace and harmony in accordance with the Islamic teaching.
In 1967 Israel defeated 3 Arab armies in just 6 days. Israel performed a perfect Blitzkrieg operation. The Israeli air force surprised and destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian air forces on the ground in less than four hours. Simultaneously, Israeli Panzers raided into Sinai, within hours the Egyptian forces collapsed. The humiliation of the Egyptian army was unprecedented in military terms.
If the Israeli doctrine carried any validity, Egypt wouldn’t consider any military confrontation with Israel. But the reality on the ground proved the opposite. Just a few months after their June 1967 defeat, the Egyptian Army launched a war of attrition against Israel, one which exhausted the Israeli forces (including the air force). In the War of Attrition (1967-70) Egypt displayed new capabilities, relying on new Soviet ground-to-air missiles that obliterated Israeli air superiority. Yet Israel refused to draw the necessary conclusions. It was suffocated by hubris that prevented it from reading its neighbors and their intentions.
On 6 October 1973 (Yom Kippur) at 2 PM, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated attack on Israeli forces in the Suez Canal and in the Golan Heights. Within hours the two Arab armies managed to obliterate the Israeli defence lines. A few days later and thanks to a close American airlift Israel recovered. It gained its lost land in the occupied Golan heights and even managed to conquer some new territory in Syria. In the South, Israel managed to establish a bridgehead over the Suez Canal. It encircled the Egyptian 3rd army and cut its supply lines. But Israel failed to push the Egyptian 3rd and 2nd armies back. The Egyptian army ended the war, claiming a narrow strip of Sinai back. It was this victory that empowered Anwar Sadat to launch a peace initiative four years later (1977).
Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian leader at the time, didn’t manage to claim a victory. Syria remained a defiant enemy of Israel. It is reasonable to speculate that if Assad was allowed to cling to some of his territorial gains in October ‘73, Israel and Syria could have proceeded into further reconciliatory talks.
The same logic can be applied to Hezbollah. The Lebanese Shia resistance movement is reluctant to fight Israel not because it is afraid of the consequences, as Israelis delude themselves, but because it already won significantly over the IDF. A war with Israel is dangerous for Hezbollah not because Israel will do its best once again to destroy Lebanese infrastructure and flatten half of Beirut, but because the outcome of such a war is unknown. Hezbollah is in a much better position retaining its status as the Arab military force that made the IDF run home with its tail between its legs (2006).
One may wonder whether Israeli strategists are so thick as not to grasp the most obvious facts about their neighbors and what fuels their motivation to fight. It may of course be possible that Israel’s decision makers aren’t as excited by tranquility as some of us want to believe. Gaza is where Israel tests its new weaponry and tactics. Gaza rockets are a necessary ingredient in the Iron Dome’s public relations. Most importantly, the Gaza crisis emerged when Netanyahu’s political options were running out. It was the Gaza current conflict that made the political powers in Israel subside and then crystalize lucidly within the realm of the hard right. This war made both Netanyahu and Hamas stronger.
It would be fair to argue that Hamas is operating within the modernist perception of conflicts as devised by Carl von Clausewitz. For the German military philosopher “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” In ‘postmodernist’ Israel, it seems war is one of the means that keeps some politicians out of prison.
When Nanaia Mahuta was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, there were hopes for a change in government thinking towards the struggles of indigenous people. The minister said she hoped to bring her experience and cultural identity as an indigenous woman to her role on international issues.
Palestine, West Papua and Western Sahara are places where the indigenous people are struggling for freedom and human rights and early on there was hope New Zealand would join the 138 member states of the United Nations that recognise Palestine.
However the hope has faded and Mahuta finally spoke on Tuesday, via a tweet, saying she was “deeply concerned” about the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem and Gaza. She called for a “rapid de-escalation” from Israel and the Palestinians, for Israel to “cease demolitions and evictions” and for “both sides to halt steps which undermine prospects for a two-state solution”.
Speaking with reporters later she said she did not want to apportion blame and in a further statement on Thursday said New Zealand officials had raised Israel’s “continued violation of international law and forced evictions occurring in East Jerusalem” with the Israeli ambassador.
Mahuta speaks as though there was some kind of political or military equality between Israel and Palestinians. But there isn’t.
In reality, it means the minister is appeasing the highly militarised state of Israel, with which we have extensive bilateral relations, against a largely defenceless indigenous Palestinian population that lives under Israeli occupation and/or control.
She is addressing only the symptoms of the problem. The heart of the problem is that for the past 53 years Israel has run what the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation Human Rights Watch has called “crimes of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians.
NZ Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta speaks as though there was some kind of political or military equality between Israel and Palestinians. But there isn’t. Image: Dom Thomas/RNZ
With tensions rising, Israel this month mounted an extraordinary brutal attack on Muslim worshippers as they were praying in the Al Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. This mosque is the third holiest site for Muslims and this was seen around the world as an outrage against all of Islam.
The heart of the problem is that for the past 53 years Israel has run what the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation Human Rights Watch has called “crimes of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians. Image: APR screenshot HRW
From there the Hamas leadership in Gaza, after issuing an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw security forces from Al Aqsa, began firing rockets into Israel, which has responded with heavy bombing of the densely populated Gaza strip.
I have a T-shirt that says “The first casualty of war is truth, the rest are mostly civilians” and so it has been this past week, with Palestinians bearing the brunt of casualties with many dozens killed, including at least 60 children.
Despite all this, anyone reading the minister’s comments would think both sides are equally to blame when the problem lies with Israel’s denial of human rights to Palestinians over as many decades as the issue has remained unresolved.
So what should a small country at the bottom of the world do to influence events in the Middle East? The answer is simple. New Zealand should implement its existing policy on the Middle East and give it some teeth.
It is a policy based on respect for international law and United Nations resolutions. These should be at the heart of our response and direct what we say, how we say it and what we do.
This means the government should demand the following:
An end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land (UN Security Council resolution 242) and the right of return for Palestinian refugees expelled by Israeli militias (UN General Assembly resolution 194 – reaffirmed every year since 1949).
The end of the more than 65 laws discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel (These are illegal under the crime of apartheid as defined by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court).
Israel stop building Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land (UN Security Council resolution 2334 which was co-sponsored by New Zealand under John Key’s National Government). These settlements are illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Initially Israel will take not a blind bit of notice and these calls will need to be followed by escalating sanctions.
It’s time for the minister to speak up unequivocally for Palestinian human rights and bring Aotearoa New Zealand on to the right side of history.
John Minto is the national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The New Zealand Herald and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
[Following an attack on the Islam’s third most holy shrine by Israel security forces] the Hamas leadership in Gaza, after issuing an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw security forces from Al Aqsa, began firing rockets into Israel, which has responded with heavy bombing of the densely populated Gaza strip. Image: Said Khatib/AFP/Al Jazeera
Content warning: this article contains descriptions of police violence that some readers may find distressing
You may already know that the police are likely to get sweeping new powers to arrest protesters when the Police Bill is passed. But these potential new powers seem to have already given police across the country new confidence. We’re seeing more and more reports of people being attacked by police while on demonstrations, while legal observers monitoring the situation are being increasingly targeted. It seems that the promise of the new bill is all that the police need to give them the green light to increase their violence against demonstrators.
Reports of police assaults across the country
Bristol, Manchester, London, and Cambridge have all seen scenes of police violence at protests since March.
Of course, it was Bristol that made mainstream news headlines when police vans were set on fire by demonstrators during the city’s first Kill The Bill demonstration. But as The Canary reported, it was the police who provoked people by charging at the crowd with batons and dogs. Avon and Somerset police continued to attack Bristol protesters at subsequent demonstrations. More than 60 people reported injuries, including at least 44 incidents of people being attacked by either shields or batons. Indeed, footage showed police officers repeatedly bringing the edges of their shields down onto sitting protesters’ heads.
In Manchester, footage from one Kill the Bill demonstration on 3 April shows police officers slamming a woman’s head into a police van and then folding her body in half to restrain her as she shouted for help. The woman reported:
my head was smashed into the van wing-mirror with such force that it was folded back against the van, and I saw bits of black plastic coming off it. I later heard that were was glass on the floor below me. I briefly blacked out at this point, my legs gave way, and I wet myself. I had been pushed and pulled between officers who were mostly male and a lot larger than me.
Meanwhile, the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) reported that another woman was attacked:
Manchester’s Mayor Andy Burnham has…demanded an explanation from the police after officers dragged a young woman through the city centre with her underwear exposed while arresting her. There have been accusations that the Manchester Tactical Aid Unit is out of control after officers kicked and hit protesters sitting on the floor at another Kill The Bill protest.
Reports of choking
Also in Manchester, the city’s riot police are being investigated after choking a young student in what Netpol called a “shocking unprovoked assault”. The student reportedly almost lost consciousness in the attack. He had been leaving a demonstration and shook his head at the police just before he was assaulted.
And in Cambridge, the Coalition for Vaccine Justice reported that a 17-year-old boy was also choked by police while demonstrating outside AstraZeneca’s offices. The boy had joined a number of protesters to call for the drug company to waiver its patent on its coronavirus vaccine. A witness said:
I know the look of adrenaline-fuelled anger, and it was all across the face of the police officer just before he lunged at the young man’s throat.
Targeting legal observers
Meanwhile, police across the country are targeting legal observers on protests. In Manchester, three legal observers have lodged complaints against the police. According to Netpol:
[there is] one allegation of sexual assault after a male officer grabbed a female legal observer’s chest.
In London, four more legal observers were also targeted and arrested at a Kill The Bill demonstration. The legal observers were sent by Black Protest Legal Support (BPLS), an organisation led by Black and Brown lawyers to monitor the policing of protests. Liberty is taking action against the police on behalf of those arrested. BPLS said:
We are deeply concerned by the Met’s impunity at protests and the sharp impact this has on racialised communities. From Mangrove in 1970, to Black Lives Matter last year, to the police’s harassment of Black activists in recent weeks – the arrests subject to challenge, of predominantly BBRG Legal Observers, are but another example of decades’ worth of racialised policing at protests.
More power will make them more violent
When the Police Bill passes through parliament, the police are likely to act with greater violence at demonstrations, safe in the knowledge that the law will protect them. We need to fight right to the end to prevent this Bill from going ahead. Kill The Bill.
Sometime this week Newsroom co-editor Mark Jennings is due to be interviewed under caution by the New Zealand police because he kicked the hornet’s nest.
The particular hornet’s nest he disturbed was Oranga Tamariki, a state agency, and the reason it was given a boot was a now-discredited policy called reverse uplifts.
In a story on the Newsroom website last week, co-editor Tim Murphy revealed the police investigation that named Jennings and the demand that he attend the under-caution interview. “Under caution” means that anything he says could be used in a criminal prosecution against him.
The story noted that the case highlighted in the video led directly to Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis seeking a “please explain” from the agency and then directing Oranga Tamariki to stop the new policy of “reverse uplifts’” under which Māori children around the country who had been put in permanent care were being summarily removed and taken, in the case investigated, to unknown and distant whānau.
A Māori advisory panel was appointed from outside the ministry and the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki (OT), Grainne Moss, later resigned.
However, OT did not take the Newsroom investigation on the chin. In fact, it came out fighting and enlisted Crown Law. That intervention led to a High Court order to remove a video from the Newsroom website and the media organisation being hit with a $13,000 costs order it can ill-afford.
Finding may be challenged
The judge in the case did not accept that the matter was of such public interest that it over-rode the (strongly contested) matter of potential identification. While I accept that the identity of vulnerable persons must be protected under both the Family Court Act and the Oranga Tamariki Act, it remains to be seen whether that finding against Newsroom will be challenged. My own – strictly layman’s – view is that it could be.
Now one of Newsroom’s most senior executives is being threatened with criminal prosecution under the Family Court Act. Jennings could face up to three months in prison or a maximum fine of $2000 under that legislation. Arguably, he might even face a charge of contempt of court which can carry up to six months imprisonment or a $25,000 fine.
My question is a simple one: Why?
Why was Crown Law asked to intercede on Oranga Tamariki’s behalf? Why was an injunction sought in spite of Newsroom’s willingness to take steps to avoid identification of children? Why, after the initial aim of removing the video had succeeded, was an order for costs pursued against a fledgling news organisation struggling to maintain financial viability? Why have the police now been involved to pursue a criminal investigation against one of its co-founders? And why has this whole matter been pursued with such vigour?
My own view is that Newsroom’s investigation was very much in the public interest and that the video was a critical element in bringing about a policy change. I thought the possibility of identifying the children was remote.
Collectively, my questions have a simple answer: To send a message that, if you kick a state agency’s hornet’s nest, expect to get stung.
In legal and media circles it has a name: The Chilling Effect. It’s a concept that has been around for a long time.
Sedition laws as punishment
One of America’s founding fathers, James Madison, had real concern during the framing of the Constitution of the United States over the use of sedition laws to punish those who criticised government. Madison rightly concluded that it would lead to an author thinking twice before publishing and create a form of self-censorship.
And so it does.
In 2015 I swore an affidavit in support of Nicky Hager’s action against the Police when they executed a search warrant on his home following publication of Dirty Politics. It was one of three affidavits on the nature of the chilling effect that searches for the identity of confidential sources would have on investigative journalism.
Justice Clifford acknowledged the possibility of a chilling effect and noted that the three statements on its nature and consequence went unchallenged by the Attorney-General’s counsel. Of course, Hager won that challenge, and one might have thought Police would have become more than a little reticent about actions against journalists and their lawful pursuits.
It is doubtful that Crown Law acted against Newsroom of its own volition. It is far more likely that Oranga Tamariki arrived on its doorstep complaining that poor children were being identified and “something has to be done”. OT had genuine concerns for these tamariki and children in general, but there is no doubt its reputation had been damaged by the Newsroom investigations.
The lengths that it has been prepared to go in pursuing Newsroom – in the complete absence of any complaint to the news organisation by any member of the public over possible identification of the children or their whanau –is nonetheless puzzling.
Put simply, there is no evidence that children or whanua have been publicly identified and, in any event, Newsroom has had the publication of that particular part of its investigation banned. It has also incurred a very substantial financial penalty with the awarding of full costs.
A clear warning
Assuming the police action stems from a complaint emanating from OT, I am left with a nasty feeling that the result is a clear warning about delving too deeply into the agency’s activities. In other words: Don’t kick the hornet’s nest!
It has a chilling effect that extends beyond OT. What is to stop other state agencies from threatening criminal charges if they can find a convenient piece of law?
Convenient laws can be found in unlikely places. Twenty years ago, the British government tried to use the Treason Felony Act of 1848 to hammer The Guardian. The Act contained a clause making it unlawful to call for an end to the monarchy.
Editor Alan Rusbridger was on a republican campaign when he got hit from behind. The House of Lords ruled the particular clause in the Treason Felony Act had (unsurprisingly) been superseded but the action remains an object lesson on the lengths governments might go to send a message.
And some of those messages can be quite chilling.
Dr Gavin Ellis is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications – covering both editorial and management roles – that spans more than half a century. This article is republished with permission.
Tomorrow I will move a motion calling on the New Zealand Parliament to join the Green Party in recognising the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and statehood.
This is about acknowledging the humanity and dignity of Palestinians at a time when they are facing extreme violence and degradation, once again, at the hands of Israeli occupying forces.
The harrowing violence we are witnessing in Gaza and East Jerusalem are part of an ongoing atrocity against the Palestinian people.
Green MP Golriz Ghahraman speaking at the Auckland Nakba rally on Saturday … “we should have responded strongly at the very start of what was very violent systemic attacks on the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem”. Image: David Robie/APR
Violence against civilians, whether committed by Hamas or the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) must be condemned in the strongest terms, but the massively disproportionate death toll — more than 200 Palestinian deaths, 50 of them children, and 10 Israelis, including two children — speaks to the context of a powerful military force indiscriminately attacking a trapped community.
The path forward from the latest bout of violence must be lasting peace, supported by the international community.
Statehood as part of a two-state solution would uphold and celebrate the inherent rights and dignity of Palestinians.
It would allow that strong and resilient community to move forward to a future where Palestinian children can look forward to building their lives free from violence, with hopes and dreams that they so richly deserve.
This is a longstanding Green Party kaupapa that we hope the House will unanimously support.
Golriz Ghahraman is a Green Party list MP and spokesperson on foreign affairs and social justice issues. She is an Iranian-Kiwi refugee and made history as the first ever refugee to be sworn in as an MP in New Zealand.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
So far, the New Zealand government has been remarkably silent about the Gaza-Israel conflict. Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta could be helping meditate for peace, Geoffrey Miller writes.
The growing Gaza crisis is testing Nanaia Mahuta’s recent assertion that New Zealand has an independent foreign policy.
The conflict between Israel and Hamas-controlled Gaza could be a golden opportunity for Mahuta to take the lead and forge her own path on the world stage.
New Zealand could be following Norway’s example and helping to broker a ceasefire and mediate wider peace attempts in the region.
But if anything, New Zealand’s response to the growing Israeli-Palestinian crisis to date appears to be slower and lower-key than that of its traditional English-speaking partners.
As of Monday morning, Mahuta’s public reaction appears to have been largely limited to a tweet and – in diplomatic terms – a fairly standard, 180-word written statement.
is deeply concerned about the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem and Gaza. We call for rapid de-escalation from and . We call on Israel to cease demolitions and evictions and for both sides to halt steps which undermine prospects for a two state solution.
Mahuta has largely echoed the calls of others calling for de-escalation in the crisis.
Notably, she does not appear to have given any TV or radio interviews about the topic.
NZ Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has largely echoed the calls of others calling for de-escalation in the crisis. Image: Dom Thomas/RNZ
Late PM comments
For her part, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s first comments on the crisis appear to have been made in a scheduled weekly TV interview on Monday morning – nearly a full week after Israel began launching airstrikes on Gaza, in response to the firing of rockets into Israeli territory by Hamas.
Ardern, who talked of her “despair” at the conflict, seems to have been the last of the Five Eyes leaders to comment on the crisis publicly.
Overall, it appears the government would prefer not to become involved in a distant conflict that – to many – appears intractable and unsolvable.
Other NZ parliamentarians – with the notable exception of Green MPs, especially Golriz Ghahraman – appear to be taking much the same position. According to Hansard, the conflict did not even rate a mention in the New Zealand Parliament last week – in stark contrast to its Australian, British and Canadian counterparts, which all debated the issue.
Neither did New Zealand’s public statements differ greatly in tone or substance from those made by other Five Eyes countries.
Marise Payne, Australia’s Foreign Minister, called for de-escalation at a joint press conference with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington on Thursday. And Canada and the United Kingdom have both have issued similar statements at prime ministerial and foreign minister level.
Mediation role? Other countries are trying to find a solution to the crisis, including Egypt, Qatar, Russia and the US.
Each country has its own potential advantages in mediation: Qatar and Egypt have traditionally held the ear of Hamas, for instance, while Israel is most likely to listen to its closest ally, the United States.
But there is plenty of scope for others to become involved.
For example, China last week worked with non-permanent United Nations Security Council (UNSC) members Tunisia and Norway in repeated attempts to try and find agreement on a joint statement on the crisis – efforts that were ultimately blocked by the United States.
New Zealand, too, could also play a more active role in brokering a solution.
Ardern’s heartfelt response to the conflict on Monday morning resembled that of a political commentator and observer, rather than of a participant in international affairs.
The conflict was tragic, but ultimately for others to solve – or at least that was the impression she gave.
More active earlier role
But New Zealand has played a more active role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before. As Professor Robert Patman pointed out on Sunday, New Zealand co-sponsored UNSC Resolution 2334 in 2016 that condemned Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The move prompted Israel to recall its ambassador from Wellington and sever diplomatic ties with New Zealand for six months as a symbolic punishment.
Despite this history, New Zealand still has a good chance of being seen as an honest broker by all parties.
With most other smaller Western democracies falling under the EU’s umbrella, New Zealand is one of only a handful of countries with the credibility and neutrality to talk to both sides.
The fact that New Zealand has recently distanced itself from the Five Eyes alliance – and New Zealand’s overall good working relationship with China – would help to remove any impression of bias towards a particular side.
Moreover, New Zealand has designated only Hamas’s military wing as a terrorist entity, rather than the organisation as a whole – unlike the EU, US, Canada and Japan.
And Jacinda Ardern’s own personal star power and diplomatic clout – as shown again by her leadership of the Christchurch Call meeting at the weekend – would also help New Zealand win friends and influence people at the negotiating table.
Nordic template?
A template for New Zealand’s involvement could come from another small democracy – Norway. The Nordic country – also a ‘team of five million’ – has remained an active player in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993.
In the current crisis, Norway is again trying to help – its top diplomat Tor Wennesland is playing a leading role, under secondment to the UN.
Stop the fire immediately. We’re escalating towards a full scale war. Leaders on all sides have to take the responsibility of deescalation. The cost of war in Gaza is devastating & is being paid by ordinary people. UN is working w/ all sides to restore calm. Stop the violence now
For New Zealand, former Labour leader David Shearer – who has extensive experience in the Middle East and once headed the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Jerusalem – could be the ideal equivalent appointee.
David Shearer with children in Koch
David Shearer could be an ideal choice for a mediation role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Geoffrey Miller writes. Photo: Supplied
Shearer is now back in New Zealand after finishing up at his job as the head of the UN mission in South Sudan – and he spoke at length about the Gaza conflict in a TV interview on Sunday.
Could New Zealand be the Norway of the South?
Absolutely – if it wants to be.
Geoffrey Miller is an international analyst at the Democracy Project. He has lived and travelled extensively in the Middle East and is a fluent Arabic speaker. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
—Hermann Goering, Nazi leader
Rod Serling
With all that is crashing down upon us, from government-manipulated crises to the blowback arising from a society that has repeatedly prized technological expedience and mass-marketed values over self-ownership and individual sovereignty, those coming of age today are facing some of the greatest threats to freedom the world has ever witnessed.
It’s downright frightening.
Young people will find themselves overtaxed, burdened with excessive college debt, and struggling to find worthwhile employment in a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion. Their privacy will be eviscerated by the surveillance state. They will be threatened, intimidated and beaten by militarized police. They will be the subjects of a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies and government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice.
As such, they will find themselves forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands that “we the people” be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.
It’s a dismal prospect, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, we failed to guard against such a future.
Worse, we who should have known better neglected to maintain our freedoms or provide our young people with the tools necessary to resist oppression and survive, let alone succeed, in the impersonal jungle that is modern America.
We brought them into homes fractured by divorce, distracted by mindless entertainment, and obsessed with the pursuit of materialism. We institutionalized them in daycares and afterschool programs, substituting time with teachers and childcare workers for parental involvement. We turned them into test-takers instead of thinkers and automatons instead of activists.
We allowed them to languish in schools which not only look like prisons but function like prisons, as well—where conformity is the rule and freedom is the exception. We made them easy prey for our corporate overlords, while instilling in them the values of a celebrity-obsessed, technology-driven culture devoid of any true spirituality. And we taught them to believe that the pursuit of their own personal happiness trumped all other virtues, including any empathy whatsoever for their fellow human beings.
We have allowed them to be manipulated by a corporate culture that simply wants money and control. However, as Aldous Huxley warned: “The victim of mind-manipulation does not know he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free.”
No, we haven’t done this generation any favors.
Based on the current political climate, things could very well get much worse before they ever take a turn for the better. Here are a few pieces of advice that will hopefully help those coming of age today survive the perils of the journey that awaits:
Be a thinking individual. For all of its claims to champion the individual, American culture advocates a stark conformity which, as John F. Kennedy warned, is “the jailer of freedom, and the enemy of growth.” Worry less about fitting in with the rest of the world and instead, as Henry David Thoreau urged, become “a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”
Learn your rights. We’re losing our freedoms for one simple reason: most of us don’t know anything about our freedoms. At a minimum, anyone who has graduated from high school, let alone college, should know the Bill of Rights backwards and forwards. However, the average young person, let alone citizen, has very little knowledge of their rights for the simple reason that the educational system no longer teaches them and spends little time on the rights of the people. So grab a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and study them at home. And when the time comes, stand up for your rights before it’s too late.
Speak truth to power. Don’t be naive about those in positions of authority. As James Madison, who wrote our Bill of Rights, observed, “All men having power ought to be distrusted.” We must learn the lessons of history. People in power, more often than not, abuse that power. To maintain our freedoms, this will mean challenging government officials whenever they exceed the bounds of their office.
Resist all things that numb you. Don’t measure your worth by what you own or earn. Likewise, don’t become mindless consumers unaware of the world around you. Resist all things that numb you, put you to sleep or help you “cope” with so-called “reality.” Those who establish the rules and laws that govern society’s actions desire compliant subjects. However, as George Orwell warned, “Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they rebelled, they cannot become conscious.” It is these conscious individuals who change the world for the better.
Don’t let technology turn you into zombies. Technology anesthetizes us to the all-too-real tragedies that surround us. Techno-gadgets are merely distractions from what’s really going on in America and around the world. As a result, we’ve begun mimicking the inhuman technology that surrounds us and we have lost our humanness. We’ve become sleepwalkers. If you’re going to make a difference in the world, you’re going to have to pull the earbuds out, turn off the cell phones and spend much less time viewing screens. Then, maybe you’ll see the world for what it really is.
Help others. We all have a calling in life. And I believe it boils down to one thing: You are here on this planet to help other people. In fact, none of us can exist very long without help from others. If we’re going to see any positive change for freedom, then we must change our view of what it means to be human and regain a sense of what it means to love and help one another. That will mean gaining the courage to stand up for the oppressed.
Cultivate spirituality, reject materialism and put people first. When the things that matter most have been subordinated to materialism, we have lost our moral compass. We must change our values to reflect something more meaningful than technology, materialism and politics. Standing at the pulpit of the Riverside Church in New York City in April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. urged his listeners:
[W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motive and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Pitch in and do your part to make the world a better place. Don’t rely on someone else to do the heavy lifting for you. Don’t wait around for someone else to fix what ails you, your community or nation. As Gandhi urged: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Say no to war. Addressing the graduates at Binghampton Central High School in 1968, at a time when the country was waging war “on different fields, on different levels, and with different weapons,” Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling declared:
Too many wars are fought almost as if by rote. Too many wars are fought out of sloganry, out of battle hymns, out of aged, musty appeals to patriotism that went out with knighthood and moats. Love your country because it is eminently worthy of your affection. Respect it because it deserves your respect. Be loyal to it because it cannot survive without your loyalty. But do not accept the shedding of blood as a natural function or a prescribed way of history—even if history points this up by its repetition. That men die for causes does not necessarily sanctify that cause. And that men are maimed and torn to pieces every fifteen and twenty years does not immortalize or deify the act of war… find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow-man.
Finally, prepare yourselves for what lies ahead. The demons of our age—some of whom disguise themselves as politicians—delight in fomenting violence, sowing distrust and prejudice, and persuading the public to support tyranny disguised as patriotism and/or keeping us “safe.” Overcoming the evils of our age will require more than intellect and activism. It will require decency, morality, goodness, truth and toughness. As Serling concluded in his remarks to the graduating class of 1968:
“Toughness is the singular quality most required of you… we have left you a world far more botched than the one that was left to us… Part of your challenge is to seek out truth, to come up with a point of view not dictated to you by anyone, be he a congressman, even a minister… Are you tough enough to take the divisiveness of this land of ours, the fact that everything is polarized, black and white, this or that, absolutely right or absolutely wrong. This is one of the challenges. Be prepared to seek out the middle ground … that wondrous and very difficult-to-find Valhalla where man can look to both sides and see the errant truths that exist on both sides. If you must swing left or you must swing right—respect the other side. Honor the motives that come from the other side. Argue, debate, rebut—but don’t close those wondrous minds of yours to opposition. In their eyes, you’re the opposition. And ultimately … ultimately—you end divisiveness by compromise. And so long as men walk and breathe—there must be compromise…
Are you tough enough to face one of the uglier stains upon the fabric of our democracy—prejudice? It’s the basic root of most evil. It’s a part of the sickness of man. And it’s a part of man’s admission, his constant sick admission, that to exist he must find a scapegoat. To explain away his own deficiencies—he must try to find someone who he believes more deficient… Make your judgment of your fellow-man on what he says and what he believes and the way he acts. Be tough enough, please, to live with prejudice and give battle to it. It warps, it poisons, it distorts and it is self-destructive. It has fallout worse than a bomb … and worst of all it cheapens and demeans anyone who permits himself the luxury of hating.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the only way we’ll ever achieve change in this country is for the American people to finally say “enough is enough” and fight for the things that truly matter.
It doesn’t matter how old you are or what your political ideology is. If you have something to say, speak up. Get active, and if need be, pick up a picket sign and get in the streets. And when civil liberties are violated, don’t remain silent about it.
Wake up, stand up, and make your activism count for something more than politics in a world turned upside down.
This week saw Palestine under Israeli bombardment once again. Nearer home, an inquest confirmed that British troops massacred innocent civilians in Belfast in 1971. Yet on Wednesday morning, former PM Tony Blair and his one-time propagandist Alistair Campbell chatted on breakfast TV.
Campbell, now the host of Good Morning Britain, had a smug talk with his old boss about Labour Party politics, political power and vaccines.
Their role in the destruction of Iraq went unmentioned. As did the profound links between colonialism and violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Belfast.
For the British ruling class and its media backers, these are figures of legitimacy, vaccinated against any criticism of their own bloody records.
Ballymurphy
On 11 May, an inquest found that the nine people shot dead by British paratroopers in Ballymurphy, Belfast, had been innocent. A fact their families had known since the killings in 1971. The coroner found:
All of the deceased in the series of inquests were entirely innocent of wrongdoing on the day in question.
In response, Brandon Lewis, Boris Johnson’s Northern Ireland secretary, mustered a mealy-mouthed non-apology:
The events of Ballymurphy should never have happened, the families of those who were killed should never have had to experience the grief and trauma of that loss
Palestine
Meanwhile in Palestine, the Israeli government was continuing to bombard the population with high-tech weaponry, bringing down a 13-storey tower block. And an Arab man was reportedly lynched by a far-right mob in Tel Aviv.
It is easy for some to sit back and ‘both sides’ what is going on. But as well as being a product of British imperial ambitions, Israel remains a major customer for UK-made military hardware. Israeli violence cannot be disconnected from British arms firm’s profits. The UK government licences millions of pounds worth of arms to Israel annually, as Campaign against the Arms Trade (CAAT) regularly points out.
A reckoning?
The British ruling class clearly likes to think of itself as a statesman-like leader in international affairs. In this reading, the likes of Blair and Campbell are the ‘adults in the room”
The flip side of this fantasy is a country that cannot face its own history. This inability means Blair and Campbell can power-chat on breakfast TV while innocents suffer.
In what feels like a throwback to another era, banks and big business are once again talking about ‘growth’, and economic development. Both of which amount to the same thing to the men and women of money – profit.
After over a year of utter turmoil, death, illness, heartache, social and economic lockdowns, some nations – the wealthy nations who, unlike poor countries, have been able to stock-pile vaccinations and immunize their populations, are opening up. The impact Covid has had on their coffers has been measured and, as the twisted wheels of consumerism begin to churn again, they are evaluating their short term financial prospects and working out how much richer they can become.
In the UK, the head of Barclays Bank recently announced, “The UK economy is on course for its biggest economic boom since 1948” – whoopee! In the midst of the pandemic, the bank, which is Europe’s largest financier of fossil fuels (£20bn in 2020 alone), made record profits in the first three months of 2021 of £2.4 billion, due, to quote the nauseating jargon, to “strong growth in its corporate and investment banking division and an improved mortgage book.” Lending money to ailing businesses mainly, loans that have been guaranteed by the government, so another win-win for the banks.
France and the US have announced ‘growth’ (of 0.4%) in the first quarter of 2021. In UK house prices are once again increasing, announced as if that’s a good thing by greedy estate agents and ideologically-trapped politicians. German financial institutions are forecasting a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increase of 3.7% this year. China has declared GDP growth of 18.3% in the first quarter of 2021, which is the highest ever recorded. In India, where Covid is running wild due to government stupidity and a totally inadequate, criminally underfunded health care system, estimates of GDP growth for the year vary from 10.5%-13%.
All of this ‘growth’ is based on one thing, consumerism, the very same consumerism that caused and is fueling the environmental emergency, which is the greatest crisis of this or any other time. Consumerism has also imprisoned the human spirit, and led to the construction of petty little lives that revolve around the pursuit of pleasure, which is sold as happiness, and the accumulation of stuff, the vast majority of which is not needed. Discontent is maintained, desire constantly enflamed, widespread misery leading to wholesale mental health illness, guaranteed.
And so it goes on, the madness, the ideologically-rooted consumer lunacy in which a tiny number benefit enormously, while the majority struggle to survive.
Some hoped, prayed, begged, that Covid would bring about a fundamental change in approach; perhaps a period of quiet, of enforced economic withdrawal would allow for a socio-economic re-evaluation, for an influx of common-sense. ‘Build back better’, ‘new normal’, a ‘green recovery’, all such slogans have tripped of the tongues of duplicitous politicians and corporate leaders everywhere. But now as some countries begin to relax controls, the divisive, environmentally destructive pre-Covid patterns are set to be repeated. What will it take, we ask, for substantive change to come about and socio-economic justice to be created?
We, by which I mean the vast majority of people, the masses, are not interested in GDP figures. ‘Growth’ needs to be completely re-defined, released from the narrow confines of an exploitative economic model that is obsessed with profit, is inherently cruel and destructive, and has promoted a set of values and ideals that have caused widespread illness, of people and the planet. What matters to individuals everywhere is not GDP growth, what matters, is the creation of happy, harmonious societies; societies in which governments, businesses and individuals live socially and environmentally responsible lives, where the pressure to become something, to conform to a stereotype and to achieve, is absent or diluted.
Love as Growth
At the heart of any fresh understandings around ‘growth’ must be the cultivation of social justice and trust, which, if brought about, would allow the possibility at least for peace to come into being for the first time in human history. For such a rational shift to occur, the socio-economic order needs to be re-fashioned and perennial values of goodness – cooperation, tolerance, mutual understanding, that unite people actively encouraged. Consumerism, founded on greed, fear and insatiable desire must be allowed to fall away, replaced by sustainable ways of living based on sufficiency; competition (subdued somewhat during Covid) between nations, regions, states and cities must soften in light of the recognition that the various interrelated crises of the age, can only be met and overcome by united action.
Focused expressions of goodwill, as seen by community endeavors throughout the world in times of need (Covid pandemic included), unite people, helping to banish tensions and build trust; this is worthy development or growth, and is readily achieved when the habitual urge to compete is negated.
Individual growth we could describe as the apprehension and expression of who and what we essentially are, of realizing innate potential, and contributing to the well-being of society, thereby strengthening group growth, not financial gain, success and status. And collective growth, which flows from such individual understanding, must be concerned with growth in the expression of love in our world; with the creation of peace and unity and of environmental healing, ending hunger (which could be quickly achieved if the will/love to do so existed) and compassionately responding to the refugee crisis and the global displacement of people. Love, expressed not in emotional, sentimental terms, but love as that driving force for good.
It is well known that the endless U.S. war on terror was overtly launched following the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the linked anthrax attacks. The invasion of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act were immediately justified by those insider murders, and subsequently the wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. So too the terrorizing of the American people with constant fear-mongering about imminent Islamic terrorist attacks from abroad that never came.
It is less well known that the executive director of the U.S. cover story – the fictional 9/11 Commission Report – was Philip Zelikow, who controlled and shaped the report from start to finish.
Perhaps it’s unknown or just forgotten that The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission repeatedly called for Zelikow’s removal, claiming that his appointment made a farce of the claim that the Commission was independent.
Zelikow said that for the Commission to consider alternative theories to the government’s claims about Osama bin Laden was akin to whacking moles. This is the man, who at the request of his colleague Condoleezza Rice, became the primary author of (NSS 2002)The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, that declared that the U.S. would no longer abide by international law but was adopting a policy of preemptive war, as declared by George W. Bush at West Point in June 2002. This was used as justification for the attack on Iraq in 2003 and was a rejection of the charter of the United Nations.
So, based on Zelikow’s work creating a magic mountain of deception while disregarding so-called molehills, we have had twenty years of American terror wars around the world in which U.S. forces have murdered millions of innocent people. Wars that will be continuing for years to come despite rhetoric to the contrary. The rhetoric is simply propaganda to cover up the increasingly technological and space-based nature of these wars and the use of mercenaries and special forces.
Simultaneously, in a quasi-volte-face, the Biden administration has directed its resources inward toward domestic “terrorists”: that is, anyone who disagrees with its policies. This is especially aimed at those who question the COVID-19 story.
If you wistfully think the corona crisis will soon come to an end, I suggest you alter your perspective. Zelikow’s involvement, among other things, suggests we are in the second phase of a long war of terror waged with two weapons – military and medical – whose propaganda messaging is carried out by the corporate mainstream media in the pursuit of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Part one has so far lasted twenty years; part two may last longer. You can be certain it won’t end soon and that the new terrorists are domestic dissidents.
Did anyone think the freedoms lost with The Patriot Act were coming back some day? Does anyone think the freedoms lost with the corona virus propaganda are coming back? Many people probably have no idea what freedoms they lost with the Patriot Act, and many don’t even care.
And today? Lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing, travel restrictions, requirements to be guinea pigs for vaccines that are not vaccines, etc.?
And they thought they were free, as Milton Mayer wrote about the Germans under Hitler. Like frogs in a pot of cold water, we need to feel the temperature rising before it’s too late. The dial is turned to high heat now.
But that was so long ago and far away, right? Don’t exaggerate, you say. Hitler and all that crap.
Are you thankful now that government spokespeople are blatantly saying that they will so kindly give us back some freedoms if we only do what they’re told and get “vaccinated” with an experimental biological agent, wear our masks, etc.? Hoi polloi are supposed to be grateful to their masters, who will grant some summer fun until they slam the door shut again.
Pfizer raked in $3.5 billion from vaccine sales in the first quarter of 2021, the first three months of the vaccine rollouts, and the company projects $26 billion for the year. That’s one vaccine manufacturer. Chump change? Only a chump would not realize that Pfizer is the company that paid $2.3 billion in Federal criminal fines in 2009 – the largest ever paid by a drug company – for being a repeat offender in the marketing of 13 different drugs.
Meanwhile, the commission justifying the government’s claims about COVID-19 and injections (aka “vaccines”) will be hard at work writing their fictive report that will justify ex post facto the terrible damage that has occurred and that will continue to occur for many years. Censorship and threats against dissidents will increase. The disinformation that dominates the corporate mainstream media will of course continue, but this will be supplemented by alternative media that are already buckling under the pressure to conform.
The fact that there has been massive censorship of dissenting voices by Google/ YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc., and equally massive disinformation by commission and omission across media platforms, should make everyone ask why. Why repress dissent? The answer should be obvious but is not.
The fact that so many refuse to see the significance of this censorship clearly shows the hypnotic effects of a massive mind control operation.
Name calling and censorship are sufficient. Perfectly healthy people have now become a danger to others. So mask up, get your experimental shot, and shut up!
Your body is no longer inviolable. You must submit to medical procedures on your body whether you want them or not. Do not object or question. If you do, you will be punished and will become a pariah. The authorities will call you crazy, deviant, selfish. They will take away your rights to travel and engage in normal activities, such as attend college, etc.
Please do not recall The Nuremberg Code. Especially number 7: “Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.” (my emphasis)
“Now is the time to just do what you are told,” as Anthony Fauci so benevolently declared.
I am not making a prediction. The authorities have told us what’s coming. Pay attention. Don’t be fooled. It’s a game they have devised. Keep people guessing. On edge. Relieved. Tense. Relaxed. Shocked. Confused. That’s the game. One day this, the next that. You’re on, you’re off. You’re in, you’re out. We are allowing you this freedom, but be good children or we will have to retract it. If you misbehave, you will get a time out. Time to contemplate your sins.
If you once thought that COVID-19 would be a thing of the past by now, or ever, think again. On May 3, 2021 The New York Times reported that the virus is here to stay. This was again reported on May 10. Hopes Fade for Global Herd Immunity. You may recall that we were told such immunity would be achieved once enough people got the “vaccine” or enough people contracted the virus and developed antibodies.
On May 9, on ABC News, Dr. Fauci, when asked about indoor mask requirements being relaxed, said, “I think so, and I think you’re going to probably be seeing that as we go along, and as more people get vaccinated.” Then he added: “We do need to start being more liberal, as we get more people vaccinated.”
But then, in what CNN reported as a Mother’s Day prediction, he pushed the date for “normality” out another year, saying, “I hope that [by] next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now. I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can. We’ve got to make sure that we get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated. When that happens, the virus doesn’t really have any place to go. You’re not going to see a surge. You’re not going to see the kinds of numbers we see now.”
Notice the language and the vaccination meme repeated three times: “We get more people vaccinated.” (my emphasis) Not that more people choose to get vaccinated, but “we get” them vaccinated. Thank you, Big Daddy. And now we have another year to go until “we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.” Interesting phrase: as we can. It other words: we will never return to normality but will have to settle for the new normal that will involve fewer freedoms. Life will be reset, a great reset. Great for the few and terrible for the many.
Once two vaccines were enough; then, no, maybe one is sufficient; no, you will need annual or semi-annual booster shots to counteract the new strains that they say are coming. It’s a never-ending story with never-ending new strains in a massive never-ending medical experiment. The virus is changing so quickly and herd immunity is now a mystical idea, we are told, that it will never be achieved. We will have to be eternally vigilant.
But wait. Don’t despair. It looks like restrictions are easing up for the coming summer in the northern hemisphere. Lockdowns will be loosened. If you felt like a prisoner for the past year plus, now you will be paroled for a while. But don’t dispose of those masks just yet. Fauci says that wearing masks could become seasonal following the pandemic because people have become accustomed to wearing them and that’s why the flu has disappeared. The masks didn’t prevent COVID-19 but eliminated the flu. Are you laughing yet?
Censorship and lockdowns and masks and mandatory injections are like padded cells in a madhouse and hospital world where free-association doesn’t lead to repressed truths because free association isn’t allowed, neither in word nor deed. Speaking freely and associating with others are too democratic. Yes, we thought we were free. False consciousness is pandemic. Exploitation is seen as benevolence. Silence reigns. And the veiled glances signify the ongoing terror that has spread like a virus.
We are now in a long war with two faces. As with the one justified by the mass murders of September 11, 2001, this viral one isn’t going away.
We can be assured that Zelikow and his many associates at Covid Collaborative, including General Stanley McChrystal, Robert Gates, Arnie Duncan, Deval Patrick, Tom Ridge, et al. – a whole host of Republicans and Democrats backed by great wealth and institutional support, will not be “whacking moles” in their search for truth. Their agenda is quite different.
But then again, you may recall where they stood on the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the endless wars that have followed.
I woke up to the news and fear cut into me for my family in Israel. Where are they right now? I felt one moment of the fear that Palestinians live with.
No false equivalence: nothing about this is equal.
In video, Israeli police are heavily armed and armoured, backed by courts of ethnic law.
Palestinians stand their ground wearing T-shirts. An armed charge into an unarmed crowd is not a “clash”, it is an assault.
Israeli soldiers have been vaccinated and most Palestinians have not. To hell with Israel’s legal responsibility. They knew that no state would hold them to it, and no state has.
But look — Palestinians are changing the script before our eyes. They are taking authorship.
On May 8, 80,000 Palestinians came to Al Aqsa Mosque. Israeli police had violated their holy place and they came to reclaim it. They overwhelmed the roadblocks and the paramilitary police and faced them down with their bodies and their prayers.
Unstitching the Green Line
Palestinians protested in Ramallah and Jaffa, in Gaza and in Haifa. They are unstitching the Green Line. Palestinians and their allies are protesting around the world.
Thousands of Israelis have been filmed dancing this morning, delirious at the sight of fire in the Al Aqsa Mosque.
In 2014, Israelis sat on the hillsides of Sderot to watch the bombardment of Gaza. I think their desensitised madness has spread; the soullessness that comes from wielding overwhelming violence with impunity.
Wait, look again. In Gaza there is danger of a different magnitude.
Gazan fighters fired rockets to join the uprising, to protest the forced expulsion of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah.
I am not fond of rockets, but having seen both rockets and bombs in action, I would prefer to stand near a rocket than a one-ton bomb. A rocket makes a hole in the ground, while the airborne bombs of the Israeli military (IDF) make the earth tremble.
“Israel conducted airstrikes in Gaza on Monday evening, following rocket fire from Gaza that caused damage to one Israeli vehicle, and ‘lightly injured’ one Israeli civilian, according to an Israeli army statement.”
Israeli bombs killed 21 Gazans Israeli bombs killed 21 Gazans overnight. They killed nine children, and injured scores of people. Let that attest to the relative value placed on one Israeli vehicle and 21 Gazan lives.
International governments condemned the rockets and elided the rest.
Israel, still drunk on its Trump licence, may believe it can bomb Gaza with impunity. Gazans, with clarity and unfathomable endurance, with covid rampant behind a blockade wall, may feel they have less and less to lose.
This is a formula for catastrophe. We must not let it play out again. Gazans are no symbols to be held up as proof after the fact. They are human beings under assault right now, and they need our protection.
Do not tut-tut them all to step back equally, because the inequality of the status quo ante was the cause: a regime of dispossession, apartheid, blockade, ethnically determined lives and life prospects.
We need to respond to the cause and the crimes. We need to demand that our governments uphold the laws they sign in our names to clear the way forward – not back. Intervene, protect, invoke the law, end the Nakba.
Saturday may be Nakba Day, but Nakba is an event in the present tense until we – yes we, calling on law and justice with every means available – bring it to an end.
Marilyn Garson writes about Palestinian and Jewish dissent. This article was first published by Sh’ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices and is republished with permission. The original article can be read here.
“This is a formula for catastrophe. We must not let it play out again. Gazans are no symbols to be held up as proof after the fact. They are human beings under assault right now, and they need our protection.” Image: APR screenshot Al Jazeera
I woke up to the news and fear cut into me for my family in Israel. Where are they right now? I felt one moment of the fear that Palestinians live with.
No false equivalence: nothing about this is equal.
In video, Israeli police are heavily armed and armoured, backed by courts of ethnic law.
Palestinians stand their ground wearing T-shirts. An armed charge into an unarmed crowd is not a “clash”, it is an assault.
Israeli soldiers have been vaccinated and most Palestinians have not. To hell with Israel’s legal responsibility. They knew that no state would hold them to it, and no state has.
But look — Palestinians are changing the script before our eyes. They are taking authorship.
On May 8, 80,000 Palestinians came to Al Aqsa Mosque. Israeli police had violated their holy place and they came to reclaim it. They overwhelmed the roadblocks and the paramilitary police and faced them down with their bodies and their prayers.
Unstitching the Green Line Palestinians protested in Ramallah and Jaffa, in Gaza and in Haifa. They are unstitching the Green Line. Palestinians and their allies are protesting around the world.
Thousands of Israelis have been filmed dancing this morning, delirious at the sight of fire in the Al Aqsa Mosque.
In 2014, Israelis sat on the hillsides of Sderot to watch the bombardment of Gaza. I think their desensitised madness has spread; the soullessness that comes from wielding overwhelming violence with impunity.
Wait, look again. In Gaza there is danger of a different magnitude.
Gazan fighters fired rockets to join the uprising, to protest the forced expulsion of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah.
I am not fond of rockets, but having seen both rockets and bombs in action, I would prefer to stand near a rocket than a one-ton bomb. A rocket makes a hole in the ground, while the airborne bombs of the Israeli military (IDF) make the earth tremble.
“Israel conducted airstrikes in Gaza on Monday evening, following rocket fire from Gaza that caused damage to one Israeli vehicle, and ‘lightly injured’ one Israeli civilian, according to an Israeli army statement.”
Israeli bombs killed 21 Gazans Israeli bombs killed 21 Gazans overnight. They killed nine children, and injured scores of people. Let that attest to the relative value placed on one Israeli vehicle and 21 Gazan lives.
International governments condemned the rockets and elided the rest.
Israel, still drunk on its Trump licence, may believe it can bomb Gaza with impunity. Gazans, with clarity and unfathomable endurance, with covid rampant behind a blockade wall, may feel they have less and less to lose.
This is a formula for catastrophe. We must not let it play out again. Gazans are no symbols to be held up as proof after the fact. They are human beings under assault right now, and they need our protection.
Do not tut-tut them all to step back equally, because the inequality of the status quo ante was the cause: a regime of dispossession, apartheid, blockade, ethnically determined lives and life prospects.
We need to respond to the cause and the crimes. We need to demand that our governments uphold the laws they sign in our names to clear the way forward – not back. Intervene, protect, invoke the law, end the Nakba.
Saturday may be Nakba Day, but Nakba is an event in the present tense until we – yes we, calling on law and justice with every means available – bring it to an end.
This article was first published by Alternative Jewish Voices and is republished with permission. The original article can be read here.
“This is a formula for catastrophe. We must not let it play out again. Gazans are no symbols to be held up as proof after the fact. They are human beings under assault right now, and they need our protection.” Image: APR screenshot Al Jazeera
Jonathon Seed, the Swindon and Wiltshire Tory candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), is currently making headlines after being disbarred from the election. ITV News has revealed that Seed has a historic drink driving offence, which makes him ineligible to stand. It’s unclear whether the Conservative Party knew of the offence. Seed insists he declared it, while ITVunderstands that the Tories were not aware of the conviction.
Seed is an ex-army major and ex-fox hunt master. Animal rights campaigners have worked tirelessly for the past year, giving extensive reasons why Seed was not fit to run for PCC. Wiltshire Hunt Sabs and Bath Hunt Saboteurs told The Canary:
Without the constant scrutiny and campaigning by Bath and Wiltshire sabs, this wouldn’t have come to light. Jonathon Seed certainly thought no-one would look into a role that no-one previously cared about.
But it’s disgraceful that it has taken this long for the Tories to disbar Seed. Campaigners have previously documented many other reasons why the man should have been disqualified, and all were ignored. Earlier this year, it was even revealed that Seed had failed to mention his connection to an organisation campaigning to repeal the hunting ban in his register of interests.
Robert Pownall, founder of anti-hunting organisation Keep The Ban, told The Canary:
It is frankly disgusting that it’s taken a historic drink driving charge for Jonathon Seed to withdraw himself from proceedings. Why on earth was somebody with such an extensive history of wildlife abuse even allowed to stand for Police and Crime Commissioner in the first place?
Serious questions must be asked of Wiltshire Conservative Party as to how and why Jonathon Seed was deemed a suitable candidate for the role.
Wildlife abuses
Back in March, The Canary extensively covered Seed’s history of fox hunting, as well as his current close ties to the barbaric sport. Seed was master of two local hunts for 20 years, from 1992 to 2012, while fox hunting with hounds was made illegal in 2004. When Seed was master of Avon Vale Hunt, he insisted that hunting foxes was “important for freedom“, and was determined to get the ban “overturned in due course”.
During his time as hunt master, Seed was was accused by hunt saboteurs of being violent. Wiltshire Hunt Sabs and Bath Hunt Saboteurs previously told The Canary:
When Seed was hunt master of the Avon Vale, from around 2000-2012, they were an exceptionally violent hunt. Sabs were often ridden at by Seed on his horse, and sabs were injured as a result of being sent flying by him. He had a hotline to his “Welsh militia” who he would call in to assault and abuse sabs and monitors on a routine basis.
Meanwhile, in 2013, two Avon Vale men pled guilty to interfering with a badger sett the year before, while they were under Seed’s watch. Charges against Seed for the same incident were dropped.
This is not the first time Seed has hidden the truth
Seed’s drink driving conviction is not the only thing that the councillor has kept quiet about while campaigning to be PCC. Earlier this year, a leaked document revealed that Seed was listed as one of This is Hunting UK’s (TiHUK) regional coordinators in 2018. TiHUK is an organisation whose main aims include repealing the hunting ban. And yet, Seed’s register of interests completely fails to mention his involvement with TiHUK. In fact, Seed has stated:
My declaration of interests has always been correct and up to date throughout my time as a councillor.
This brazen willingness to hide the truth is shocking, highlighting that Seed can’t be trusted, not just as a PCC, but also as a councillor and Tory party member. Wiltshire Hunt Sabs and Bath Hunt Saboteurs told The Canary:
The Conservative Party surely can’t stand behind a candidate bound to bring constant controversy, but more than that it’s election fraud. It’s a criminal offence, and he could go to prison. He can’t possibly continue to be the public face of a political party.
Meanwhile, Wiltshire’s other PCC candidates are calling for a criminal investigation into Seed.
The public is footing the bill
Of course, the public had already voted for Swindon and Wiltshire’s PCC candidate before the controversy against Seed came to light, and the results are being counted right now. If Seed receives the most votes, another election would need to be held.
Pownall argues:
The question is why the British taxpayer should have to fit the bill for the re-run of this election and why the Conservative Party should even be allowed to stand another candidate.
Seed needs to be expelled
Although Seed admits that he is disappointed that he isn’t running for PCC, he is still keeping his prestigious Tory councillor position. He said:
I will continue with my work as a local councillor and within the local community, to which I have dedicated my life for the past 20 years.
With his family ties to barbaric fox hunting practices, his business ties to the hunting industry, and his habit of hiding the truth, it’s clear that Seed can not be trusted in any positions of power. What will it take for him to be sacked from his council role, too?
The caretaker Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Dr Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, thinks the newspaper you hold in your hands is dedicated to trying to “tear down” the Samoan government but the broader economic progress of Samoa.
So, reader, are you subsidising borderline treachery by having paid for the edition you hold in your hands?
We certainly don’t think so. This newspaper has been part of Samoan public life for longer than the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP) and Tuilaepa Dr Sa’ilele Malielegaoi. And for all these 43 years we have lived by a simple rule: telling truths, however uncomfortable, is the best thing for our country.
Our loyalties belong to our readers, the people of Samoa, and the truth and nothing and no one else. We consider not telling the truth about failures of government or corrupt goings-on to be the height of disloyalty to one’s country.
Tuilaepa’s statement was not entirely surprising to us but further evidence that he evidently lives by the saying that consistency is a preoccupation of small minds.
Many would have noticed that the Prime Minister’s office space at the Human Rights Protection Party Headquarters has as its backdrop several articles from what he this week described (and later retracted as a ) “vile” and “miserable” tabloid.
It is a strange thing indeed for a leader to have clippings from the pages of what he has described as essentially a magazine subversive to national loyalties.
Flattering coverage
There is after all an alternative, government-owned newspaper in this country and one that has not been short at all of flattering coverage of the Prime Minister that could serve as alternative decoration.
On Thursday, Tuilaepa asserted that it was very typical of Samoans to try and tear each other down even when they are trying to do good.
“That’s like this paper, the [Samoa] Observer. Everything [they publish] is incorrect, I do not know when they will correct it,” he said.
“Others try to do something good while others try to tear it down […] just like the Samoa Observer newspaper.
“Whatever happens, they never report about anything bad from other political parties, but when it is criticism from something very minimal, oh, the [Samoa] Observer would be so full of a collection of irrelevant reports on it.”
We would beg to differ with the caretaker Prime Minister’s observations. But of course we would; no one would admit to harbouring such a rotten agenda as to seek to sabotage this country.
So we suggest you don’t take our word for it but rather Tuilaepa’s own.
‘Loved’ Samoa Observer
It was earlier this year that the then-Prime Minister said that he “loved” the Samoa Observer.
He was mixing his words with a touch of irony but as the old Russian saying goes: in every joke, there is a trace of a joke. And in this case, he was obviously making a serious point about the deficiencies of this country’s state-owned media empire and its inability to ask questions of him during press conferences.
He reproached the announcers at the state-owned radio station 2AP for deriving all the questions they asked of the Prime Minister from the Samoa Observer.
“Even though I make harsh comments towards them most of the time, I still love the (Samoa) Observer,” he said.
“You guys then go and read their articles and use those articles to formulate the questions you ask me during our weekly programmes.
“That is how you get your questions and that is what makes these interviews interesting, but it’s all because of the issues highlighted in the Observer.”
If Tuilaepa truly desired scrutiny he would have invited us to ask him unscripted questions at press conferences over the last two years for which he was in power. We never requested nor required what the Government Press Secretariat styled as the special “privilege” of being the only media outlet obliged to submit questions in advance to the Prime Minister.
Returning scrutiny
Returning scrutiny to your press conferences, Tuilaepa, is only a phone call away.
But let’s consider the Prime Minister’s broader accusation. Do we set out to undermine the credibility of our government?
No, we just do our job every day.
Politics is about power. Journalism is about asking questions about how that power is exercised to ensure that it is in the interest of the public.
In recent times at the Samoa Observer, this has involved a range of stories.
We of course measured the multi-million dollar airstrip at Ti’avea Airport – sold to the public as an alternative to Faleolo International Airport – and found it three times too small to land a passenger jet. There were plenty of questions there.
In 2019, we asked why the government was continuing to downplay the possibility that Measles had reached Samoa when, as we then revealed, an isolation unit for the disease had already been established at the national hospital.
Protecting the youth
More recently, we asked why the government had ignored the advice of its own advisory committee, issued months before, to move quickly to protect the youth of the nation before the disease ravaged the health of Samoa’s children.
Is it the Prime Minister’s contention that we should not investigate matters such as these and ask questions about them? Especially when, by his own admission, state-media employees are not providing scrutiny or even ideas off their own steam.
To be frank, we don’t much care. Our responsibility is not to please the powerful – far from it. But it is obvious that governance in Samoa would be much the worse without a critical press.
But as to the accusation that we are biased, in fact, whichever way misdeeds draw our attention our reporters will follow.
So it was with our critical editorial and coverage of the Faatuatua ile Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party manifesto. We asked how the party planned on funding a policy platform that would almost double the size of the national budget at a time when the economy was shrinking faster than ever.
What about our March front-page story that three electoral committee members from the party were facing charges relating to election forgery?
(Note the party, which is not happy with our journalism, denied this story but has refused to say what the titles of the people arrested were. Until it does so, we stand by our reporting.)
Taking on all comers
The Samoa Observer takes on all comers and has always done so.
If we sense that the rules are being breached or the people of Samoa are being hard done by we will report on it. If we believe that the ongoing level of poverty in this nation is obscene, as we do, we report on it.
What is the alternative of a country without a newspaper with a critical edge?
We see it regularly in the Prime Minister’s press conferences where a sense of apathy radiates around the room as announcers tee up the Prime Minister with questions that fit his agenda.
Question marks loom particularly large over Samoa’s democracy at the moment. The final institution of government standing between Samoa and dictatorship appears to be the judiciary.
Tuilaepa has done his best to undermine that institution through casting aspersions.
But we can assure you that whatever the caretaker Prime Minister says about us will make us think twice about publishing a story.
This editorial was published by the Samoa Observer on 8 May 2021.
The caretaker Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Dr Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, thinks the newspaper you hold in your hands is dedicated to trying to “tear down” the Samoan government but the broader economic progress of Samoa.
So, reader, are you subsidising borderline treachery by having paid for the edition you hold in your hands?
We certainly don’t think so. This newspaper has been part of Samoan public life for longer than the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP) and Tuilaepa Dr Sa’ilele Malielegaoi. And for all these 43 years we have lived by a simple rule: telling truths, however uncomfortable, is the best thing for our country.
Our loyalties belong to our readers, the people of Samoa, and the truth and nothing and no one else. We consider not telling the truth about failures of government or corrupt goings-on to be the height of disloyalty to one’s country.
Tuilaepa’s statement was not entirely surprising to us but further evidence that he evidently lives by the saying that consistency is a preoccupation of small minds.
Many would have noticed that the Prime Minister’s office space at the Human Rights Protection Party Headquarters has as its backdrop several articles from what he this week described (and later retracted as a ) “vile” and “miserable” tabloid.
It is a strange thing indeed for a leader to have clippings from the pages of what he has described as essentially a magazine subversive to national loyalties.
Flattering coverage There is after all an alternative, government-owned newspaper in this country and one that has not been short at all of flattering coverage of the Prime Minister that could serve as alternative decoration.
On Thursday, Tuilaepa asserted that it was very typical of Samoans to try and tear each other down even when they are trying to do good.
“That’s like this paper, the [Samoa] Observer. Everything [they publish] is incorrect, I do not know when they will correct it,” he said.
“Others try to do something good while others try to tear it down […] just like the Samoa Observer newspaper.
“Whatever happens, they never report about anything bad from other political parties, but when it is criticism from something very minimal, oh, the [Samoa] Observer would be so full of a collection of irrelevant reports on it.”
We would beg to differ with the caretaker Prime Minister’s observations. But of course we would; no one would admit to harbouring such a rotten agenda as to seek to sabotage this country.
So we suggest you don’t take our word for it but rather Tuilaepa’s own.
‘Loved’ Samoa Observer It was earlier this year that the then-Prime Minister said that he “loved” the Samoa Observer.
He was mixing his words with a touch of irony but as the old Russian saying goes: in every joke, there is a trace of a joke. And in this case, he was obviously making a serious point about the deficiencies of this country’s state-owned media empire and its inability to ask questions of him during press conferences.
He reproached the announcers at the state-owned radio station 2AP for deriving all the questions they asked of the Prime Minister from the Samoa Observer.
“Even though I make harsh comments towards them most of the time, I still love the (Samoa) Observer,” he said.
“You guys then go and read their articles and use those articles to formulate the questions you ask me during our weekly programmes.
“That is how you get your questions and that is what makes these interviews interesting, but it’s all because of the issues highlighted in the Observer.”
If Tuilaepa truly desired scrutiny he would have invited us to ask him unscripted questions at press conferences over the last two years for which he was in power. We never requested nor required what the Government Press Secretariat styled as the special “privilege” of being the only media outlet obliged to submit questions in advance to the Prime Minister.
Returning scrutiny Returning scrutiny to your press conferences, Tuilaepa, is only a phone call away.
But let’s consider the Prime Minister’s broader accusation. Do we set out to undermine the credibility of our government?
No, we just do our job every day.
Politics is about power. Journalism is about asking questions about how that power is exercised to ensure that it is in the interest of the public.
In recent times at the Samoa Observer, this has involved a range of stories.
We of course measured the multi-million dollar airstrip at Ti’avea Airport – sold to the public as an alternative to Faleolo International Airport – and found it three times too small to land a passenger jet. There were plenty of questions there.
In 2019, we asked why the government was continuing to downplay the possibility that Measles had reached Samoa when, as we then revealed, an isolation unit for the disease had already been established at the national hospital.
Protecting the youth More recently, we asked why the government had ignored the advice of its own advisory committee, issued months before, to move quickly to protect the youth of the nation before the disease ravaged the health of Samoa’s children.
Is it the Prime Minister’s contention that we should not investigate matters such as these and ask questions about them? Especially when, by his own admission, state-media employees are not providing scrutiny or even ideas off their own steam.
To be frank, we don’t much care. Our responsibility is not to please the powerful – far from it. But it is obvious that governance in Samoa would be much the worse without a critical press.
But as to the accusation that we are biased, in fact, whichever way misdeeds draw our attention our reporters will follow.
So it was with our critical editorial and coverage of the Faatuatua ile Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party manifesto. We asked how the party planned on funding a policy platform that would almost double the size of the national budget at a time when the economy was shrinking faster than ever.
What about our March front-page story that three electoral committee members from the party were facing charges relating to election forgery?
(Note the party, which is not happy with our journalism, denied this story but has refused to say what the titles of the people arrested were. Until it does so, we stand by our reporting.)
Taking on all comers The Samoa Observer takes on all comers and has always done so.
If we sense that the rules are being breached or the people of Samoa are being hard done by we will report on it. If we believe that the ongoing level of poverty in this nation is obscene, as we do, we report on it.
What is the alternative of a country without a newspaper with a critical edge?
We see it regularly in the Prime Minister’s press conferences where a sense of apathy radiates around the room as announcers tee up the Prime Minister with questions that fit his agenda.
Question marks loom particularly large over Samoa’s democracy at the moment. The final institution of government standing between Samoa and dictatorship appears to be the judiciary.
Tuilaepa has done his best to undermine that institution through casting aspersions.
But we can assure you that whatever the caretaker Prime Minister says about us will make us think twice about publishing a story.
This editorial was published by the Samoa Observer on 8 May 2021.
In 2020 Kier Starmer became UK Labour leader and promptly reneged on just about every campaign promise he’d made to adhere to the policies, traditional Party principals, and post-war consensus values, that had been restored under Jeremy Corbyn’s previous tenureship. Starmer has withdrawn the Party Whip from Corbyn – effectively exiling him – and more recently given interviews about the Party supposedly having to ‘recover’ from Corbyn’s leadership. In this he’s been consistently aided and abetted by various commentariat neoliberal mouthpieces in the corporate media, similarly implying that the Blairite era was some sort of successful norm.
This spin on recent history presupposes two false premises. Firstly, that the era of Corbyn’s grassroots mobilisation was some sort of oxymoron democratic failure, this the available evidence belies. Secondly, that rather than being a process of direct democratic representation on behalf of the mass of society, electoral politics should be treated as some sort of advertising/marketing game designed to facilitate the careers of a small handful of individuals, operating on behalf of highly financed corporate lobbyists. This was not what the Labour Party was formed to do.
As a representational organisation, the Labour Party had been originally founded by mass movement Trade Unionists and Chartist campaigners for the poor. Post-war, in terms of representing the economic interests of society’s economically oppressed working-class, the marginalised, and have-nots, it had prior to neoliberal entryism, some similarities with the pre-Clinton insurgency Democratic Party. Contrary to Starmer’s and corporate media’s constructed narrative of supposed neoliberal electoral efficiency, the evidence from recent history of collapsing General Election voter numbers demonstrates quite starkly, that Labour’s social base, has realised it’s being democratically denied the representation from its Party, it historically could have expected and desired. Its societal grassroots therefore recognised it had no vested interest in continuing to vote.
The Labour Party came unsuccessfully through Thatcherism smeared and bullied by the right-wing Murdoch and Rothermere Press who day-to-day, did the propaganda heavy-lifting for the Tory Party’s campaigning. From this era, Neil Kinnock was the last traditional Labour leader. Kinnock invoked working-class authenticity by claiming to be a proud Welsh socialist – though having subsequently accepted a peerage and later supported neoliberal entryism, this historical claim would seem to have been just spin.
That said, Labour under faux but perhaps at least perceived real traditionalist Kinnock, came out of the 1992 General Election losing, yet with an improved 11.5 million votes. In 1997, years of Tory corruption resulted in Tony Blair riding into power on an anti-Conservative turnout for New Labour, of 13.5 million votes. Yet, five years of pandering to big money and therefore economically attacking his own supporters, meant that at the 2001 General Election only 10.7million voters thought the Party still represented them. Blair had lost nearly 3 million voters — 2 million the Party had previously picked up off the Tories, and nearly a further million, down on the Party’s performance under Kinnock had disappeared on apparent electoral strike (significantly this is well before the Iraq War). In 2005 the deterioration continued under Blair with the Party albeit staying in power, but losing another million Labour voters, now down to 9.5 million. In 2010 Labour’s neoliberal former Chancellor Gordon Brown, led the Party to defeat and astonishingly only 8.5 million people now thought the Party actually represented them.
In all during this period Blair and Brown managed — via their self-serving corporate lobbying aligned curatorship of the Party — to burn their way through the allegiances of 5 million voters, while losing two thirds of Labour’s once 400,000 strong membership, and this during a period when the UK population was actually increasing. If Labour’s social base had any voice in an ever more unrepresentative billionaire orientated corporate media, somebody surely would have asked ‘just who have these neoliberals been working for?’
Labour’s new young Leader Ed Miliband, rhetorically made the pretence in the 2015 General Election, of apparently moving the Party back to the left and from Gordon Brown’s mere 8.5 million votes, managed to stabilise the rout of its disappearing grassroots, but still only obtaining an electorally failing and underachieving, 9.5 million voters support.
Jeremy Corbyn then became Leader and the Party in losing the 2017 General Election, still dramatically managed to turn around 16 years of decline, with 12.8 million voters now believing Labour once again represented them. Indicative of the renewed long-term health of Labour its now 0.5 million members made it the largest political organisation in Europe. All of this was achieved with the neoliberal Labour right doing everything possible to bring Corbyn down in the two years prior to the General Election – even restaging a Leadership contest within a year of Corbyn first success.
In the run-up to the 2019 General Election the Party had to contend with a partisan corporate media at war with it, an ongoing pro-Israel moral panic, an attempt to subvert the Brexit referendum by globalised free trade interests, clearly designed to change Labour’s leadership and direction. All of which was supported by the Party’s neoliberal right.
Given that much of Labour’s heartlands favoured leaving the EU, the anti-democratic attack on the referendum result was probably the most damaging. If you’re not respecting votes cast you can’t expect voters to support you. In any case, contrary to media spin, the referendum result had not been particularly close. The available pool of voters was 46 million. 16 million voted to remain in the EU and lost. That meant 30 million people either favoured leaving or in abstaining, were content to go along with the democratic outcome, whichever way — Leave/Remain — it came out.
Consequently Labour under Corbyn lost a lot of MPs in the 2019 General Election, many in Party heartlands. This was spun in the media as one of Labour’s worst ever results. Actually, even in these circumstances, 10.2 million voters felt that the values and manifesto of Labour with Corbyn leadership represented them. This was more than voted for the Party under Ed Milliband, more than voted for the Party when Gordon Brown was leader. It was even more than voted for the Party during Blair’s last election win. The nature of Britain’s ‘first past the post’ voting system means that if your Party turn-out is not concentrated in specific districts but instead spread-out, you might enjoy popular support but not constituency MP successes. But at least under a Party traditionalist like Corbyn the future health of Labour as a social movement could be regarded as secure – at least until Starmer came along.
All of which begs the question once the dust from electoral marketing has settled, why comparatively do neoliberals haemorrhage votes so quickly? In the case of Blair and Brown, in wasn’t only the case their reputations were in tatters with Muslims and anti-war groups. In order to maintain a low tax regime on the rich and corporate elites, there was hardly a part of working-class life that was not attacked by them. They abolished the mandatory student grant and introduced fees, so now deeply indebted students had no reason to be grateful to them. The poor, who had their access to welfare cut while being stigmatised as ‘scroungers… part of a culture of dependency’, had no reason to vote neoliberal New Labour. Low income social housing residents told, their rents would be forced up to market levels, similarly had no reason for gratitude. And of course neoliberal employment casualisation means that a generation of young workers now have less job protections than previously enjoyed by their grandparents.
As Karl Marx put it and contrary to neoliberal political marketing: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
We might also presume that the Clintons have done similar damage to the long-term culture of the Democrat Party. The people of Arkansas experienced three terms of the Clintons in the governor’s office. They had two terms of the Clintons in the White House. Yet in the 2014 US poverty rankings Arkansas came forty-eighth out of fifty states. One of the two worse-off states was Louisiana. It might be glib and not particularly original but it is possible to conclude that having the Clintons represent you is nearly as bad as experiencing Hurricane Katrina.
Of course it is difficult to identify the same level of voter decline in the United States because in the same 1992 to 2020 time period, the country’s population increased from 256,990,607 to 331,449,281. This increase of 74,458,674 is so large it’s roughly the size of Trumps 2020 second ever largest Presidential voter turnout (obviously this does not necessarily indicate the same people voted for him).
However, there is one US example that is quite helpful. In 2008 Barack Obama campaigned for the Presidency – like Blair in 97 – as the anti-status-quo ‘change candidate’ and picked up a historically large voter turnout of 69,498,516. But in office he continued foreign wars, protected the professional banking class, little was done to improve the economic or educational opportunities of working-class Americans, and Obama impotently rung his hands while a Black Lives Matter crisis played out on the streets.
In 2012’s election Obama’s turnout dropped to 65,915,795. The resulting loss of 3.5 million voters, who no longer felt represented, is not huge in a country the size of the US. But what happened next is interesting. In the run up to the 2016 Presidential election the Democrats could at least claim to have expanded US medical cover. Yet Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump despite him being depicted in the corporate media as a bogeyman. Clinton’s loss was spun in the corporate media as a popular vote win. However her 65,853,514 turnout meant she’d struggled to just about get into the ballpark of Obama’s declining second, Presidential vote count. Significantly Clinton had only made it into the race courtesy of DNC shenanigans in her favour at the expense of grassroots darling Bernie Sanders.
In 2020 Joe Biden made it into the White House on the back of a massive record breaking anti-Trump vote of 81,268,924 million. Biden is little better than neoliberal Hillary Clinton. Over the next five years every failure, every betrayal of leftist grassroots Democrats will – according to past form – erode that voter turnout. Short of Trump or a significant number of his older supporters dropping dead, come the next election, most of his fanatical 74,216,154 voter turnout will be intact. The losers will be those who wanted a fairer America but got stuck with neoliberals.
Here in the UK there are local elections on Thursday May 6 2012. Labour Leader Starmer has spent the last year, attacking, smearing and banning the Party’s own constituency groups and supporters. The word is that Labour voters are back on electoral strike. Some have formed The Northern Independence Party (NIP). Activists are refusing to canvass and campaign for the Party. If results are as bad as expected, Starmer will no doubt blame Corbyn and his legacy. The corporate media will likely choose to echo this untruth. The message from this is that grassroots groups need to find a way turning their Parties back into representative social movements, instead of marketing machines for unscrupulous careerists, in pursuit of corporate lobbying money.
In 2020 Kier Starmer became UK Labour leader and promptly reneged on just about every campaign promise he’d made to adhere to the policies, traditional Party principals, and post-war consensus values, that had been restored under Jeremy Corbyn’s previous tenureship. Starmer has withdrawn the Party Whip from Corbyn – effectively exiling him – and more recently given interviews about the Party supposedly having to ‘recover’ from Corbyn’s leadership. In this he’s been consistently aided and abetted by various commentariat neoliberal mouthpieces in the corporate media, similarly implying that the Blairite era was some sort of successful norm.
This spin on recent history presupposes two false premises. Firstly, that the era of Corbyn’s grassroots mobilisation was some sort of oxymoron democratic failure, this the available evidence belies. Secondly, that rather than being a process of direct democratic representation on behalf of the mass of society, electoral politics should be treated as some sort of advertising/marketing game designed to facilitate the careers of a small handful of individuals, operating on behalf of highly financed corporate lobbyists. This was not what the Labour Party was formed to do.
As a representational organisation, the Labour Party had been originally founded by mass movement Trade Unionists and Chartist campaigners for the poor. Post-war, in terms of representing the economic interests of society’s economically oppressed working-class, the marginalised, and have-nots, it had prior to neoliberal entryism, some similarities with the pre-Clinton insurgency Democratic Party. Contrary to Starmer’s and corporate media’s constructed narrative of supposed neoliberal electoral efficiency, the evidence from recent history of collapsing General Election voter numbers demonstrates quite starkly, that Labour’s social base, has realised it’s being democratically denied the representation from its Party, it historically could have expected and desired. Its societal grassroots therefore recognised it had no vested interest in continuing to vote.
The Labour Party came unsuccessfully through Thatcherism smeared and bullied by the right-wing Murdoch and Rothermere Press who day-to-day, did the propaganda heavy-lifting for the Tory Party’s campaigning. From this era, Neil Kinnock was the last traditional Labour leader. Kinnock invoked working-class authenticity by claiming to be a proud Welsh socialist – though having subsequently accepted a peerage and later supported neoliberal entryism, this historical claim would seem to have been just spin.
That said, Labour under faux but perhaps at least perceived real traditionalist Kinnock, came out of the 1992 General Election losing, yet with an improved 11.5 million votes. In 1997, years of Tory corruption resulted in Tony Blair riding into power on an anti-Conservative turnout for New Labour, of 13.5 million votes. Yet, five years of pandering to big money and therefore economically attacking his own supporters, meant that at the 2001 General Election only 10.7million voters thought the Party still represented them. Blair had lost nearly 3 million voters — 2 million the Party had previously picked up off the Tories, and nearly a further million, down on the Party’s performance under Kinnock had disappeared on apparent electoral strike (significantly this is well before the Iraq War). In 2005 the deterioration continued under Blair with the Party albeit staying in power, but losing another million Labour voters, now down to 9.5 million. In 2010 Labour’s neoliberal former Chancellor Gordon Brown, led the Party to defeat and astonishingly only 8.5 million people now thought the Party actually represented them.
In all during this period Blair and Brown managed — via their self-serving corporate lobbying aligned curatorship of the Party — to burn their way through the allegiances of 5 million voters, while losing two thirds of Labour’s once 400,000 strong membership, and this during a period when the UK population was actually increasing. If Labour’s social base had any voice in an ever more unrepresentative billionaire orientated corporate media, somebody surely would have asked ‘just who have these neoliberals been working for?’
Labour’s new young Leader Ed Miliband, rhetorically made the pretence in the 2015 General Election, of apparently moving the Party back to the left and from Gordon Brown’s mere 8.5 million votes, managed to stabilise the rout of its disappearing grassroots, but still only obtaining an electorally failing and underachieving, 9.5 million voters support.
Jeremy Corbyn then became Leader and the Party in losing the 2017 General Election, still dramatically managed to turn around 16 years of decline, with 12.8 million voters now believing Labour once again represented them. Indicative of the renewed long-term health of Labour its now 0.5 million members made it the largest political organisation in Europe. All of this was achieved with the neoliberal Labour right doing everything possible to bring Corbyn down in the two years prior to the General Election – even restaging a Leadership contest within a year of Corbyn first success.
In the run-up to the 2019 General Election the Party had to contend with a partisan corporate media at war with it, an ongoing pro-Israel moral panic, an attempt to subvert the Brexit referendum by globalised free trade interests, clearly designed to change Labour’s leadership and direction. All of which was supported by the Party’s neoliberal right.
Given that much of Labour’s heartlands favoured leaving the EU, the anti-democratic attack on the referendum result was probably the most damaging. If you’re not respecting votes cast you can’t expect voters to support you. In any case, contrary to media spin, the referendum result had not been particularly close. The available pool of voters was 46 million. 16 million voted to remain in the EU and lost. That meant 30 million people either favoured leaving or in abstaining, were content to go along with the democratic outcome, whichever way — Leave/Remain — it came out.
Consequently Labour under Corbyn lost a lot of MPs in the 2019 General Election, many in Party heartlands. This was spun in the media as one of Labour’s worst ever results. Actually, even in these circumstances, 10.2 million voters felt that the values and manifesto of Labour with Corbyn leadership represented them. This was more than voted for the Party under Ed Milliband, more than voted for the Party when Gordon Brown was leader. It was even more than voted for the Party during Blair’s last election win. The nature of Britain’s ‘first past the post’ voting system means that if your Party turn-out is not concentrated in specific districts but instead spread-out, you might enjoy popular support but not constituency MP successes. But at least under a Party traditionalist like Corbyn the future health of Labour as a social movement could be regarded as secure – at least until Starmer came along.
All of which begs the question once the dust from electoral marketing has settled, why comparatively do neoliberals haemorrhage votes so quickly? In the case of Blair and Brown, in wasn’t only the case their reputations were in tatters with Muslims and anti-war groups. In order to maintain a low tax regime on the rich and corporate elites, there was hardly a part of working-class life that was not attacked by them. They abolished the mandatory student grant and introduced fees, so now deeply indebted students had no reason to be grateful to them. The poor, who had their access to welfare cut while being stigmatised as ‘scroungers… part of a culture of dependency’, had no reason to vote neoliberal New Labour. Low income social housing residents told, their rents would be forced up to market levels, similarly had no reason for gratitude. And of course neoliberal employment casualisation means that a generation of young workers now have less job protections than previously enjoyed by their grandparents.
As Karl Marx put it and contrary to neoliberal political marketing: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
We might also presume that the Clintons have done similar damage to the long-term culture of the Democrat Party. The people of Arkansas experienced three terms of the Clintons in the governor’s office. They had two terms of the Clintons in the White House. Yet in the 2014 US poverty rankings Arkansas came forty-eighth out of fifty states. One of the two worse-off states was Louisiana. It might be glib and not particularly original but it is possible to conclude that having the Clintons represent you is nearly as bad as experiencing Hurricane Katrina.
Of course it is difficult to identify the same level of voter decline in the United States because in the same 1992 to 2020 time period, the country’s population increased from 256,990,607 to 331,449,281. This increase of 74,458,674 is so large it’s roughly the size of Trumps 2020 second ever largest Presidential voter turnout (obviously this does not necessarily indicate the same people voted for him).
However, there is one US example that is quite helpful. In 2008 Barack Obama campaigned for the Presidency – like Blair in 97 – as the anti-status-quo ‘change candidate’ and picked up a historically large voter turnout of 69,498,516. But in office he continued foreign wars, protected the professional banking class, little was done to improve the economic or educational opportunities of working-class Americans, and Obama impotently rung his hands while a Black Lives Matter crisis played out on the streets.
In 2012’s election Obama’s turnout dropped to 65,915,795. The resulting loss of 3.5 million voters, who no longer felt represented, is not huge in a country the size of the US. But what happened next is interesting. In the run up to the 2016 Presidential election the Democrats could at least claim to have expanded US medical cover. Yet Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump despite him being depicted in the corporate media as a bogeyman. Clinton’s loss was spun in the corporate media as a popular vote win. However her 65,853,514 turnout meant she’d struggled to just about get into the ballpark of Obama’s declining second, Presidential vote count. Significantly Clinton had only made it into the race courtesy of DNC shenanigans in her favour at the expense of grassroots darling Bernie Sanders.
In 2020 Joe Biden made it into the White House on the back of a massive record breaking anti-Trump vote of 81,268,924 million. Biden is little better than neoliberal Hillary Clinton. Over the next five years every failure, every betrayal of leftist grassroots Democrats will – according to past form – erode that voter turnout. Short of Trump or a significant number of his older supporters dropping dead, come the next election, most of his fanatical 74,216,154 voter turnout will be intact. The losers will be those who wanted a fairer America but got stuck with neoliberals.
Here in the UK there are local elections on Thursday May 6 2012. Labour Leader Starmer has spent the last year, attacking, smearing and banning the Party’s own constituency groups and supporters. The word is that Labour voters are back on electoral strike. Some have formed The Northern Independence Party (NIP). Activists are refusing to canvass and campaign for the Party. If results are as bad as expected, Starmer will no doubt blame Corbyn and his legacy. The corporate media will likely choose to echo this untruth. The message from this is that grassroots groups need to find a way turning their Parties back into representative social movements, instead of marketing machines for unscrupulous careerists, in pursuit of corporate lobbying money.
Gavin Lewis is a freelance Black-British mixed-race writer and academic. He has published in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States on film, media, politics, cultural theory, race, and representation. He has taught critical theory and film and cultural studies at a number of British universities. Read other articles by Gavin.
“Our Planet, Our Future, An Urgent Call for Action” is the title of the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit. As a follow up to that summit, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently published Our Planet, Our Future: An Urgent Call for Action d/d April 29th 2021.
The opening paragraph of the Noble Laureate declaration implicitly calls for immediate unified worldwide action:
The first Nobel Prize Summit comes amid a global pandemic, amid a crisis of inequality, amid an ecological crisis, amid a climate crisis, and amid an information crisis. These supranational crises are interlinked and threaten the enormous gains we have made in human progress.
The context and content of that prestigious summit is well worth analysis and contemplation. The Nobel Laureates identified looming risks to “the enormous gains we have made in human progress.” In other words, the Nobel Laureates foresee a distinct possibility that human progress may be on a path of diminishment if the world does not join together to take care of and fix the biosphere, our planet Earth. In that regard, President Biden’s infrastructure plan is merely a big blip.
The Nobel Laureates clarion call implicitly exposes neoliberalism’s driving force of globalization as a core issue that impacts the planet by reaping riches without any hesitation or concern for the disintegration of ecosystems. Not one ecosystem is left unscathed, not even one, as the planet huffs and puffs and exudes gas under the most severe stress in millions of years, “unprecedented” has become the most favored word in scientific jargon.
Although not mentioned by the Nobel Laureates, one of the biggest challenges to their concerns is a burgeoning worldwide right-wing anti-science populist movement, which may be the Achilles heel to any and all agreements amongst major nations to fix the planet. In such case, there’s a distinct possibility that the world’s right-wing populist crusade may take civilization down a rabbit hole, sans a return ticket.
Trump-style leadership is found throughout the world, and it’s not going away any time soon. Quite the opposite as it’s the most extreme anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, anti-science faction in modern history. Trump’s anti-science stance chased top-flight scientists out of the country, several fled to France. In the first two years of the Trump administration, more than 1,600 federal scientists left government according to Office of Personnel Management employment data analyzed by the Washington Post. Similar articles in other publications describe nearly total decimation of key science personnel and loss of access to crucial scientific information that will take years and years to replenish. Trump tossed science out the window and crushed access to crucial data that’s needed to meet the very goals required to repair the planet, as suggested by the Nobel Laureates.
Moreover, anti-intellectual right-wing populists are not finished. They’ve only just begun. “Across Europe, right-wing parties have become not just increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic but anti-fact, anti-expert, anti-reason.”1
The Nobel Laureates didn’t mention, and likely would never mention, the biggest obstacle to their plans, which is the growing powerful right-wing anti-science populist crusade. America’s Congress is filled with them: “Rejection of mainstream science and medicine has become a key feature of the political right in the U.S. and increasingly around the world.2
It’s likely that the Nobel Laureate proposals (see link at end of this article) don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell as long as major countries are poisoned by lowly ignorance and make-believe lies, thus exposing a universal failure to provide the basics of education, thereby spewing out reams of anti-science nitwits. In the end, it spells trouble for a very troubled planet. Failure of education is fatal!
Alas, history does repeat:
The destructive potential of anti-science was fully realized in the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. Millions of Russian peasants died from starvation and famine during the 1930s and 1940s because Stalin embraced the pseudoscientific views of Trofim Lysenko that promoted catastrophic wheat and other harvest failures.2
In similar fashion, repeating Stalin-type lunacy but 80 years later:
The Trump White House launched a coordinated disinformation campaign that dismissed the severity of the epidemic in the United States, attributed COVID deaths to other causes, claimed hospital admissions were due to a catch-up in elective surgeries, and asserted that ultimately that the epidemic would spontaneously evaporate. It also promoted hydroxychloroquine as a spectacular cure, while downplaying the importance of masks. Other authoritarian or populist regimes in Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines and Tanzania adopted some or all of these elements.2
Currently, three nationwide surveys show white Republicans, including one-in-four Republican House members, refusing COCID-19 vaccines. This obstructionist behavior originated with protests against vaccines as a major platform of the Tea Party with its “health freedom” rallies when a measles epidemic hit parts of California. The same health freedom rallying cry then spread to Texas. Nowadays, Public refusal of COVID-19 vaccines extends to India, Brazil, South Africa, and several lower income countries and in parts of Europe, providing first-hand real-time evidence that ignorance spawns avoidable deaths.
Right-wing populism and the practice of science naturally clash. Studies show that science is (a) evidence-based (b) objective and (c) demands proof of statements, whereas populist politics is based on emotional, easily falsifiable annunciations, but the truth destroys their agenda. Therefore, truth must be avoided at all costs. “If you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” (Joseph Goebbels)
The Nobel Laureates offer guideposts for the initial stages of saving the planet: (1) the next decade is crucial (2) global emissions must be cut in half (3) destruction of nature must stop. They “get it” in terms of what ails the world, and their declaration is remarkably similar to statements made by a few bold outspoken scientists over the past couple of decades. In fact the Nobel Laureates endorse warnings found throughout peer-reviewed literature over the past couple decades that unfortunately never found loud enough voices to make a difference.
Thus, the Nobel Laureates “Urgent Call for Action,” has exposed serious threats to the planet already recognized over the past several years, as stated: “Societies risk large-scale, irreversible changes to Earth’s biosphere and our lives as part of it.”
That warning has been repeated, but largely ignored, over and over again over the past several years but voiced by too few scientists, until recently, things are changing so fast that they’re coming out of the woodwork with warnings of the loss of ecosystems, meaning loss of habitat, loss of vertebrates, loss of the Great Barrier Reef, loss of the Arctic, loss of flying insects in ‘protected’ European nature reserves, loss of arthropods in tropical rainforests in Puerto Rico and Western Mexico, loss of rainforest throughout the world, and irreversible Antarctica disintegration, as the world’s Nobel Laureates finally plead for “An Urgent Call for Action.”
Throughout years of concern by scientists of loss of the planet’s remarkable capabilities, nature has never really had a chance. It simply can’t avoid the impact of the Anthropocene Era humongous wayward human footprint that arbitrarily crunches and munches everything in site. Nature is an easy target.
In the final analysis, saving the planet may be beyond the clarion call by Nobel Laureates simply because the challenges of accomplishment may be bigger than the final solution: “One would be hard-pressed to find a region of the world that populism didn’t touch in the 2010s. The decade brought us the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit vote in Britain. It witnessed the rise of the Alternative for Germany—the first far-right party to enter the country’s national parliament in decades—as well as the ascent of populist parties in countries such as Austria, Brazil, Italy, India, Indonesia, and Poland. By 2018, as many as 20 world leaders held executive office around the world.”3
The aforementioned article identifies the next big target of right-wing populists, as follows: “Whereas much of the past decade revolved around arguments over issues of immigration and sovereignty, the 2020s could be dominated by a new, more pressing narrative: climate change.”
“Right-wing Politics and Anti-Science Positions are Locked Together in a Literal Deadly Mix”, Daily Kos, March 31, 2021.
“Our Planet, Our Future, An Urgent Call for Action” is the title of the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit. As a follow up to that summit, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently published Our Planet, Our Future: An Urgent Call for Action d/d April 29th 2021.
The opening paragraph of the Noble Laureate declaration implicitly calls for immediate unified worldwide action:
The first Nobel Prize Summit comes amid a global pandemic, amid a crisis of inequality, amid an ecological crisis, amid a climate crisis, and amid an information crisis. These supranational crises are interlinked and threaten the enormous gains we have made in human progress.
The context and content of that prestigious summit is well worth analysis and contemplation. The Nobel Laureates identified looming risks to “the enormous gains we have made in human progress.” In other words, the Nobel Laureates foresee a distinct possibility that human progress may be on a path of diminishment if the world does not join together to take care of and fix the biosphere, our planet Earth. In that regard, President Biden’s infrastructure plan is merely a big blip.
The Nobel Laureates clarion call implicitly exposes neoliberalism’s driving force of globalization as a core issue that impacts the planet by reaping riches without any hesitation or concern for the disintegration of ecosystems. Not one ecosystem is left unscathed, not even one, as the planet huffs and puffs and exudes gas under the most severe stress in millions of years, “unprecedented” has become the most favored word in scientific jargon.
Although not mentioned by the Nobel Laureates, one of the biggest challenges to their concerns is a burgeoning worldwide right-wing anti-science populist movement, which may be the Achilles heel to any and all agreements amongst major nations to fix the planet. In such case, there’s a distinct possibility that the world’s right-wing populist crusade may take civilization down a rabbit hole, sans a return ticket.
Trump-style leadership is found throughout the world, and it’s not going away any time soon. Quite the opposite as it’s the most extreme anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, anti-science faction in modern history. Trump’s anti-science stance chased top-flight scientists out of the country, several fled to France. In the first two years of the Trump administration, more than 1,600 federal scientists left government according to Office of Personnel Management employment data analyzed by the Washington Post. Similar articles in other publications describe nearly total decimation of key science personnel and loss of access to crucial scientific information that will take years and years to replenish. Trump tossed science out the window and crushed access to crucial data that’s needed to meet the very goals required to repair the planet, as suggested by the Nobel Laureates.
Moreover, anti-intellectual right-wing populists are not finished. They’ve only just begun. “Across Europe, right-wing parties have become not just increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic but anti-fact, anti-expert, anti-reason.”
The Nobel Laureates didn’t mention, and likely would never mention, the biggest obstacle to their plans, which is the growing powerful right-wing anti-science populist crusade. America’s Congress is filled with them: “Rejection of mainstream science and medicine has become a key feature of the political right in the U.S. and increasingly around the world.
It’s likely that the Nobel Laureate proposals (see link at end of this article) don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell as long as major countries are poisoned by lowly ignorance and make-believe lies, thus exposing a universal failure to provide the basics of education, thereby spewing out reams of anti-science nitwits. In the end, it spells trouble for a very troubled planet. Failure of education is fatal!
Alas, history does repeat:
The destructive potential of anti-science was fully realized in the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. Millions of Russian peasants died from starvation and famine during the 1930s and 1940s because Stalin embraced the pseudoscientific views of Trofim Lysenko that promoted catastrophic wheat and other harvest failures.
In similar fashion, repeating Stalin-type lunacy but 80 years later:
The Trump White House launched a coordinated disinformation campaign that dismissed the severity of the epidemic in the United States, attributed COVID deaths to other causes, claimed hospital admissions were due to a catch-up in elective surgeries, and asserted that ultimately that the epidemic would spontaneously evaporate. It also promoted hydroxychloroquine as a spectacular cure, while downplaying the importance of masks. Other authoritarian or populist regimes in Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines and Tanzania adopted some or all of these elements.
Currently, three nationwide surveys show white Republicans, including one-in-four Republican House members, refusing COCID-19 vaccines. This obstructionist behavior originated with protests against vaccines as a major platform of the Tea Party with its “health freedom” rallies when a measles epidemic hit parts of California. The same health freedom rallying cry then spread to Texas. Nowadays, Public refusal of COVID-19 vaccines extends to India, Brazil, South Africa, and several lower income countries and in parts of Europe, providing first-hand real-time evidence that ignorance spawns avoidable deaths.
Right-wing populism and the practice of science naturally clash. Studies show that science is (a) evidence-based (b) objective and (c) demands proof of statements, whereas populist politics is based on emotional, easily falsifiable annunciations, but the truth destroys their agenda. Therefore, truth must be avoided at all costs. “If you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” (Joseph Goebbels)
The Nobel Laureates offer guideposts for the initial stages of saving the planet: (1) the next decade is crucial (2) global emissions must be cut in half (3) destruction of nature must stop. They “get it” in terms of what ails the world, and their declaration is remarkably similar to statements made by a few bold outspoken scientists over the past couple of decades. In fact the Nobel Laureates endorse warnings found throughout peer-reviewed literature over the past couple decades that unfortunately never found loud enough voices to make a difference.
Thus, the Nobel Laureates “Urgent Call for Action,” has exposed serious threats to the planet already recognized over the past several years, as stated: “Societies risk large-scale, irreversible changes to Earth’s biosphere and our lives as part of it.”
That warning has been repeated, but largely ignored, over and over again over the past several years but voiced by too few scientists, until recently, things are changing so fast that they’re coming out of the woodwork with warnings of the loss of ecosystems, meaning loss of habitat, loss of vertebrates, loss of the Great Barrier Reef, loss of the Arctic, loss of flying insects in ‘protected’ European nature reserves, loss of arthropods in tropical rainforests in Puerto Rico and Western Mexico, loss of rainforest throughout the world, and irreversible Antarctica disintegration, as the world’s Nobel Laureates finally plead for “An Urgent Call for Action.”
Throughout years of concern by scientists of loss of the planet’s remarkable capabilities, nature has never really had a chance. It simply can’t avoid the impact of the Anthropocene Era humongous wayward human footprint that arbitrarily crunches and munches everything in site. Nature is an easy target.
In the final analysis, saving the planet may be beyond the clarion call by Nobel Laureates simply because the challenges of accomplishment may be bigger than the final solution: “One would be hard-pressed to find a region of the world that populism didn’t touch in the 2010s. The decade brought us the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit vote in Britain. It witnessed the rise of the Alternative for Germany—the first far-right party to enter the country’s national parliament in decades—as well as the ascent of populist parties in countries such as Austria, Brazil, Italy, India, Indonesia, and Poland. By 2018, as many as 20 world leaders held executive office around the world.”
The aforementioned article identifies the next big target of right-wing populists, as follows: “Whereas much of the past decade revolved around arguments over issues of immigration and sovereignty, the 2020s could be dominated by a new, more pressing narrative: climate change.”
Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.
Gustavo Petro is a force to be reckoned with in Colombian politics. The senator – once a member of the M-19 guerilla group, later elected to the House of Representations in the 1990s and then the mayorship of Bogotá (2012-2016) – has become the candidate to beat in next year’s presidential election. He is such a prominent opponent of right-wing politics in the country that while Donald Trump was campaigning in Florida in 2020 he included Petro in one of his anti-socialist diatribes, tweeting that “Biden is supported by socialist Gustavo Petro, a major LOSER and former M-19 guerrilla leader. Biden is weak on socialism and will betray Colombia. I stand with you!”
Petro previously ran for president in 2018 and made a strong showing, but ultimately lost to the far-right Iván Duque of the Democratic Center party by approximately 12%. It is worth noting that leaked recordings pertaining to the 2018 election contain evidence that Duque’s party conspired with individuals linked to narcotraffickers to commit electoral fraud, and subsequent investigations have uncovered at least six cases of fraud in both the House and the Senate.
Since 2018, Petro’s grassroots appeal has only grown. Polls for the upcoming 2022 election consistently place him in first place, and a survey conducted by pollster Invamer in April 2021 shows that “if elections were held tomorrow, no candidate would stand a chance against Petro.” Nestor Morales of the Mañanas Blu radio program remarked:
Petro is right to be celebrating, because [this survey] is well above its historical averages… what is impressive is that Petro is winning in absolutely everything…He has votes in sectors that were not related to him; for example, the upper strata, the old men who were so anti-petrist. There is a change, a transformation of public opinion.
The discrediting of Duque and Uribismo, the far-right political project of his mentor former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), has contributed to Petro’s rise in popularity. His already solid base has been supplemented by those disillusioned by Duque’s failed COVID response and the brutal continuation of Uribista violence against former guerilla fighters and social activists, in contravention of the previous government’s peace deal with the FARC. Furthermore, the Duque government’s recent decision to introduce a regressive tax reform that exempted the oligarchy while punishing ordinary workers has led to massive protests across Colombia. Government forces have responded brutally, causing multiple deaths and leading the UN rights office to condemn their “excessive use of force.” These protests have produced two general strikes thus far – one on April 28 and another on May 5 – and resistance to the austerity measures have grown to dominate the political discourse in the country, similar to how the 2019-2021 protests in Chile, which began due to a transit fare increase, soon snowballed into a nationwide indictment of neoliberal governance as a whole.
Gustavo Petro represents an alternative. Despite his association with Latin American socialism, however, Petro’s political views have evolved greatly over time. No longer an adherent of M-19’s revolutionary leftism, he now advocates a more moderate social-democratic model. In interviews, he is quick to distance his favored politics from those introduced in Cuba and Venezuela – policies which, in addition to angering domestic elites, inevitably leads to aggression from Washington as well. Instead, he compares himself to more gradualist figures, once stating that “I have more in common with Pepe Mujica [than Castro or Chávez],” referring to Uruguay’s famously modest left-wing president who served from 2010 to 2015 and oversaw notable macroeconomic growth as well as the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage.
Despite the softening of his views, Petro remains a target of the Colombian right and has received constant death threats during his public career. He claims to have slept with an assault rifle over the course of the “parapolitics” scandal, during which dozens of politicians (many with links to the Uribe administration) were investigated and convicted for illegal ties to paramilitary groups with evidence that he helped present to Congress. His brother was allegedly threatened with assassination (certainly no idle threat in Colombia), and his son Andrés is currently in exile, having been granted asylum by the Canadian government due to threats and political harassment from right-wing groups. Furthermore, in March 2018 a Cuban man named Raul Gutierrez was arrested in Bogotá for plotting to bomb the Cuban embassy and assassinate both Petro and FARC leader Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londoño. While imprisoned, he claimed that a right-wing Colombian group based out of Florida hired him to commit the attacks.
Leftism and social activism are dangerous business in Colombia. In the first three months of 2021 alone, 40 activists were murdered and there were 23 massacres of predominantly poor and Indigenous peoples by paramilitary groups. The impunity rate for the murder of trade unionists is approximately 87% and, as COVID-19 wracks the country, the Duque administration has continuously ramped up violence against areas which contain former FARC fighters.
One of the most horrific incidents so far this year was the murder of twelve children and two nineteen-year-olds in a bombing raid against an alleged armed group in Guaviare. Petro commented publicly on the massacre, posting a list of the children’s names on Twitter and writing “14 children killed [including the two 19-year-olds] in a bombardment ordered by the Minister of Defence. These are their names. End the war, end the genocide of children in our country.”
Marcha Patriotica, a progressive umbrella organization that brings together historically marginalized groups within Colombia including peasants, people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community, has also faced persecution. Almost two hundred of its members have been murdered since its founding in 2011, while an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights resolution from 2017 claimed that hundreds more are living under severe risks and that the government could protect them if it chose to act.
The Colombian right-wing has historically lumped together unionists, social activists, and left-wing figures with the longstanding peasant-led insurgencies in the countryside, labelling them “Castro-Chavistas,” “terrorists,” and “guerrillas posing as human rights defenders.” These are extremely serious threats in Colombia, and not just due to ongoing atrocities. One must also take into account the “political genocide” against the Patriotic Union (UP) in the 1980s and 1990s.
The UP was formed in 1985 during peace negotiations between the FARC and the Belisario Betancur administration. Its purpose was to allow the FARC to participate in the electoral system in exchange for a ceasefire. What followed, however, was a massacre: the party’s members were relentlessly attacked by paramilitaries and drug cartels and over 3000 of its members, including elected officials and presidential candidates, were murdered. This led to a resumption of overt hostilities and proved to the guerillas that the Colombian state was an inherently oppressive, right-wing organization that would not allow fair elections to weaken its hold on power.
The US-backed military has historically been the arbiter of the political realm in Colombia, backing conservative figures and using paramilitaries to kill or intimidate those who organize for social change. Their brutal acts have not shaken America’s diplomatic and material support or its military cooperation – as Joe Biden wrote during the 2020 election, it is the “keystone” of US policy in Latin America and has served as an indispensable ally in the region-wide imposition of a free-trade model vulnerable to American capital. Scandals like the extermination of the UP, the murder of over 6000 civilians in the 2000s as a way of boosting the army’s kill-count against the insurgencies, and the almost universal impunity for the killing of trade union activists have not lessened America’s support in the slightest.
Nor have recent atrocities weakened Canada’s support for the Colombian government. Stephen Harper made a point of deepening Canada’s ties to right-wing governments across the region, and Justin Trudeau has likewise taken a very active role in supporting the Latin American right against progressive movements. Yves Engler writes that, in regard to Colombia, Ottawa quickly congratulated Duque after his fraud-riddled election win, refused to criticize the attempted overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that was launched from Colombia in May 2020, and has consistently failed to draw attention to the ongoing injustices in the country.
This is the political climate – one of violent repression that receives the tacit or outright support of imperialist countries – in which Gustavo Petro has fought to present an alternative. Although the presidential election will not be held for over a year, Petro’s dramatic rise in popularity is evidence that the Colombian people are seeking a break from the status quo, and that he may represent their best chance to achieve this.
Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. His areas of interest include post-colonialism and the human impact of the global neoliberal economy. Read other articles by Owen.
Gustavo Petro is a force to be reckoned with in Colombian politics. The senator – once a member of the M-19 guerilla group, later elected to the House of Representations in the 1990s and then the mayorship of Bogotá (2012-2016) – has become the candidate to beat in next year’s presidential election. He is such a prominent opponent of right-wing politics in the country that while Donald Trump was campaigning in Florida in 2020 he included Petro in one of his anti-socialist diatribes, tweeting that “Biden is supported by socialist Gustavo Petro, a major LOSER and former M-19 guerrilla leader. Biden is weak on socialism and will betray Colombia. I stand with you!”
Petro previously ran for president in 2018 and made a strong showing, but ultimately lost to the far-right Iván Duque of the Democratic Center party by approximately 12%. It is worth noting that leaked recordings pertaining to the 2018 election contain evidence that Duque’s party conspired with individuals linked to narcotraffickers to commit electoral fraud, and subsequent investigations have uncovered at least six cases of fraud in both the House and the Senate.
Since 2018, Petro’s grassroots appeal has only grown. Polls for the upcoming 2022 election consistently place him in first place, and a survey conducted by pollster Invamer in April 2021 shows that “if elections were held tomorrow, no candidate would stand a chance against Petro.” Nestor Morales of the Mañanas Blu radio program remarked:
Petro is right to be celebrating, because [this survey] is well above its historical averages… what is impressive is that Petro is winning in absolutely everything…He has votes in sectors that were not related to him; for example, the upper strata, the old men who were so anti-petrist. There is a change, a transformation of public opinion.
The discrediting of Duque and Uribismo, the far-right political project of his mentor former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), has contributed to Petro’s rise in popularity. His already solid base has been supplemented by those disillusioned by Duque’s failed COVID response and the brutal continuation of Uribista violence against former guerilla fighters and social activists, in contravention of the previous government’s peace deal with the FARC. Furthermore, the Duque government’s recent decision to introduce a regressive tax reform that exempted the oligarchy while punishing ordinary workers has led to massive protests across Colombia. Government forces have responded brutally, causing multiple deaths and leading the UN rights office to condemn their “excessive use of force.” These protests have produced two general strikes thus far – one on April 28 and another on May 5 – and resistance to the austerity measures have grown to dominate the political discourse in the country, similar to how the 2019-2021 protests in Chile, which began due to a transit fare increase, soon snowballed into a nationwide indictment of neoliberal governance as a whole.
Gustavo Petro represents an alternative. Despite his association with Latin American socialism, however, Petro’s political views have evolved greatly over time. No longer an adherent of M-19’s revolutionary leftism, he now advocates a more moderate social-democratic model. In interviews, he is quick to distance his favored politics from those introduced in Cuba and Venezuela – policies which, in addition to angering domestic elites, inevitably leads to aggression from Washington as well. Instead, he compares himself to more gradualist figures, once stating that “I have more in common with Pepe Mujica [than Castro or Chávez],” referring to Uruguay’s famously modest left-wing president who served from 2010 to 2015 and oversaw notable macroeconomic growth as well as the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage.
Despite the softening of his views, Petro remains a target of the Colombian right and has received constant death threats during his public career. He claims to have slept with an assault rifle over the course of the “parapolitics” scandal, during which dozens of politicians (many with links to the Uribe administration) were investigated and convicted for illegal ties to paramilitary groups with evidence that he helped present to Congress. His brother was allegedly threatened with assassination (certainly no idle threat in Colombia), and his son Andrés is currently in exile, having been granted asylum by the Canadian government due to threats and political harassment from right-wing groups. Furthermore, in March 2018 a Cuban man named Raul Gutierrez was arrested in Bogotá for plotting to bomb the Cuban embassy and assassinate both Petro and FARC leader Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londoño. While imprisoned, he claimed that a right-wing Colombian group based out of Florida hired him to commit the attacks.
Leftism and social activism are dangerous business in Colombia. In the first three months of 2021 alone, 40 activists were murdered and there were 23 massacres of predominantly poor and Indigenous peoples by paramilitary groups. The impunity rate for the murder of trade unionists is approximately 87% and, as COVID-19 wracks the country, the Duque administration has continuously ramped up violence against areas which contain former FARC fighters.
One of the most horrific incidents so far this year was the murder of twelve children and two nineteen-year-olds in a bombing raid against an alleged armed group in Guaviare. Petro commented publicly on the massacre, posting a list of the children’s names on Twitter and writing “14 children killed [including the two 19-year-olds] in a bombardment ordered by the Minister of Defence. These are their names. End the war, end the genocide of children in our country.”
Marcha Patriotica, a progressive umbrella organization that brings together historically marginalized groups within Colombia including peasants, people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community, has also faced persecution. Almost two hundred of its members have been murdered since its founding in 2011, while an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights resolution from 2017 claimed that hundreds more are living under severe risks and that the government could protect them if it chose to act.
The Colombian right-wing has historically lumped together unionists, social activists, and left-wing figures with the longstanding peasant-led insurgencies in the countryside, labelling them “Castro-Chavistas,” “terrorists,” and “guerrillas posing as human rights defenders.” These are extremely serious threats in Colombia, and not just due to ongoing atrocities. One must also take into account the “political genocide” against the Patriotic Union (UP) in the 1980s and 1990s.
The UP was formed in 1985 during peace negotiations between the FARC and the Belisario Betancur administration. Its purpose was to allow the FARC to participate in the electoral system in exchange for a ceasefire. What followed, however, was a massacre: the party’s members were relentlessly attacked by paramilitaries and drug cartels and over 3000 of its members, including elected officials and presidential candidates, were murdered. This led to a resumption of overt hostilities and proved to the guerillas that the Colombian state was an inherently oppressive, right-wing organization that would not allow fair elections to weaken its hold on power.
The US-backed military has historically been the arbiter of the political realm in Colombia, backing conservative figures and using paramilitaries to kill or intimidate those who organize for social change. Their brutal acts have not shaken America’s diplomatic and material support or its military cooperation – as Joe Biden wrote during the 2020 election, it is the “keystone” of US policy in Latin America and has served as an indispensable ally in the region-wide imposition of a free-trade model vulnerable to American capital. Scandals like the extermination of the UP, the murder of over 6000 civilians in the 2000s as a way of boosting the army’s kill-count against the insurgencies, and the almost universal impunity for the killing of trade union activists have not lessened America’s support in the slightest.
Nor have recent atrocities weakened Canada’s support for the Colombian government. Stephen Harper made a point of deepening Canada’s ties to right-wing governments across the region, and Justin Trudeau has likewise taken a very active role in supporting the Latin American right against progressive movements. Yves Engler writes that, in regard to Colombia, Ottawa quickly congratulated Duque after his fraud-riddled election win, refused to criticize the attempted overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that was launched from Colombia in May 2020, and has consistently failed to draw attention to the ongoing injustices in the country.
This is the political climate – one of violent repression that receives the tacit or outright support of imperialist countries – in which Gustavo Petro has fought to present an alternative. Although the presidential election will not be held for over a year, Petro’s dramatic rise in popularity is evidence that the Colombian people are seeking a break from the status quo, and that he may represent their best chance to achieve this.
Rising tensions between Australia and China have raised the question of where New Zealand would stand if things escalate further.
Close trans-Tasman friend and ally Australia is taking a more aggressive stance against China – with South China Sea and Taiwan potential flashpoints.
And recent statements from its defence minister about a possible conflict with China have caused some alarm – a prospect that could put New Zealand under real pressure – to pick a side.
New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta said she could not comment on “prospective thinking about what may or may not happen”, adding New Zealand “values” the important relationship with Australia.
It did “make for an uncomfortable situation” to have Australia and China at loggerheads and “where you see your neighbours being treated in such a punitive way”, she said.
Australia was in a different position to New Zealand and “obviously see things in a certain way, because they have neighbours and are in a part of the region where they feel several things more acutely and we will remain closely connected in the way that we share our view of what’s happening in our region”, Mahuta said.
‘Nimble, respectful and consistent’
If it came down to taking sides – what would New Zealand do?
“New Zealand is very aware that we are a small country in the Pacific,” Mahuta said.
“And we are also aware that the nature of our relationships, both bilateral and multilateral, require us to be nimble, respectful, consistent and predictable in the way that we treat our nearest neighbours, but also those who we have bilateral relationships with, no matter whether they are big or small relationships.”
Leading defence analyst Dr Paul Buchanan said storm clouds were gathering and armed conflict was now a “distinct possibility”.
“Maybe not directly between the Australians and the Chinese, unless there’s a miscalculation involving a Australian warship, doing freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea,” Dr Buchanan said.
“But more than likely, as part of a dispute that gets out of control and Australia, as part of a coalition of countries, probably led by the United States, that is duty bound to respond, so for example, Taiwan.”
If such a conflict erupted, that would leave New Zealand “between a rock and hard place” because it would be asked to join that coalition, Dr Buchanan said.
That would require some “hard decisions … that have been in the making for well over a decade when we decided to throw most of our trade ships into the Chinese market”.
“Now we’re in on the horns of a dilemma and a bit of a quandary should our security partners ask us to join them in the common defence of a country suffering from Chinese aggression,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Rising tensions between Australia and China have raised the question of where New Zealand would stand if things escalate further.
Close trans-Tasman friend and ally Australia is taking a more aggressive stance against China – with South China Sea and Taiwan potential flashpoints.
And recent statements from its defence minister about a possible conflict with China have caused some alarm – a prospect that could put New Zealand under real pressure – to pick a side.
New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta said she could not comment on “prospective thinking about what may or may not happen”, adding New Zealand “values” the important relationship with Australia.
It did “make for an uncomfortable situation” to have Australia and China at loggerheads and “where you see your neighbours being treated in such a punitive way”, she said.
Australia was in a different position to New Zealand and “obviously see things in a certain way, because they have neighbours and are in a part of the region where they feel several things more acutely and we will remain closely connected in the way that we share our view of what’s happening in our region”, Mahuta said.
‘Nimble, respectful and consistent’ If it came down to taking sides – what would New Zealand do?
“New Zealand is very aware that we are a small country in the Pacific,” Mahuta said.
“And we are also aware that the nature of our relationships, both bilateral and multilateral, require us to be nimble, respectful, consistent and predictable in the way that we treat our nearest neighbours, but also those who we have bilateral relationships with, no matter whether they are big or small relationships.”
Leading defence analyst Dr Paul Buchanan said storm clouds were gathering and armed conflict was now a “distinct possibility”.
“Maybe not directly between the Australians and the Chinese, unless there’s a miscalculation involving a Australian warship, doing freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea,” Dr Buchanan said.
“But more than likely, as part of a dispute that gets out of control and Australia, as part of a coalition of countries, probably led by the United States, that is duty bound to respond, so for example, Taiwan.”
If such a conflict erupted, that would leave New Zealand “between a rock and hard place” because it would be asked to join that coalition, Dr Buchanan said.
That would require some “hard decisions … that have been in the making for well over a decade when we decided to throw most of our trade ships into the Chinese market”.
“Now we’re in on the horns of a dilemma and a bit of a quandary should our security partners ask us to join them in the common defence of a country suffering from Chinese aggression,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Last week, writer Sherry Zhang was at the opening night of Auckland Theatre Company’s production of Single Asian Female. She’s waited to see it since 2019 and now, having finally seen it on New Zealand shores, she reflects on the play and what it means to her.
I’ve been waiting for a while to see this show. I first heard about Single Asian Female in 2019 from a Sydney friend who told me I had to see it. “I’ll fly over from Auckland then,” I joked, but more than half-serious.
So in 2021, when Kat Tsz Hung, who plays Chinese matriarch Pearl Wong, stared defiantly at me on a giant yellow post in Auckland Theatre Company’s Waterfront Theatre, I was beyond chuffed.
I’ve waited so long because it’s about time.
Single Asian Female premiered in Sydney years ago and only reached New Zealand shores in 2021.
To be produced at ATC is as mainstream as you can get with theatre in New Zealand. It’s validating to have an Asian-centric story, directed and written, right at the Viaduct. I’ve been to a few ATC shows now, and the audience is generally a sea of white hair on white people.
There’s been incredible mahi buzzing from Proudly Asian Theatre for the past few years, championing the community needs and interests. From producing works, supporting emerging artists, and calling out the lack of diversity in Aotearoa’s performance spaces for Asian creatives.
Working with PAT on this project is smart for ATC, it provides them with some street cred for an institution that has otherwise been slow on the diversity and inclusion front.
Just a few years ago, ATC was still pumping out predominantly all-white casts and all-white production teams. (The two actors of colour had fleeting, almost silent roles).
Sacrifice of our parents
Single Asian Female is a thank you to the sacrifice our parents endure to bring up children in an Australasian space. As the character Pearl says, “food is the great equaliser, our stomachs are the same”.
Our parents run restaurants or takeaways so we can have a chance at a better life. They cook because they can, and it pays.
A scene familiar to me: older siblings running the tables while you sit in the corner finishing maths homework. Or being pulled in to do shift work even if you have prior commitments, because who else is going to run the family business?
Playwright Michelle Law isn’t afraid to pick apart the “tiger mum”, parenting trope. Pearl has so much love for her daughters Zoe (Xana Tang) and Mei (Bridget Wong). She’s funny, supportive and would do anything to protect her children. But she’s also snappy, harsh and overbearing.
Playwright Michelle Law … not afraid to pick apart the “tiger mum”, parenting trope. Image: Asia Media Centre
It tapped into a fair amount of mother issues I’m still carrying. My friends and I all walked out of the theatre slightly dazed, because “I’m pretty sure line for line, that’s something my Mum has said”.
I was pretty good at holding back the tears, until the final scenes when Zoe shares the songs Pearl would sing to calm her down when she has panic attacks. I sobbed a bit in the dark until the red lanterns and glitzy dance lights came on again for the karaoke finale spectacular.
I see how Asian mothers talk about their duty to their children. This martyrdom of suffering, of keeping up a strong face, often translates into coldness. Pearl’s chants of “I am strong,” is both inspiring and heart-wrenching.
Gorgeous one-liners The transition from the play’s original setting on the Gold Coast to Mt Maunganui provides some gorgeous one-liners about Winston Peters and L&P. But there are some awkward translations, with jokes about Penny Wong, openly queer Australian MP, not sitting as smoothly.
It felt like a missed opportunity to flesh out queerness in Chinese culture.
I understood the joke was in Pearl’s unexpected openness regarding sexuality (and her complete horror of Zoe’s unexpected pregnancy). But to use queerness as the punchline felt like a slap in the face as someone who’s continuing to unpack the trauma of being queer in a conservative Chinese family.
Other moments that stung include the racist comments Mei endures from her Pākeha high school friends. The internalised racism and identity unravelling is a particular point of growing up Kiwi-Asian.
But it frustrated me when on opening night, non-Asian audience members laughed at these comments. “Oi, it’s literally just our reality,” I wanted to shout.
At first, I struggled to place how old Mei was. But through her growth, I found her characterisation to be realistically matched with the sophistication 17-year-old teenage girls deserve.
Xana Tang’s performance as Zoe was particularly charming, while Kat Tsz Hung was flamboyant and unapologetic as Pearl. To see Asian women taking up space, loud and demanding attention is a necessary breakdown of the small, quiet and obedient stereotypes enforced upon us.
Director Cassandre Tse expertly moves us from moments of immense heartache and grief to fits of laughter. A balance and lightness needed to transport us through a two and a half hour play that holds rather heavy traumatic themes.
We’ve been waiting to hear our mothers, sisters and ourselves speak for so long, and now I just want even more.
Single Asian Female. By Michelle Law. ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland. 27 April– 15 May 2021. This review is republished from the Asia Media Centre under a Creative Commons licence.
Today marks the 40thanniversary of the death of Bobby Sands inside the H-blocks of Long Kesh internment camp. On 5 May 1981, Sands laid down his life for his and his comrades’ right for recognition as political prisoners. On this day, we should remember the sacrifice he made for the cause of Irish freedom. But his struggle does not just provide an example that all anti-imperialists should follow. It also serves as an important reminder of the ruthless brutality of the British government in Ireland under the leadership of then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. And that is equally something that we should never forget.
‘Criminalisation’ leads to ‘blanket protest’
On 1 March, 1976, the British government announced an end to ‘Special Category’ status for members of paramilitary organisations imprisoned for offences related to the conflict in Ireland. This formed part of a multi-pronged propaganda strategy to falsely portray the republican insurrection against British rule as some kind of aggravated crime wave.
In response, republican prisoners began a series of protests to regain the lost privileges, as well as the symbolic importance of prisoner of war status. This included the right to wear one’s own clothes, free association and exemption from prison work. IRA volunteer Kieran Nugent began the ‘blanket protest’ when he refused to wear a prison uniform. Thrown into his cell naked, he draped himself in the only thing available – a grey, prison-issue blanket.
The ‘dirty protest’ and the 1980 hunger strike
After suffering beatings from prison officers on their way to the shower areas, republican prisoners began the ‘no wash protest’, in which they refused to bathe, cut their hair or shave. When prison officers refused to empty their chamber pots, republican prisoners were forced to smear their own excrement on the walls, which marked the beginning of the ‘dirty protest’.
In 1979, their prospects became even bleaker with the election of the right-wing government of Margaret Thatcher in Britain. When it became clear that Thatcher wouldn’t grant even the most modest of concessions, republican prisoners began a hunger strike in 1980. It ended without any deaths when her government appeared to concede some of the strikers’ demands. But the document containing the terms of the agreement turned out to be vague and open to interpretation, and the prison regime was quickly returned to a situation little better than how it was before.
A second hunger strike, and this time to the death
Determined not to be double-crossed again, the new Officer Commanding (OC) of the republican prisoners, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, launched a second hunger strike with a crucial difference from the last. The strikers would stagger their joining of the fast one-by-one and two weeks apart so that each would near death one at a time. As OC, Sands volunteered to go first, making him the most likely to die. On 1 March, 1981, Sands refused his prison food, beginning the second hunger strike in Long Kesh just over two months after the end of the first.
On 5 March, less than a week into Sands’ fast, Frank Maguire, the independent nationalist member of parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving his seat in Westminster vacant. The republican leadership on the outside hatched a plan. They were forever getting dismissed by political opponents for not having a mandate, but if they stood Sands as a candidate in the resultant by-election and won, they could demonstrate to the British government and the wider world that the hunger strikers’ demands had popular support in the community.
A bittersweet victory
On 9 April 1981, Bobby Sands won the election with over 30,000 votes – almost 10,000 more than Thatcher had won in her home constituency of Finchley in the 1979 UK general election. The victory provided the republican movement with a powerful morale boost and demolished the British government’s argument that they had no support.
But in spite of Sands’ victory, along with international pressure from the Irish diaspora abroad and others around the world, Thatcher refused to budge. On May 5, 1981, Bobby Sands died of starvation 66 days into his fast at 27 years of age. Over 100,000 mourners lined his cortege in one of the largest political funerals in Irish history.
International outcry
Sands’ death led to international outcry at the treatment of the prisoners and Thatcher’s intransigence in meeting their demands. Critics pointed out that as members of a guerrilla army operating in contested territory, republican prisoners were entitled under the Geneva Convention to be recognised as prisoners of war. One letter, sent from one Bernard Sanders (then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the US), stated:
We are deeply disturbed by your government’s unwillingness to stop the abuse, humiliation and degrading treatment of the Irish prisoners now on strike in Northern Ireland…
We ask you to end your intransigent policy towards the prisoners before the reputation of the English people for fair play and simple decency is further damaged in the eyes of the people of Vermont and the United States.
In October 1981, the British government eventually conceded most of the prisoners’ demands; but not before nine more republican hunger strikers had followed Sands to the grave.
This episode perhaps shows more than any other the utter depravity, brutality, ruthlessness and lack of humanity that lurked within the twisted soul of Margaret Thatcher. All but one of the men were under 30 years old and left behind grieving mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and, in some cases, children – all for the ‘crime’ of fighting back against foreign oppression and discrimination in their own country.
Sands’ brave sacrifice stands as an example that all anti-imperialists and advocates of justice can aspire to. But it also serves as a reminder of Thatcher’s sordid legacy of death and destruction in Ireland.
In around six weeks, the G7 summit of world leaders will arrive on my doorstep. Since this was first announced, and as a veteran of previous summits, I’ve been worried about policing. Nothing Devon and Cornwall police have said to date has alleviated my fears.
On 28 April, the force held a Facebook Live event alongside the Cabinet Office, Cornwall Council, and Public Health Cornwall. It was supposed to be a protest special and they’d answer questions left in the chat. However, many of the actual questions on protest were ignored. But the cops did confirm that one random person’s wedding could go ahead. The event finished early because they’d apparently ‘run out of questions’.
In particular, the police refused to answer a question on whether any spycops would be present at the protest.
The question
The police were asked:
At the G8 Summit in 2005, 18 undercover police officers were present, several of whom had sexual relationships with activists. Can you reassure protesters that no undercover officers will be present at the G7 protests?
But it seems the police are unable to give that reassurance since the question was ignored. I contacted the G7 police media team to ask them for a comment about why they didn’t want to answer this question and why they finished the session early when there were questions still unanswered. I have still not received a reply at the time of publication.
PR and spin
It’s clear the police don’t really want to do anything other than promote their own PR and spin. They say they’re happy to allow protests to happen. But their designated sites for protest are all miles away from where the summit is taking place. One such place is in Exeter, 105 miles from the G7. I can’t even imagine why anyone would want to protest there or why the police even think this is a viable option. Falmouth, one of the other designated sites, is at least the media centre for the event. But the designated protest site is in a car park, off the main road, where no-one will see the protest.
Kevin Blowe, campaigns coordinator of the Network for Police Monitoring, told The Canary:
The latest Council of Europe Venice Commission guidance, which Britain has signed up to, says the police have a duty to “facilitate assemblies at the organizer’s preferred location and within ‘sight and sound’ of the intended audience”. Similarly the UN Human Rights Committee last year said “peaceful assemblies should not be relegated to remote areas where they cannot effectively capture the attention of those who are being addressed”. However, the proposed “protest sites” at Truro, Exeter, Plymouth and Falmouth are miles away from where the G7 summit is taking place. This is a deliberate attempt to crush their effectiveness.
Police Liaison Officers
Meanwhile, the police are using every opportunity to try to get protesters to talk to them. Throughout the briefing they made reference to their police liaison officers (PLOs) and how these friendly boys and girls in their baby blue bibs can help facilitate our protests. But as The Canary has previously reported, the main purpose of PLOs is to gather intelligence.
In fact, this was a point that was made for us during the Facebook Live event. In answering a question about whether violence was expected at the protests, chief superintendent Matt Longman stated:
I’ve already heard from some protest groups who are attending that they are a bit nervous about this, because they don’t want to be associated with that.
So not only are the police using people who are liaising with them for intelligence, they’re then quoting what people have said to them in a public forum.
And this type of response is exactly why the Resist G7 Coalition has made it clear that, as a coalition, it will not be talking to the cops:
The police will try and divide us. The coalition recognises and respects that groups may, in their individual capacity, feel the need to liaise with the police. But inevitably, those who do engage with the cops will be told, ‘oh but you’re the nice protesters, we’re happy with you. But look at those other nasty people – they’re the ones we’ve got a problem with’.
Divide and rule is, obviously, not new. But it is used time and again to break protest movements. The Resist G7 Coalition has taken great strides in a short time to bring together diverse groups. We recognise our collective power and our collective struggles. This unity brings a lot of strength that the cops will try and break. But hopefully through working together in a respectful way, with a clear code of conduct, we can overcome these efforts.
Protesters are the local community
Another tactic the police seem to be using is othering protesters. Repeated messages are painting those wishing to protest as outsiders – people coming into Cornwall to cause disruption. Protests will be allowed but only if they don’t have an impact or disrupt anyone. But as Blowe stated:
To begin with, “legal and safe protest” does not mean holding public assemblies “without impacting upon residents and businesses”. All protests by their nature cause some temporary disruption and all have some impact on others – that is what they are for. However, because freedom of assembly and expression are considered vital in a democratic society, the police should know they have a legal duty to avoid interfering with a protest unless certain clear conditions are met. They are also obliged to positively facilitate and protect protest rights where it is possible to do so.
But the police are also missing a crucial point. We are the local community. It’s the G7 that’s disrupting us. We didn’t ask for the summit to be held in Cornwall. We didn’t ask for 5,000 extra cops on our streets.
For six weeks, Cornwall has taken to the streets with hundreds of people coming out to oppose the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill. We have shown there is strong resistance here. And while many of us hope people will travel and join protests here in June, it’s vital that we recognise that protest is coming from and being organised by the local community.
A nasty surprise
As I’ve previously written, people are in for a nasty shock when the G7 arrives in Cornwall. Nothing that I’ve heard from the police so far has changed this opinion. By refusing to answer protesters’ questions and comment on spycops, the police have shown they’re not prepared to be accountable for their actions.
Their PR spin isn’t fooling anyone. Speaking to non-political people in my local town, there’s a lot of anger. Anger at the disruption the G7 will cause. And anger that the police think they can corral protests into irrelevant locations.
Meanwhile, people are getting organised. Most protest groups are sensible enough not to talk to the police. There will be resistance, and local people are already showing that Cornwall is a vibrant place for protest. We refuse to be divided, whether between different groups of protesters or between perceived notions of who forms the local community. And it’s through acting together that we will build solidarity and put Cornwall on the map as a place of resistance and rebellion.
Featured image via Kill the Bill Cornwall (with permission) and Emily Apple
is deeply concerned about the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem and Gaza. We call for rapid de-escalation from 
and 
. We call on Israel to cease demolitions and evictions and for both sides to halt steps which undermine prospects for a two state solution.
