NZ’s foreign policy shift adds to piling flashpoints
Posted: April 21, 2024 Filed under: Other, responses | Tags: 'who we are', colonialism, Donald Trump, exploitation mentality, Jacinda Ardern, Mosque shootings, NATO, Newsroom, nuclear deterrence, nuclear suicide, Rob Campbell Leave a commentAs the new Government moves New Zealand more clearly into the American camp, we risk further division as a country – and must challenge efforts to enmesh us in alliances against our interests.
by Rob Campbell
I pick only one point from Rob Campbell’s terrific statement to comment on – Jacinda Ardern (remember her?)
Read more: NZ’s foreign policy shift adds to piling flashpoints‘while engaging in flirting – if not foreplay – with Nato in Europe.’
Up to now, since the Labour Party with Jacinda Ardern became the previous government, this country’s biggest problem has been that PM’s unthinking instinct to support NATO, a very aggressive militaristic organization. It was based on the PM’s understanding of ‘who we are’ as a people and our history. Remember that the PM’s response to the mosque massacre was ‘this is not who we are’. Fair enough assertion in that circumstance, though over the following weeks and months there was much welcome discussion about the colonialist nature of our history. But undoubtedly ‘who we are’ was fundamentally important to that PM. And when she realized that her understanding was incorrect, she resigned. So I think your description of ‘flirting, or ‘foreplay’, while clever and to a point insightful, is not personal enough to that PM to get at the best description.
Now we have a new government which has a better understanding of the shallow and dangerous nature of that understanding of our history because it reflects its own exploitation ideology. They instinctively understand that that philosophy will not be workable in the future so they know this is their last chance to implement it. And, of course, it is global, not just here and not just in the person of Donald Trump. This leaves a civilization, aware of the need to fundamentally change, rudderless and with weapons available to end it all.
This clear view reveals that it would not be unrealistic to call this a global suicide pact. There is no such thing as ‘nuclear deterrence’ and there never has been – it’s a figment of a collective insanity.
Book Review for Foreign Control Watchdog, Christchurch – ‘Doppelganger’
Posted: April 4, 2024 Filed under: book, Other | Tags: "This Changes Everything", Allen Lane, colonialism, Doppelganger, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Jeckle and Hyde, Naomi Klein, No Logo, Penguin Books, The Shock Doctrine Leave a commentDoppelganger
A Trip Into the Mirror World
By Naomi Klein
Allen Lane (Penguin books) 2023
pp 348 plus pp 40 notes (plus links and more notes at NaomiKlein.org)
Other titles by Klein: No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything
Read more: Book Review for Foreign Control Watchdog, Christchurch – ‘Doppelganger’A Doppelganger is a double, a person very much like another person, or even oneself, or somehow being confused with oneself by others. Likely with some unexpected reactions by oneself or others to this duo. Or an individual with a split personality like Jeckle and Hyde. “For Freud, doppelgangers represented paths not taken, choices not made”. Or multiverse stories like depicted in the recent movie ‘Everything, Everywhere, All at Once’. The historical European colonialist attitude to indigenous cultures, disrespecting them and murdering them, then applying those attitudes to eat themselves from the inside in a ‘final solution’ of the German Nazis with the European Jews, creating a western / German doppelganger war in the 20th C. The subject of doubles is not unknown in literature. (e.g Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double, 1846, “A terrible multitude of duplicates had sprung into being”).
If I had ever heard of this phenomenon I don’t recall it. But we are living in a unique time in history and strange but real things are appearing from the collective. The Post Truth Era where denial has reached mainstream. The path we know we have to take for climate change, but are refusing to take, a cultural doppelganger. It might do for us to ponder how two activists seemingly similar in their earlier lives get to be so seemingly different, so opposed to each other, as well as how could a larger public get the two of them mixed up.
Klein is a story teller here, not just a descriptor. It is her personal story and she has found the experience surprizing and challenging, perhaps even life changing. While our world of climate change, nuclear threats, inequality, divisiveness and prejudice, racism and threats of ultimate violence, and wonderland-type rabbit holes is an important part of her story, the depth description and analysis of all that actually takes place only in the latter sections of the book, after her personal story is mostly told, and that is where her story and our world, comes to make more sense.
Klein’ first experience with the mixup was in 2011 in a public toilet near a planned march to support ‘Occupy’ when one of the marchers said to another, ‘Did you see what Naomi Klein said?’ Naomi Klein had said nothing about the march, though she supported it. Klein suddenly figured it out, and said to them, “I think you are talking about Naomi Wolfe.” Since then N. Wolfe has become a well known critic of vaccines, and a loud and confident spinner of conspiracy theories. Both Jewish, both with a fairly rare but powerful first name from the Hebrew bible. That’s just the beginning of her story, her relationship to ‘Other Naomi” (capital ‘O’, capital ‘N’).
Early on in her journey Klein recognizes that there are concerns about control shared by N. Wolfe and throughout society. But how did N. Wolfe get so focused on vaccines and deep conspiracies after her feminist years, while N. Klein had for some time been concerned and written much about climate change, corporate control, etc. and still was. N. Klein eventually had to become obsessed with N Wolfe’s journey in order to understand how it was insinuating itself into her life. That N. Wolfe had dropped into Steve Bannon’s world made it all worse but more necessary. This is the kind of discussion which all of Part Two (150 pages) is about. Klein tells her story from as many angles as she can, trying to get that clear picture of what all this crazy stuff is about.
Wolf was a feminist known for writing ‘The Beauty Myth’. But as Klein encountered her later she had become a regular guest of Steve Bannon. Playing to fears, many shared by Klein, but their stories , their explanations very different. Why when the explanations are right out there and which we know, do people so desperately want them not to be true, so that fantastical other explanations need to be invented?
Klein rediscovered Jewish author Philip Roth who in ‘Operation Shylock’ created a character named Philip Roth (Real Roth) who wrote books, same titles as his own, and there was another character named Philip Roth (Fake Roth) who is an activist not an author, an ‘actor’ so perhaps more ‘real’ than Real Roth. Roth’s theme is about creation of a ’New Jew’, a ‘gun toting, muscle bound Israeli’, ‘a Maccabean mirror of the chauvinist nationalists in Poland, Ukraine, and Germany who had used Jews as their scapegoats for so long’.
Another doppelganger example is the expropriation of terms like ‘othering’ used by Bannon to describe criticisms of his armed and bully followers. She also discovers that some former supporters of the Canadian NDP (leftish party) had jumped to the far-right People’s Party skipping the tory Conservative Party in the process, creating a doppelganger self.
A last example in Part Two from her own story is about autism, her son T. being autistic. She has been happy to learn that autism is on a spectrum of neurodiversity, not an illness or a condition, not something to try to change. She points to other cultures in other times when people might complain about ’changelings’, left them by a ‘fairy’ who had stolen their real child. (Irish and Celtic legends, for example.) There the autistic and the ‘normal’ was a doppelganger double. Klein notes how that kind of story became centre to the Nazis and led to many state murders even before the gas chambers. Even today I read a report of an elected official in Europe recommending special needs kids be returned to institutions, and ADHD people should be severely disciplined.
In Part Three and Part Four more descriptions of connections and threats are analysed. But through all this, I kept wondering when Klein was going to start digging deeper into ‘who we are’ to examine the source of all this rabbit hole phenomenon. Who We Are as a culture, as a species. My margin notes are full of this question. Previously when I had read (part of) The Shock Doctrine, I had noticed the same reluctance and I gave up finishing it. While the later stories become more focused on that, she rarely gets around to an explanation as to where from and why now the denial has come.
Klein comes close at the end of Part Two. Seeming more like an introduction to Parts Three and Four than a summary to Part Two, in the last paragraph of Part Two is this sentence, “At bottom, I suspect that much of the mirroring and doubling we are seeing comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see, to really look at – in our midst, in our past, and in the tumultuous future racing towards us.”
We may not bear to look at it, but by 2024 in The Post Truth Era, I think we in our collective do understand that our consumer-ist societies are not our future. And we find the changes required to deal with it terrifying, and we ‘can’t bear to see’. That is what has catalysed both the mainstream denial and rabbit hole behaviour. Klein does not emphasize that deeper look into our collective where she would find that source of our massive denial. But this must become a front and centre place in our discussions if we are to work through it all. The denial is overwhelming as evidenced in Aotearoa / New Zealand by the new empty-headed desperado government, but at the same time it is shallow so there is a chance the denial might over time fade into the dustbin of history. When / If that happens, will future generations even be able to imagine what we were like in our now?
Morgan Bach on Newsroom poeticises about her 80s-90s being gone now.
Posted: September 15, 2023 Filed under: Other, responses | Tags: "This Changes Everything", colonialism, David Seymour, denial, ecosphere, Helen Clark, Margaret Thatcher, Morgan Bach, Naomi Klein, National Party, neo-liberal, Post Truth Era, Roger Douglas, ronald reagan Leave a commentMorgan Bach, an ‘elder millennial’ (in her words) looks back on the class of 2000, “and the sweet nostalgia for a time that was actually quite rotten”. I see it as a 40 year long desperation up to now, and what next?
Read more: Morgan Bach on Newsroom poeticises about her 80s-90s being gone now.The ‘lie’ began with the neo-liberal coups in the 80s, but really the main thing was desperation, the desperation of the knowledge that we were ‘destroying the planet’, now the new more descriptive term, our ‘ecosphere’. The lie has been part of the denial, yes, but more importantly, the counter attack on the realization that the world had changed, as Naomi Klein titled her book, “This Changes Everything”.
And this desperation and aggression was not hidden, just renamed by Roger Douglas in this country, and by Reagan and Thatcher. It has carried on for 40 years. In our time we all know we have to change fundamentally to deal with the possible worst of climate apocalypses but the realization is terrifying that we hide from it, supporting the empty-headed desperadoes of National and henchman the light-headed fantasies of te pati Seymour. Main stream politician Helen Clark has recently labeled our time as a ‘silly season’, and she is right. But its’s more than silly, it is suicidal, and the path was already established in her years as PM, now having been going on for 40 years.
And we do know this. So the denial which is in the mainstream today (‘The Post Truth Era’) can unexpectedly turn around, even suddenly. The old realizations of colonial exploitative Business As Usual, can become seen as from the past, now gone (lost innocence? or perhaps lost desperation, gained determination?) Thanks, Morgan, for a poetic inspiration for these paragraphs here.
Praising Donna Miles, The Post columnist.
Posted: August 23, 2023 Filed under: Letters | Tags: Aotearoa / New Zealand, colonialism, Dave Armstrong, Donna Miles, Dr. Siouxsie Wiles, Josie Pagani, Kiwi mythologies, Rob Campbell, The Post, Tracy Watkins Leave a commentMy ‘not for publishing’ letter to new editor of The Post, Tracy Watkins, about The Post columnists, especially praising the best, Donna Miles.
Read more: Praising Donna Miles, The Post columnist.Hello The Post,
Editor Tracy Watkins,
Thank you for your brilliant columnist Donna Miles. After Donna, Dave Armstrong and Siouxsie Wiles are the best. The others, as a block, are mediocre at best by comparison. There is one recent challenger, Rob Campbell; I wait to see how that works through.
Donna is so good for us here in Aotearoa / New Zealand, I think, because she is a refugee, an immigrant with problems in her home country of Iran. Her article last Monday, speaking of “the Maori privilege myth” is illustrative of her contribution to this country. With her perspective more global, that is not having grown up here within the colonialist culture inherent in this country, she can discuss the issues facing the country and still retain her more global perspective. Hence, she is not afraid to call a myth a myth; honest language. Honest language is very important when it contrasts to the mainstream conversation.
By contrast there are columnists, especially you, Tracy Watkins, and Josie Pagani, who have the experience of being largely within the colonialist culture so that you can talk about and around the inherent privilege of that colonialist history, but in the end say nothing about it. And get away with it! John Key in the eight years he was Prime Minister never said anything and that was why he was one of the most popular PMs in recent memory.
Sincerely,
Richard Keller
Letter to (about) Roger Douglas (remember him?)
Posted: July 29, 2023 Filed under: Letters | Tags: 'There is no alternative', colonialism, David Seymour, exploitation mentality, Maggie Thatcher, neo-liberal, New Zealand, Roger Douglas, ronald reagan, TINA, UK, USA Leave a comment Read more: Letter to (about) Roger Douglas (remember him?)The Editor, The Post, Wellington
23/07/ 2023
Dear Editor:
Roger Douglas of eighties neo-liberal fame is complaining that David Seymour’s version of ACT is pandering to the wealthy elite which Douglas says was not his original intent. Well he is certainly right that ACT policies favour the rich, but both Douglas’s and Seymour’s. Douglas should remember that the neo-liberal was championed by Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK among many other places. Everywhere it catered to the rich. That’s where the great growth in inequality of the last 40 years has come from and continues today.
The neo-liberal was desperately touted to be the ‘only way’. (TINA –There Is No Alternative). ‘Only way’ for what? That no-other-way pandering to the rich is exploitative of people and is also consistent with the colonialist history of many outposts of the European empires, including New Zealand. And more generally the attack on the globe’s ecospheres through centuries of human-separatist-supremacist ideology and practice. So the breadth of the neo-liberal can also be seen to be responsible for the depth of denial of the continuing changes over the next decades necessary to avoid the worst of climate apocalypse. This threat is so well known by now that TINA may yet prove to be the only way to ‘prevent’ those necessary changes.
Sincerely,
Richard Keller
Big picture of lack of responsibility to the most vulnerable
Posted: June 29, 2023 Filed under: Other, responses | Tags: "who are we?", colonialism, Loafers Lodge, Scoop Wellington Leave a commentScoop Wellington reports on the memorial service for those who died in the Loafers Lodge fire. My look at the historical context.
Read more: Big picture of lack of responsibility to the most vulnerableLack of responsibility toward the most vulnerable has been around for a time. Colonialism first brought to New Zealand the arrogant and exploitative notion that civilization cannot exist in a forested land, but now we see that there is more of a future with forested land than with our kind of ‘civilization’.
Coming to grips with climate change and the admission that only massive changes to our ‘way of consumerist life’, that is, ‘who we are’, is necessary to move forward. Now that would change our attitude to the most vulnerable!
New Zealand’s foreign policy is not ‘independent’ – look at Solomon Islands response
Posted: June 2, 2022 Filed under: Other, responses | Tags: Afghanistan, Christchurch killings, colonialism, Five Eyes, Iraq war, New Zealand government, Pacific military bases, Rainbow Warrior, Robert Ayson, Splomon Islands, USA, Viet Nam war Leave a commentRobert Ayson of Vic U’s article reprinted on Newsroom treats claims of an independent foreign policy shallowly (though traditionally).
Read the rest of this entry »The increasingly strange Post Truth Era in NZ explained.
Posted: November 25, 2021 Filed under: Letters | Tags: 'clean and green', auckland, classless society, colonialism, COVID-19, Delta variant, Jacinda Ardern, Judith Collins, military alliance, money counters, New Zealand, New Zealand government, nuclear free NZ, Post Truth Era, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, traditional allies 1 CommentThe Editor, The Listener, Auckland
25/11/ 2021
Dear Editor:
We are living in the Post Truth Era where denial has become main stream. And this denial is leading us into a period looking continuously more strange.
Read the rest of this entry »What’s in a name? – the name of this country
Posted: September 27, 2021 Filed under: Other, responses | Tags: 'All New Zealanders', Afghanistan, Afghanistan interpreters, anti-colonialist, Aotearoa, Aotearoa / New Zealand, climate change, colonialism, exploitation, exploitation mentality, great replacement, imperialism, New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern 1 CommentI’ve been invited to sign a petition to not change the name of this country, keeping it ‘New Zealand’. This is my response:
Read the rest of this entry »How ‘main stream’ is far-right ideology in the USA?
Posted: September 15, 2021 Filed under: Letters, Letters-to-overseas | Tags: collective subconscious, colonialism, cultural history, Donald Trump, exploitation mentality, far right ideology, fear, history, imperialism, Madison, President, The Progressive, Wisconsin Leave a commentSeptember 14, 2021
The Editor, The Progressive Magazine
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Hello The Progressive,
The look at far right groups in your April / May print edition is informative and interesting. But it only hints at the discussion as to whether and how much of their message has made it into the main stream.
Read the rest of this entry »