TV Review: Songs from the Inside

Songs from the Inside is a brilliant documentary series currently on Maori TV about four musicians coaching inmates at Arohata and Rimutaka to write their own songs.

The documentary is a welcome antidote to “reality TV”. Both the producer Maramena Roderick and director Julian Arahanga are very aware that they do not want to create a prison version of Idol.

There are so many shows today glamorizing the cops and encouraging us to identify with their brutality - like Highway Patrol - and an endless stream of crime shows trying to make us support the police and ‘law and order’ panics. Songs from the Inside cuts against all of this, and all of the right-wing ‘law and order’ politics of both main parties from the last decades. It is not afraid to show colonization, racism, loss of language and culture, and oppression, as issues that lead to so many young Maori men and women ending up in prison.

What the documentary manages to do is portray both the musicians - Anika Moa, Warren Maxwell, Maisey Rika and Ruia Aperahama - and inmates’ relationships developing throughout the series in a breathtakingly honest and brave way. The openness and trust that develops between them allows the documentary to explore issues of sexuality, drugs, crime, and remorse. And above all, the documentary humanizes the inmates/students so that viewers can identify and relate to them.

Even though the show isn’t explicitly political, in today’s New Zealand media culture telling those stories is a radical move.

Songs from the Inside is on Sundays 8PM. Previous episodes can be watched on demand

Listen to the interview featuring the producer and director of Songs discussing these issues and more with Kim Hill


Shomi Yoon

We Remember Blair Peach

Blair Peach was murdered at the hands of the Metropolitan Police on 23rd April 1979. Blair was an east London teacher who had gone to Britain from New Zealand. He was also a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Anti Nazi League. He was killed protesting at the Nazi National Front (NF), which was holding a meeting in the predominantly Asian area of Southall, west London.

Amidst a climate of crisis and terror - as the FN in France celebrate a big vote in the presidential elections, and as the mainstream media report Breivik's hate-filled fascist testament from Norway - the causes Blair gave his life for, anti-racism and anti-fascism, have lost none of their relevance or urgency.

We reprint an article from the British Socialist Worker below, which was first published to mark the 25th anniversary of Blair Peach's death. A further article from 2010 provides updates on the long campaign to bring Peach's killers to justice.

The International Socialists celebrates Blair Peach's life as a socialist, unionist, teacher, and anti-racist. We will mark his memory by continuing the struggle against oppression and racism here in Aotearoa.

***

"As the police rushed past him, one of them hit him on the head with the stick. I was in my garden and saw this quite clearly. He was left sitting against the wall. He tried to get up, but he was shivering and looked very strange. He couldn't stand. Then the police came back and told him, 'Move! Come on, move!' They were very rough with him and I was shocked because it was clear he was seriously hurt."

This was the shocking testimony of Southall resident Parminder Atwal, one of the witnesses to the murder of Blair Peach at the hands of the Metropolitan Police on 23 April 1979. Last Friday, 25 years after his murder, a piece of artwork was unveiled and a memorial meeting held in the area where he was killed.
Blair was an east London teacher who had come over from New Zealand. He was also a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Anti Nazi League. He was killed protesting at the Nazi National Front (NF), which was holding a meeting in the predominantly Asian area of Southall, west London. His police killers still walk free.

The National Front had announced it would hold a "general election" meeting in Ealing Town Hall on Monday 23 April 1979. Local people were appalled. They knew that fascist meetings bring fascist violence. Three years earlier an NF-inspired gang had stabbed Gurdip Singh Chaggar to death in Southall.
But the local Tory council gave the Nazis Ealing town hall to meet in. Local people did all they could to get the meeting banned. The day before 5,000 people marched to the Town Hall.

Southall Anti Nazi League activist Balwinder Rana recalls, "The march was attacked by the police, who picked fights all along the way." The then Labour home secretary, Merlyn Rees, refused to ban the meeting. Three thousand police, with dogs, horses, riot vans, a helicopter and units of the notorious Special Patrol Group poured into Southall.

At lunchtime Southall's shops closed in protest at the Nazi meeting. Some factories shut down and Asian workers at nearby Heathrow airport walked out. Anti-Nazis arrived in Southall in solidarity. At around 3.30pm some demonstrators tried to get on a bus going through the police cordon. The police threw everyone off. Those arrested included Mr Rihal, on his way home to look after his wife who had just left hospital.

The police later lied and said he had damaged the bus. He got three months in jail. As Balwinder recalls, "At about 6.30pm people started to go towards the town hall. Suddenly the cordon parted and police on horseback came through and started to hit people with long batons. They attacked men, women and children." Police vans speeded through the hemmed-in crowd.

Inside the Nazi meeting the local NF candidate was pledging to "bulldoze Southall to the ground and replace it with an English hamlet". People outside were confronted with a full-blown police riot. The Daily Telegraph recorded what happened:

"Within three minutes mounted police had cornered about 50 demonstrators against the churchyard walls. As we watched, several demonstrators were dragged crying and screaming to the nearby police station. Nearly every demonstrator had blood flowing from some injury."

The police surrounded 6 Park Road, which been designated a first aid and advice centre. The police kicked the door in and forced everyone to run a gauntlet of truncheon blows to get out.

Local activist Clarence Baker had been told earlier by the police, "You black bastard. We are going to get you." He remembered, "About six were hitting me with their truncheons. I felt one blow. I did not feel anything after that."

Clarence ended up in intensive care with a blood clot on his brain. At least three protesters were hit so hard their skulls fractured. Blair Peach was one of them. "At least two Special Patrol Group vans came up," remembers Blair's friend Jo Lang, who chaired last week's memorial meeting. The officers got out and charged us. We ran, but Blair wasn't with us. So we went back to look for him. An Asian family had taken him into their living room. You couldn't see how badly injured he was. It was later said that he was hit with a lead-filled cosh. While he was in the ambulance he started having fits. At 12 o'clock they phoned and told us he was dead."

News of his death sent shock waves through the British working class. The day before he was buried 4,000 local Asian people filed past Blair Peach as he lay in Southall's Dominion Cinema. Throughout the night Southall youth maintained a guard of honour over him. The next day the cortege travelled to east London.
Bengali people from Brick Lane, who Blair had stood with against Nazi terror, paid their respects. There were 13 national union banners on the 10,000-strong funeral procession. TUC president Ken Gill spoke at the graveside alongside Tony Cliff of the SWP.

When the lockers and some houses of Special Patrol Group members were later searched coshes, knives, bayonets, swords and Nazi regalia were found. The unit was later disbanded. But since then the police have been consistently deployed to defend Nazi events: from Bradford to Welling in south London, and in Birmingham and Manchester last weekend.

Surge in Fascist Vote as French Politics Polarises

by Jim Wolfreys in Paris, writing for Socialist Worker


The first round of the French presidential election has revealed a dramatic rise in support for Marine Le Pen’s fascist Front National (FN).

Le Pen came third in the exit polls with 18 percent, behind the Socialist Party's François Hollande (29 percent) and the current right wing president Nicolas Sarkozy (27 percent). The FN’s support, up from 10 percent in 2007, represents around 6.5 million votes, the most ever won by the French extreme right.
How has this situation come about?

Mainstream commentators point to the FN’s “softer” image under Marine Le Pen as evidence that it has become more moderate. This is false. She may have made cosmetic changes to the party's public image, but the self-styled “revolutionary nationalists” who created it in the early 1970s always aimed to adapt fascism to present day conditions. She is still pursuing this strategy.

Over the past five years the FN has become the main beneficiary of Nicolas Sarkozy’s obsession with “national identity.” His presidency has combined austerity measures with a grotesque “bling-bling” lifestyle and the most relentlessly racist agenda of any modern French president.

The government has established and ruthlessly implemented deportation quotas for “illegal” immigrants. Roma camps have been smashed up and a vicious and sustained attack has been launched on France’s Muslim population. The state has decreed what Muslims should wear and where they should pray—by banning the wearing of the niqab in public and outlawing praying in the street. Sarkozy’s election campaign featured attempts, following Le Pen’s lead, to create moral panics about halal meat and Islamic fundamentalism.

The Islamophobia of politicians and parties across the political spectrum has legitimised the FN. This has made it easier for millionaire’s daughter Marine Le Pen to masquerade as an opponent of the “elite” and its austerity measures. She proclaims her party to be “the only opposition to the ultra-neoliberal left.”
Sarkozy and Hollande will now contest the second round of the election on 6 May. Polls suggest that Hollande is likely to win.

Despite the shock of the FN vote, the left has achieved its highest overall first round score since 1988. This was made up of support for Hollande’s programme of “fair austerity” and those who voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left Front. His proposals for wealth redistribution and ecological renewal won 11 percent, with 1.2 percent voting for the New Anti-Capitalist Party.

Mélenchon rightly argues that the Sarkozy-Merkel axis at the heart of the European austerity project must be broken. The left has therefore to ensure Sarkozy is defeated in the second round.
Although the radical left vote is lower than anticipated, it indicates significant support for an alternative to austerity. An employers’ offensive is going to follow the second round, whoever wins. Fighting this will require a movement of industrial and political resistance that achieves maximum unity.

This means the left needs actively to confront the Front National and the tide of Islamophobia that has made racism respectable in France. The consequences of its failure to do this so far are there for all to see today. But so, also, is its potential to provide solutions to the crisis of French society.

The FN can be defeated. In the 1990s anti-fascists mobilised against its meetings and engaged in “democratic harassment” of the organisation. This helped provoke a damaging split in the party from which it is only now recovering.

On the eve of the election Mélenchon derided Le Pen as an abomination—“the Yeti of French politics”—and “a road-mender of the crusades”. He compared those who argued “Better Le Pen than Mélenchon” to those who argued “Better Hitler than the Popular Front” in the 1930s. The comparison is valid. The task now is to translate fine words into action.

[This article was first published at Socialist Worker UK]

Wellington: Queer the Night

Mark your diaries and start spreading the word: march on Friday 11th May, 7pm from Waitangi Park to protest homophobia and transphobia. More information from The Queer Avengers here. The event is also on Facebook.

[For theory and background reading see Norah Carlin's classic "The Roots of Gay Oppression", and this archive of articles on LGBTI theory and struggle]

Afghanistan: the Mission is the Atrocity

[Iraq war veteran Phil Aliff wrote this for the U.S. socialist website Socialist Worker earlier in the week. As the current round of NZ SAS meddling in the region draws to a close, it is of particular relevance here. We also recommend the SW articles “A warthat guarantees atrocities” and Helen Redmond's “An accepted part of the occupation”]

THE LAST few weeks have been catastrophic for the U.S./NATO occupation of Afghanistan.
Days of violent protests against the U.S. military followed the burning of Korans at a military base in late February, leaving scores dead and injured. Then, 38-year-old Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales left his outpost before dawn on March 11 and murdered 17 Afghan civilians.


The news of this tragedy evoked memories of incidents such as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and raised new questions for Americans about whether the war in Afghanistan can really still be called "the good war."


The atrocities committed by Bales in Kandahar province, the historic home of the Afghan Taliban, cost the lives of four men, four women, two boys and seven girls in two villages.
Since the massacre, the U.S. military has struggled to contain what it considers a "public relations" nightmare by focusing the blame on this individual soldier who suddenly "snapped"--as if the problem of overstressed soldiers is limited to a "few bad apples." This is the military's common refrain in previous instances in which soldiers have committed atrocities as part of the "war on terror."


But this is merely a smokescreen used to avoid addressing the fundamental questions that such atrocities raise about the role of the U.S. around the world, as well as the pattern of utter disregard for people touched by these conflicts--whether Afghan or American--that U.S. officials have repeatedly demonstrated.


In order for the occupation to be carried out, dehumanizing Afghans is a necessity of U.S. military strategy. Islamophobia and disregard for the Koran are mainstays of military life. This is exacerbated by the fact that occupation inevitably breeds resistance, which explains why the U.S. easily toppled the Afghanistan's Taliban government more than 10 years ago, but now faces the prospect of humiliation in the longest war in U.S. history.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


IN THE first chapter of The Forging of the American Empire, author Sidney Lens explains that the idea that the U.S. is a benevolent superpower is based on the "myth of morality":


America the benevolent, however, does not exist and never has existed. The United States has pilfered large territories from helpless or near-helpless peoples; it has forced its will on scores of nations, against their wishes and against their interests; it has violated hundreds of treaties and understandings; it has committed war crimes as shocking as most; it has wielded a military stick and a dollar carrot to forge an imperialist empire such as man has never known before.


This has never been clearer than now. The war in Afghanistan has cost thousands of lives and destabilized Central Asia. Yet U.S. officials trumpet the military occupation of a country half a world away as a mission in the service of human rights, democracy, the liberation of Afghan women and the protection of Americans from terrorism--all while creating conditions that lead to tragedies like the recent massacre.


U.S. officials celebrate their "close collaboration" with "our allies in Afghanistan"--while subjecting Afghans to drone attacks, violent night raids, increased poverty and dehumanizing interactions with NATO occupation forces. It's the white man's burden all over again--bringing civilization through barbarism, destroying the village in order to save it.


This is bound to generate a growing fury, and yet the U.S. military can't seem to understand why Afghan soldiers and police might vent their resentments on their "benevolent masters."
It is this clash--between the official rhetoric about Afghan allies on the one hand and the reality of despair and anger among actual Afghans on the other--that creates the strain on U.S. soldiers, a constant anxiety that any Afghan man, woman or child might be the enemy. And if anyone and everyone is a potential enemy, then anyone and everyone is also a potential target.


As the call for war intensified in the days after September 11, the U.S. looked to Afghanistan as the first step in a grand military campaign to reshape the Middle East and Central Asia.


The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was motivated by far more than just revenge. It was meant to secure one of the world's key oil pipeline corridors and demonstrate U.S. power in a region close to China and Russia, the two most powerful competitors to U.S. imperialism.


In order to maintain the occupation, the U.S. has relied on President Hamid Karzai, who is now known as the "Mayor of Kabul" because of the inability of the central government to exercise any significant control over Afghan territory beyond the nation's capital.


Karzai, who was one of the mujahedeen's chief fundraisers during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and a CIA contact, has done nothing to increase social and economic mobility for Afghans. Instead, he has absorbed warlords with a long list of human rights abuses into his government and overseen one of the most corrupt countries in the world--all with U.S. backing.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


THE SITUATION is bleak for most Afghans--particularly women--caught in the vise of a decade-long war with no clear end in sight. According to a 2010 UN study on poverty in Afghanistan, 36 percent of the population lives in absolute poverty, while another 37 percent lives just above the poverty line. This is despite an estimated $35 billion in aid that flooded the country between 2002 and 2009.
According to a Thomson Reuters poll in 2010, Afghanistan is ranked as the most dangerous country in the world for women. This is despite the justification that the U.S. is occupying Afghanistan in order to liberate women. According to an Afghan government report, 2,300 women attempt to kill themselves each year, mainly due to factors such as poverty and domestic violence.


Indiscriminate air strikes are another characteristic of the increasingly dangerous situation in Afghanistan. The use of drone aircraft and airstrikes has increased dramatically under the Obama administration and routinely affects women and children, such as the bombing of civilians in May 2009, which killed up to 120 people in the province of Farah.


The last decade of warfare has not only produced a horrific situation for the people of Afghanistan, but also for U.S. service members who are facing a mental health epidemic.


According to a Pentagon study, the number of service members hospitalized for suicidal thoughts increased by 7,000 percent between 2006 and 2011. The number of soldiers diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) rose six-fold between 2003 and 2008.


Despite the statistics, many soldiers are repeatedly deployed with mental health issues, increasing the likelihood of tragedies such as the massacre in Kandahar province. The blame for the mental health epidemic in the military also cannot be attributed to a "few bad apples"--unless, of course, those bad apples are sitting in the Pentagon.


The Army systematically ignored the health of Sgt. Bales, who was on his fourth deployment. Bales clearly needed care for PTSD as well as a traumatic brain injury reportedly suffered during an earlier deployment.


The idea that this is an isolated incident only deflects blame from the military leaders and the Obama administration, who have ignored this epidemic for years.


The Koran burning, pictures of Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, the bombing of wedding parties and the massacre carried out by Bales are related. The dehumanization of Afghans, along with the mental health epidemic in the U.S. military, has created the conditions for these atrocities to occur.


The only way to end the ongoing commission of atrocities in Afghanistan is a complete withdrawal of all NATO forces from the region. The decade-long war has been a nightmare for Afghans and U.S. soldiers alike, costing thousands of lives and creating fundamental instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Every day the U.S. remains only exacerbates this already bad situation.

Nationalise Oceania!

Low paid aged care workers and nurses were out on strike again on 19^th March. The action was at 22 out of Oceania’s 57 homes, which are run on public money for private profit. They have our full support. Their stand is an example to other workers, and shows that workers in all industries can stand up and fight back. 

Oceania pay their care givers an appalling basic rate of just $13.61, a smidgen above the minimum wage that will be $13.50 from April. Qualified nurses are paid more of course, but less than in the public sector. They only get $8.33 on top of basic when they work a weekend shift.  Oceania’s latest offer is a miserly 1.72% increase, but only from February and not backdated to last June when the last collective agreement expired. But the offer is worse than even this because Oceania want to cut overtime rates.

As paymasters the government are partners in this crime. Oceania got a 2.6% increase in their public funding last June but refuse to pass it on to staff pay. In a labour-intensive service industry John Key is effectively capping pay to below inflation levels.

What should be done? For starters the union movement should raise a storm of protest and not leave the Oceania unions SWFU and NZNO to battle on alone. The SWFU and NZNO strikes are an inspiration, and have drawn others into the  union and into struggle. Two SFWU delegates from Oceana spoke to a Unions Wellington meeting last Friday and talked of the determination of union members on the picket lines. But the care givers left to fight by themselves have little industrial power, and illegal solidarity strike action by workers in sectors with greater power is unrealistic. However, the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) and all unions could back the strikers’ public protests to the hilt by calling on members to join in. We marched with the watersiders, we can do the same in town after town with the Oceania workers and the elderly folks’ families.

It is not only the greedy Oceania owners who need to be exposed. The politicians are responsible for the elderly care service being run for profit. Quite simply Oceania and the other private outfits should be nationalised without compensation. The public already pay for the care for the elderly. Why should profit be skimmed off at the expense of poverty pay and minimal standards? Those false friends of workers, the Labour Party, could make nationalisation a manifesto policy and pledge to make elderly care the quality public service it should be. Keeping the status quo means condemning women care workers to poverty pay indefinitely, because that is what privately contracted publicly funded services are designed to do. Only as a public service could women care workers ever get the recognition they deserve for a demanding job that, let’s face it, few men have the skills to do. Unless Labour, and the Greens, take up the call for nationalisation their support for the care workers is nothing but hogwash.

There is another false friend abroad, and that is the call for New Zealand ownership. Bryan Gould wrote an otherwise excellent piece on the dispute, but lamented that Oceania was Australian-owned (New Zealand Herald, 14 March 2012).

“Like most overseas owners, Oceania have little knowledge of and even less interest in the welfare of their New Zealand workers - to say nothing of New Zealand customers and taxpayers.”

“The real goal of privatised companies is profit, not service. We cannot prevent privatised firms - despite the government's obfuscation on this issue - from falling into foreign hands. Enterprises owned overseas have little concern for the interests of their workforce. New Zealand workers are increasingly at the mercy of hard-nosed employers.”

Quite frankly this all-New Zealanders-together nationalism is nonsense. The for-profit elderly care service is a made in New Zealand construct. It operates under New Zealand made anti-union labour laws. There is no evidence at all that New Zealand employers are better to their workers than Australian; in fact it would be easy to make an argument to the contrary. But it is not a question what set of employers have better morals because all capitalists have the same immorality, to exploit and make the most profit possible. The New Zealand ruling class is as greedy as any and gets away with it more than most. The main enemy is at home. The real question Bryan Gould should be asking is how do we build a workers’ movement powerful enough to get rid of the profit system.

Pay the Oceania workers’ 3.5% claim today!

Nationalise the elderly care service and pay women a living wage tomorrow!

[Photo Credit: Service and Food Workers' Union website. Look out for details of how to support the strike action coming on Easter Thursday, 5th April]

Justice for the Urewera Four!

The most expensive case in New Zealand history, and for what? Millions of dollars have been spent on a vindictive and farcical prosecution, at the cost of untold stress, emotional harm and upset for the people of Tuhoe. In February we called the treatment of the Urewera Four an “anti-democratic outrage”, and stand by that today. The police case continued for reasons of malice and political mischief – there were gains to be made in creating a ‘terror’ threat. Tuhoe, yet again, have borne the burden for that.

A police officer responsible for the case was quoted on National Radio this morning as saying he ‘wasn’t hung up’ on jury decisions. Well he might say this; in 2007 the police tried to make out that they had busted up an imminent terrorist threat. As the months and years went on plank after plank of their lurid War on Terror fantasy fell away. All that is left now are a gaggle of firearms charges, and even many of those were thrown out by the jury.

Commentator Morgan Godfrey gets it right:

The government and the Police owe Tuhoe an apology. Ruatoki was attacked, and I deliberately use the word attacked, as school buses were searched by armed police, kaumatua and kuia were illegally detained, men and women were man handled and mistreated all for a few firearm charges. Charges that are so remote from what the Police were alleging. It’s a sorry affair.

Hone Harawira calls the decision “justice denied”, and reminds us of vital context:

Yesterday should have been about the triumph of justice, but it wasn’t. All we got a sad and sorry end to a tragic raid into the heartland of the Tuhoe because after all the drama, the high expectation and grainy videos, yesterday the jury could only return guilty verdicts on firearms charges. That’s all we got after a four year campaign that cost the taxpayers millions of dollars, divided the nation, and gave people genuine reason to fear the police.

Because today, justice is still denied to the people of Tuhoe.

Today the case may finally be over but not for the people of Tuhoe. There has been no apology, no compensation, no change in police operations and no new engagement policy initiated as a result of the litany of errors we now know as Operation 8.

Today we remember those who have passed on since 2007. Today we remember the pain and suffering brought upon the people of Tuhoe by the state … again.

Today I commit the energy and the support of the MANA Movement to standing against those who would use the Terrorism Suppression Act and the Search and Surveillance Bill to crush independent thinking, to force us to fear what we say and to hide what we do and to stop us from choosing freedom over oppression.

And today I salute Tame Iti and his comrades for their dignity, for their courage, for their passion and for their love for this land.

This trial was the latest in a long history of frame-ups and politically-motivated prosecutions aimed at damaging and disrupting the movement for Tino Rangatiratanga. Attacks in the past have never succeeded in destroying that movement. This one won’t either.

Tuhoe deserve full compensation and an apology from the government and the police for the outrages carried out in Ruatoki.

The struggle continues.