Trust in New Zealand’s media is in decline.
Why is this happening? Many explanations are given: Journalists are overworked and unable to dedicate adequate time to their stories. Too much opinion has bled into news. Social media is undermining traditional media’s role in shaping public perceptions. There’s too much reliance on sensationalism and clickbait in the digital environment.
To that I would add that many journalists do themselves few favours with their belittling attitude towards the public, particularly on social media. Journalistic standards have cratered, most notably in print. Getting through an entire New Zealand Herald or Stuff article feels like an exercise in self-flagellation.
The reason I distrust New Zealand’s media is mostly because it acts as a buttress for an economic orthodoxy, established in the 1980s, which has failed so many New Zealanders. The stripping back of a more egalitarian state in the name of the free market has widened divisions in society and created new ones.
Despite the Herald or Stuff or Newshub carving out separate audience markets on social-political bases, they are remarkably uniform in how they treat the economic structures that govern us.
News is framed around a narrow set of ideological beliefs. In practice, this means the exaltation of private wealth, the bolstering of free market and business imperatives as omnibenevolent forces, and an unquestioning faith in globalisation. This is despite the devastating impact that neoliberalism and hyper-globalisation are having on society and the environment.
The most glaring recent example of this type of economy-first thinking came during the Covid lockdowns, where a narrow range of special interests were given endless space in the media to assail the public health response, like the following from Hospitality New Zealand chief executive Julie White in Stuff during 2021’s Delta outbreak: “Now it’s 100 per cent [Ministry of] Health running the show . . . No one is advising them commercially.”
Reporters often adopted the attack lines of the political opposition, most notably Barry Soper, who took to describing the daily press briefings as officials speaking from “the podium of truth” — an insidious framing calculated to undermine trust in the health response. Almost all media launched sustained assaults on lockdown measures, despite remarkably durable public support for the strategy. And it began early, with free-marketeers Luke Malpass and Thomas Coughlan writing in The Sydney Morning Herald that New Zealand had become a “police state” with “Soviet-style queues” — language that would later feature prominently among New Zealand’s conspiracy crowd and the intolerant racist right.
I will never forget the Herald’s front-page story on June 8, 2020, before the cabinet had even met to discuss a move into alert level 1, headlined: “Only 1 Option.” More recently, both One News and The Post have engaged in a kind of revisionism, in which Auckland’s lockdowns are presented as both “disproportionate” and widely hated. A recent story in The Post, entitled “When Will Auckland Forgive Labour?”, relied on interviews with a PR practitioner and a centre-right partisan.
Do national reporters even speak — and listen — to a public whose interests they claim to represent?
In foreign news, too, our national media has long failed the public — and now, dangerously so.
Having largely outsourced foreign news to international wire services, and to newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph or The Washington Post (which are key nodes in the western imperial architecture), our national media has effectively positioned itself in opposition to the nation’s purportedly independent foreign policy.
Our foreign, defence and intelligence agencies have done much the same. In wanting to play with the big boys, the state bureaucracy, coupled with a grasping political class, appears likely to drag New Zealand into a US-instigated Asia-Pacific conflict that serves none of our interests.
When you consider how close we came in 1985 to accepting US nuclear armed and powered ships in our waters (as outlined by Nicky Hager in this revelatory piece) it’s not surprising that we find ourselves at a similar point in our history.
Christopher Luxon, in a recent interview with The Financial Times, was bullish when he declared that New Zealand was “very open” to being part of AUKUS Pillar 2. At the same time, he cast China, by far our biggest trading partner, as the enemy — a move which hasn’t gone unnoticed there. In a piece entitled “NATO barbarians are expanding and gathering at the gates of Asia,” South China Morning Post columnist Alex Lo writes:
Most regional countries want none of it, but four Trojan horses — South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand — are ready to let them in.
Has it crossed [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken’s mind that most of Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, don’t want NATO militarism to infect their parts of the world like the plague?
Over the last few years, we’ve seen how, with a few exceptions, our media has lined up unquestioningly behind narratives that serve powerful vested interests. Truth, as the saying goes, is the first casualty of war. It’s also a casualty of our vanities and prejudices, and the myths about the west that we’ve absorbed. We’re hearing echoes of that in the way our political leaders are falling into line with our so-called traditional allies. We in the west are the good guys, standing for truth, justice and democracy.
This is nonsense.
Take the war in Ukraine, for example. Thanks to western media coverage, most people in the west have a skewed picture about the rights and wrongs of this conflict. The narrative of an imperialist Russia launching an “unprovoked” war against the brave, underdog Ukrainians is barely challenged in mainstream newsrooms. And you’d be hard-pressed to find anything that questions the role played by NATO, a supposed force for good in the world.
But when you’re on the ground, as I was for 15 years, things look very different.
In July last year, I’d just left Ukraine for Romania when then prime minister Christopher Hipkins attended NATO’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Ukrainians were getting shredded on Russia’s so-called “Surovikin line”. It had been clear for months that Kiev was in no position to launch its “much anticipated counter-offensive,” as media were framing it. Yet the west and its media organs were insisting on it.
I felt ill watching Hipkins cosying up to NATO’s Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, whose organisation had given itself an apparently global remit “to ensure our collective defence from all threats, no matter where they stem from, based on a 360-degree approach . . .”
On April 23 this year, US President Joe Biden signed into law a legislative package which would see US$95 billion in “aid” urgently transferred to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
This has clear implications for New Zealand.
To understand those implications, it’s instructive to look at NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign of Libya, the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. All these events take place in the context of post-Soviet, hyper-violent American hegemony.
In Libya, for example, rebels were employed as a proxy force to eliminate an insufficiently compliant leader in Muammar Gaddafi as the west continued to shape the world — at the end of a gun barrel — to its liking. More recently, in Ukraine, the US and its allies have used the Ukrainian armed forces as a proxy.
I was in Libya for The Los Angeles Times throughout 2012, watching as the country descended into chaos following NATO’s “humanitarian intervention”, and reporting militia violence, human trafficking and arms smuggling. The western media had reported the events of the previous year as a Libyan “revolution” carried out by rebel forces defying Gaddafi’s “tyrannical” rule. There was a grain of truth to that, but the revolt had also seen NATO conducting some 10,000 strike operations and dropping nearly 8000 bombs. Does NATO even know how many people it incinerated?
Far from being a defensive campaign, NATO’s Libyan adventure rapidly devolved into an opportunistic mission to bring about regime change. The rebels acted as a proxy ground force. This illustrated the path US intervention would take. Having sustained notable losses in Afghanistan, and in the wake of a deeply unpopular, unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq, the strategy would be war by proxy.
The militarisation of the Asia-Pacific will also see our region’s peoples used as a proxy. Unblinking western support for Israel’s atrocious slaughter in Gaza, meantime, reveals the rot at the heart of the collective west.
On Ukraine and the ongoing Israeli genocide of Gazans, our national media, both in print and broadcast, has failed the public, regurgitating Atlanticist framings that cast Europe and the US — and the thoroughly corrupt narcissist Volodymyr Zelensky — as global heroes, while providing cover for flagrant American imperialism.
Will our national media go down the same path, regarding the US-instigated showdown with Beijing in the Asia-Pacific?
It very much looks like it.
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Ukraine, July 2023
At Zaporizhzhia’s central Mayakovskoho square, in eastern Ukraine, teens emitted clouds of vape. Children raced about in battery-powered toy cars, their parents trailing behind. Others splashed about in the Fountain of Life, built in remembrance of the Chernobyl disaster. One boulder, a feature of the fountain, was split in two, inset with coloured stones depicting the atom.
The central restaurants were buzzing, the streets full of people enjoying the early evening sun, strolling through parks in full bloom and past the granite “Kombat” monument that celebrated the Red Army’s victory over the Nazis in 1945.
The outward normalcy in Zaporizhzhia belied an overwhelming sense of unease.
A short distance away, in Orikhiv, Ukrainian troops were being annihilated on the “Surovikin line,” a formidable network of defences that the Russian army had built over the previous eight months. Interviews with doctors and nurses, along with open-source video depicting masses of destroyed western-supplied equipment, painted a bleak picture. As did videos of soldiers, likely the recently mobilised, refusing to fight after being sent to near-certain death.
But the immediate fear was for the nearby Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Ukrainian military intelligence claimed that Russia intended to blow up the plant on July 5. Moscow, for its part, said that the Ukrainians intended to stage a “false flag” operation, an attempt to draw western troops or airpower into Ukraine with NATO’s Vilnius summit looming.
Authorities had advised residents, in the event of catastrophe, to stay indoors, close their windows and wait for evacuation.
A local contact, Helen, who worked for the local government, shared her thoughts as we walked in the late evening sun. “From the movies, you’d think that if it is [your] last day, you’ll do this and that . . . things you’ve always wanted to do. But no, it’s just like any other day.”
I talked with several leading Ukraine watchers, and we all reached much the same conclusion: Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, was threatening to unleash nuclear catastrophe.
The Ukrainians had repeatedly assailed the facility, including with HIMARS rocket launchers. More broadly, the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists have a long history of employing sabotage, false-flag and assassination, alongside poisonous historical revisionism.
I was on a ranch outside Kharkov a few weeks before Ukraine’s counter-offensive began, with a special forces unit waiting to rotate to the front. They were enjoying a bit of R & R: riding horses, swimming in a pond and barbequing under a setting sun.
They were determined to drive the Russians back. But they were also under no illusions about what the collective west was up to. One of them told me: “We are being used.”
Far from being a simple war of “autocracy vs democracy” or “good vs evil”, the Russo-Ukraine war is multi-layered, decomposing into civil, regional and great-power conflict. It is also an oligarch-driven (both local and foreign) scramble for Ukraine’s resources.
But, at its core, it is about Crimea, the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, founded by the Russian military leader Potemkin in 1783.
Simply put, NATO expansion was always about terminating Russian naval power in the Black Sea, with the goal of claiming the port city of Sevastopol, in Crimea. Such a scenario would give the alliance enormous power over both Russian security and its economy. NATO’s 2004 expansionist tranche notably included the Black Sea nations of Bulgaria and Romania. Turkey has been a member since 1952. Ukraine and Georgia are the puzzle’s final two pieces.
The Kremlin views this as an existential security threat. But, as gangster capitalists, they also see it as affording them an opportunity to hive off some resource-rich areas.
“Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war,” wrote William Burns, the US ambassador to Russia, in a February 2008 cable, before that year’s famous Bucharest summit, where it was announced that Ukraine would join the NATO bloc, despite negligible domestic support for that move. “In that eventuality,” Burns had written, “Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”
But even as Ambassador Burns penned his cable, ethnicity was being weaponised.
Following the Orange Revolution of 2005, which brought the Atlanticist and nationalist Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko to power and fame, the “memory politics” of the nationalist cult became state policy. Nazi collaborators and assorted genocidaires of the Organisation of Ukranian Nationalists (OUN), forged in 1929 in the mould of Italy’s fascist movement, were elevated into the public consciousness, revised as freedom fighters and democrats.
The myths were generated in the diaspora. After World War Two, assorted western intelligence agencies began to recruit Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators. The deeply anti-communist ethno-nationalists of the OUN were viewed as assets in the incipient Cold War. The CIA, for example, went as far as parachuting Ukrainian fascists behind Soviet lines. This went on for about a decade and was an unmitigated disaster.
Regardless, the CIA helped the most-valuable assets to bypass immigration and resettle in the US (a similar process was underway in Canada, the UK and even Australia). The radicals set up research centres, publishing houses and lobbying groups. They recast themselves as freedom-loving democrats who’d bravely fought the Nazis and the Soviets.
This mythology was imported into newly independent Ukraine following the Soviet dissolution.
Viktor Yushchenko — who began pursuing NATO membership despite negligible public support — was the first to truly adopt the OUN cult’s myths. It was a clear attempt to displace the Soviet’s Great Patriotic War narrative, despite an encrypted fascism being deeply embedded in this nationalist mythology.
That’s something Christopher Luxon should have been aware of when he mindlessly tweeted the fascist rallying cry “Slava Ukraini” in February this year.
After Yushchenko’s presidency ended in toxic political infighting and deadlock, with corruption booming and the economy in tatters, Viktor Yanukovych was elected to the presidency in 2010 — and his first major foreign policy move was to extend Russia’s lease of the port at Sevastopol, due to expire in 2017, by a further 25 years. Around 60 percent of Ukrainians supported the extension, believing that it could improve the economic fortunes of coastal regions and see a revival in their ship-building traditions. Nationalist politicians responded by hurling smoke grenades into parliament.
NATO began training some 10,000 Ukrainian troops each year following the violent Maidan uprising in 2013–2014, in which the far-right and “pro-European” civil society actors began to fuse. The former — the OUN’s ideological progeny — placed snipers in Hotel Ukraini and the Music Conservatory overlooking Maidan, killing police and protesters alike — a blatant false-flag operation.
The CIA went on to establish a string of spy bases along the Russian-Ukrainian frontier. Nationalist memory politics was put on steroids. Ukrainian language and identity was imposed on Ukraine’s diverse ethnic and linguistic groups. Thousands of streets were renamed after, or monuments erected to, nationalist figures, including notorious genocidaires.
Despite being portrayed as defensive in character, senior European officials have since acknowledged that the goal was to prepare Ukraine’s offensive capability — “inter-operable” with NATO — to reclaim both the Donbass and Crimea.
Military infrastructure was put into place, including 2017’s infusion of US military manpower — the largest since the Soviet dissolution — in Eastern and Central Europe. NATO military bases went live in Romania and Poland, hosting US ballistic missile “defence” systems. In the west, the public was subjected to sustained information warfare, which claimed that Putin had orchestrated Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House.
The US began providing offensive weaponry to Ukraine during Trump’s presidency, supplying Javelin weapon systems in 2018. The country was being transformed into a full-blown western proxy, even as Ukrainians gave Volodymyr Zelensky a clear mandate to pursue peace in the 2019 presidential election.
*
Ukraine’s “much anticipated counter-offensive” was a spectacular disaster. Wonder weapons like Leopard tanks burned on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, trapped in minefields and assailed by drones. Ukrainian manpower was chewed to pieces, while casualty monitors noted that Russian casualties were at their lowest levels of the war, a function of the formidable defences they’d built.
Cemeteries throughout the country swelled, grotesque rows of pre-dug graves sat waiting.
It had been clear for months that the counter-offensive would fail. Kiev’s forces had suffered heavy losses in the Battle of Bakhmut (July 2022 to May 2023). NATO training was not geared towards grinding, artillery-style trench warfare. Diffuse weaponry provided by assorted nations (so much for “inter-operability”) had complicated logistics. Ukrainian air defence was running on fumes and Russia largely dominated the skies. Russian war planners knew when and where the counter-offensive would come, given the Zelensky regime’s inability to shut up for more than five minutes.
Midway through April 2023, armed federal agents, surveillance aircraft overhead, raided a house in Massachusetts. Local television channels broadcast footage of 21-year-old Airman First Class Jack Teixeira being escorted from the property. He was behind a February leak of classified US intelligence documents which provided a bleak view of Ukraine’s looming counter-offensive.
The Washington Post cited the documents as assessing that “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” resulting in only “modest territorial gains.”
Regardless, US President Joe Biden’s administration insisted that Ukraine launch its offensive, to hell with the death toll. Hyper-active western media created an environment of heightened expectation, while acting as a pressure point on the Zelensky clan, which obsesses over optics.
The constant pressure certainly irritated Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Zelensky. He very publicly blew a fuse on Twitter, inadvertently saying the quiet part out loud: Ukraine was in no position to launch its “much anticipated counter-offensive”.
When will the counter-offensive start? In which direction will it be? How many people and equipment will there be? What is the battle plan? Journalists ask the same questions of everyone who can be called an ‘official’.
Meanwhile, ordinary Ukrainians who left civilian life to defend their country are preparing to claim their home day after day, but they do not understand where the promised ammunition, aircraft and long-range missiles are . . .
Here’s the thing about reducing your country to a US proxy: there will be a toll.
Since around November, 2022, videos have spread across Ukrainian media platforms of forcible mobilisation. They show men being hauled from street corners and bundled into vans. A border guard recently shot dead a man in Transcarpathia as he attempted to flee the country. Thirty people have drowned attempting to swim across the Tisza River into Hungary. Another of the forcibly mobilised was beaten to death.
With a fresh wave of mobilisation underway, such videos are flooding socials.
“[Mobilisation] is a death sentence,” said Dmitry (32), from Odessa. He was one of a dozen or so Ukrainian men fleeing war who I met in the courtyard of a Bucharest hostel last September. He had recently paid a US$5000 bribe for a medical exemption. “I refuse to be sent to eastern Ukraine to die in a trench . . . I am not willing to die for the politicians in Kiev and their puppeteers inside Ukraine: the nationalists, fascists.”
Such voices, despite being widespread in Ukraine, are barely mentioned in western media. In the “rules-based international order”, peace can’t be mentioned. And the Ukrainians are paying a horrific toll: the kill ratio is likely far exceeding two-to-one, and not in Ukraine’s favour.
That is something New Zealand’s political and media class need to reflect on, as the US seeks to turn the Asia-Pacific into another sacrificial lamb.
*
The mask slipped in 2023.
The true face of the “collective west” and the “rules-based international order” was laid bare for all to see.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing were legitimised.
In September, 2023, Azeri troops overran the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, after a nine-month siege. More than 100,000 Indigenous Armenians were driven from their homes by the Azerbaijani forces. The sweep saw Russian peace-keeping troops withdrawn, with Putin unwilling to dedicate resources towards stabilisation on a potential Caucasian front. He abandoned the Armenians of Artsakh to their fate.
For the US, it represented a symbolic victory against Russia, as their Ukrainian counter-offensive descended into tragic farce. Azerbaijan’s brutal dictator, Ilham Aliyev, and his troops, riled up on fevered Azeri ethno-nationalism, were given carte blanche in a textbook case of ethnic cleansing.
I was in Armenia for The Los Angeles Times at the end of 2014, having spent the previous two years covering Turkey and the Syrian killing grounds. It was approaching the 100-year anniversary of the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians, beginning 1915. And Armenians were once again fleeing war, this time in Syria. The opposition there had radicalised, acquiring an intolerant Sunni-Salafi hue. Indeed, a few months earlier, my friend Steve was decapitated by a masked Islamic State militant.
“We are the descendants of those who survived the genocide,” said Lena Halajian, who, at the time, headed an NGO helping Syrian Armenians adapt to their new lives. “I fear history is repeating itself.”
Azerbaijan’s 2023 ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh was yet another layer in Armenians’ historic suffering.
*
It was the Israeli response to Hamas’ punishing October 7 al-Aqsa Flood operation where a new gold-standard in depravity was established.
Western-backed genocide would become part of our live-streamed dystopia.
I’m so scared, please come. Come take me. Please, will you come?
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) ensured that six-year-old Hind Rajab’s life ended in a state of terror. Trapped in her family’s car, surrounded by dead relatives, and menaced by a Merkava tank, Hind’s desperate plight on January 29 outraged people around the world.
A recent Al Jazeera-commissioned investigation by Forensic Architecture found 355 bullet holes riddled the vehicle, consistent with weapons used by the Israeli military. Depressions in the windshield indicated that a bulldozer had likely run over the vehicle.
Almost two weeks later, the bodies of two paramedics who had been sent to save Hind were recovered some 50 metres away, following the Israeli withdrawal from the neighbourhood in Gaza City. The medics were likely fired on with a 120mm M830A1 High Explosive Anti-Tank Multi-Purpose-Tracer round.
Little Hind was found dead, along with six of her relatives.
The report concluded that it was “not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children.”
Shocking as the slaughter of the family was, it was no anomaly. A recent United Nations-backed inquiry alleged that Israel had committed crimes against humanity, employing forced starvation and extermination during its Gaza campaign. An earlier ICJ ruling found that Israel was plausibly engaged in genocide.
Every day a new depravity, and on such a scale that it has become difficult to keep up. The use of starvation as a weapon of war; the mass graves outside Israeli-occupied hospitals; the systematic murder of Gazan journalists. On June 24, Save the Children reported that some 20,000 Gazan children were missing, detained, trapped beneath the rubble or buried in mass graves.
Israel destroyed Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, which stored 3000 embryos. Torture of Palestinian detainees is widespread. In a recent video statement, Israeli’s Minister of National Security, Itmar Ben-Gvir, called for the execution of Palestinian prisoners with a “shot to the head.”
By the end of July, Israel had killed 39,000 people in Gaza, and more than 90,000 have suffered appalling injuries. The death toll is almost certainly much higher. A recent Lancet study contends that 180,000 Gazans have been killed.
The Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that Israel dropped more than 70,000 tons of explosives on Gaza between October 7 and April 24, exceeding the bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and London during World War Two.
Reuters reported on June 28 that the US had supplied Israel with “at least 14,000 of the MK-84 2000-pound bombs, 6500 500-pound bombs, 3000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1000 bunker-buster bombs, 2600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions . . .”
A flood of videos posted online by Israeli soldiers — gleefully blowing up schools, hospitals and universities, ransacking Palestinian homes, wearing the underwear and bras of Gazan women or pretending to have sex with munitions — elicit both outrage and confusion online. The common question being asked is: “What is wrong with these people?”
But the videos are not really for the outside world.
They are for the Israeli public.
It is a mirror held aloft to a society approaching the blood-drenched conclusion of its ethno-nationalist, settler-colonial mission. And the Israeli public likes what it sees.
This should come as no surprise: fascism was deeply embedded within the Zionist project, well before its militias, the Haganah and Irgun, ethnically cleansed 750,000 Indigenous Palestinians in the Nakba of 1948. Zionism is a most extreme form of ethno-nationalism and resembles other movements of the late-1800s to 1940s, most obviously the OUN.
Genocide is sine qua non to utopian Israeli nation-building.
Tel Aviv has received full-blooded support from other settler-colonial nations, chiefly the US, Canada and Australia. Other nations with colonial legacies, notably Britain and Germany, are fully on board.
People on the street are horrified, but western elites care little for the public.
Anti-genocide protesters are met with vicious police responses, particularly in Germany and on US campuses. “Antisemitism” allegations are leveraged against scholars and journalists in a blatant attempt to subdue criticism of Israel.
Much of the support for Israel is due to its role as a western intelligence outpost and weapons-testing hub in the oil-rich Middle East, coupled with Zionist lobbying proficiency. But I also suspect that many politicians and bureaucrats in the west recognise something intrinsic to their own nations in Israel.
And they like it.
*
Rarotonga, 2024
A French magazine sent me to Rarotonga earlier this year with a remit to look at the coalescing issues of climate change, US imperialism in the Pacific, and competition for the polymetallic nodules that are scattered across the Pacific seafloor.
Having spent many years in warzones and tracing the militarisation of countries like Moldova and Ukraine, I noticed that many of the same step-by-step processes were again being employed, most notably with the gradual integration of New Zealand into AUKUS — something the country should steer well clear of.
I was unsure what role New Zealand’s media would play, given the close trade ties we share with China. By the end of June it became clear, with Stuff running a series of “investigative” stories into Beijing’s pernicious influence, which recalled 1920s Yellow Peril scare campaigns and the fevered McCarthyism of the 1950s.
Midway through July, Prime Minister Luxon, fresh off his cringe-inducing trip to the NATO summit in Washington, announced his intent to expose Chinese spying in New Zealand.
What, New Zealand doesn’t spy on China?
This came only a few months after an Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security enquiry found that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) had, for nearly a decade, hosted a foreign agency’s (presumably the NSA’s) “signals intelligence system . . . without seeking ministerial approval and without subsequently informing its minister of the system’s existence or purpose.”
Meantime, a recent Reuters’ report found that the Pentagon had conducted information warfare in the Philippines to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation and stir up anti-China sentiment there.
Was Stuff looking in the right place for subversion in New Zealand?
New Zealanders are about to be subjected to sustained pro-war, anti-China propaganda.
Regardless, during the research process, it soon became apparent that sharpening US involvement in the Pacific will necessitate an assault on Indigenous rights, focused on undoing the region’s nuclear-free policies and turning it into a staging ground for the US. That is to say, proxification.
There is a reason why Washington never ratified the Treaty of Rarotonga. These opening remarks from the 1975 Nuclear Free Pacific Conference in Suva, Fiji, illustrate the disconnect:
We, the Pacific people, want to get some things clear. We are sick and tired of being treated like dogs. You came with guns and fancy words and took our land. You were not satisfied with that so you took our language and culture and then tell us we should be grateful. You forced your way of life on us and we want to tell you we do not like your way of life. It stinks. You worship dead things like your concrete jungles and now you bring in your nuclear bomb and you want to practise on us.
Walking around Rarotonga, there was one question in my mind: Can the spirit of the anti-nuclear movement, which is bound to Indigenous rights and self-determination, be rekindled sufficiently to halt what is coming?