Comrade Alastair

April 2008

The Kingdom of Tonga has announced that it will be appointing a New Zealand policeman to be its new Police Commander. The news was made public on April 2, with the Ministry of Police, Prisons and Fire Services stating that none of the seven Tongan candidates were “suitable”.

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June 2008

The recent series of killings in South Auckland has led to a frenzy of politician¹s calls to “get tough on crime”, and for increased powers for the police and the state in general. While such “law and order” orgies come and go, there are some disturbing concrete proposals emerging from this one, in particular the call to put armed cops on the streets of Auckland 24/7.

The police are recommending a six-month trial period; if the idea is approved by Police Commissioner Howard Broad, the armed patrols could be on the streets of Auckland by March next year.

“Very, very keen” on their guns

The idea is that there be four cars, each carrying two cops and carrying Bushmaster rifles and Glock 9mm pistols. The police say they are “very, very keen” to test these “mid-range lethal weapons”. The police also want to carry other weapons, such as the Taser Xrep, which fires a Taser projectile from 12-gauge shotgun, and bean bag guns, which fired “socks” filled with shot.

Police spokesperson John Rivers said that the patrols were inspired by police in the UK for the past two decades. This is hardly a reassuring statement, given the history of the British police forces. Take the case of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, the completely innocent man murdered by British police, who shot him eight times at close range after he had been restrained. Countless similar cases in the UK, the US and other countries together make a strong case in themselves for opposing any more weapons in the hands of the police.

The police have stated that the patrols will not cover the entire city, but will instead focus on “high risk” areas. No prizes for guessing which areas these will be! Those cars won’t be spending nearly as much time in North Harbour as they do in Otara or Manurewa.

Tough on crime? Tough on poverty!

The police and their supporters will argue that police need greater access to guns in order to deal with violent crime, such as the Manuwera liquor store robbery that left Navtej Singh dead. They will argue that the solution to the perceived “crime wave” is to increase police powers, put harsher penalties in place for everything under the sun, and so on.

This approach won¹t work. It doesn’t deal with the underlying root causes of crime ­ poverty and social deprivation. Violent crime, such as the robberies that have been so highly publicised lately, goes hand in hand with the poverty rate.
Someone growing up in a household on a secure income that pays for a decent standard of living, in a community with decent infrastructure and facilities, where nobody is stressed about paying the monthly bills, is highly unlikely to end up robbing a liquor store or joining a gang to achieve a sense of belonging and gain respect they haven’t been given by the capitalist system.

You’re not likely to see dairies getting robbed in higher income areas, nor are you likely to see many of the social problems that are prevalent in poorer areas. If poverty was eliminated, the crime rate would plunge dramatically.

True nature of the police

The role played by the police is a class society like New Zealand is not based on creating “safer communities together”. The fundamental role of the police force is to defend the rule of the capitalist class, and to defend the oppressive system we live under. This is plain to see whenever workers go on strike or are locked out ­ they can’t call 111 and tell the police that the boss stole their jobs! Instead, the police show clearly whose side they’re on, as they escort scabs across the picket line and arrest any workers who get too uppity.

It was also clear to see during the so-called “terror raids” late last year. The police smashed their way into homes, threatened school children with guns and blockaded entire communities in a nation wide series of arrests that targeted Maori activists, environmental campaigners and left-wingers. To this day, no charges have been brought against the people that were arrested, and the police themselves have admitted to being unable to produce a shred of evidence to lay “terror” charges.

The police are not friends of the working class. They are its enemies, and they exist to prop up an oppressive system that working people get no benefits from. With that in mind, it is obvious that workers have nothing to gain from the police sending armed patrol cars into working-class communities.

June 2008

In the past month or so, elections took place in three very different countries, far away from one another, with distinctly different languages, cultures and histories. These countries did have some things in common. All were all poor, third-world countries, whose people live in poverty and oppression, and they all voted against the regimes and systems they currently live under.

Tonga votes against monarchy, for democracy

In the leadup to the Tongan elections, mainstream New Zealand media talked a great deal about how the people of Tonga did not want radical change and did not really want the monarchy to go, and how the pro-democracy candidates were going to get an awful result.

Just as with their predictions in Nepal, they were proved to be completely wrong. In the Tongan elections, pro-democracy candidates won all nine elected seats.

Of the 34 seats in the Tongan parliament, candidates are democratically elected to only nine, with 16 members being appointed directly by the king, and another nine representing “the noble families of the realm”. This is essentially a semi-feudalistic system, with a small minority of nobles and the capitalists linked to them monopolising all power and wealth in the country.

Democratic reforms are due to be implemented in 2010, with the balance of seats being changed to 17 MPs elected by the people, nine MPs to represent the “nobility” and 4 MPs to be appointed by the King.

While this would certainly be a positive move and a step in the right direction, ultimately the King and his nobles have no right to exist. The people of Tonga deserve to live in a nation where everyone is treated equally and nobody lives in great privilege simply due to being born lucky.

Such a society can only come about through completely eradicating not only feudalism but capitalism as well, and moving towards a socialist system.

Zimbabwe votes against Mugabe’s dictatorship, but is the MDC any better?

In Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won 99 seats in the House of Assembly, with Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party winning 97 and the minority MDC faction winning 10.

In the last issue of The Spark we reported that the results of the presidential elections had not yet been released, and fears were growing that the results would be rigged in Mugabe’s favour. The MDC declared that it had won an outright victory.

The results of the recount were released on May 2, with Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC winning 47.9% of the vote to Mugabe’s 43.2%. As neither of the two main candidates won a majority, a run-off will be held on June 27.

Since the initial elections, ZANU-PF has unleashed a wave of violence against MDC members, with several being killed. Interestingly, government-approved farm occupations have begun again in some areas. This also happened after the 2000 elections, and clearly shows that the farm occupations are not part of any attempt by Mugabe to radically transform Zimbabwe’s economy and transfer land and wealth to the poor, but is rather just an attempt to distract people from his election defeats.

Disturbing reports have also emerged about the actions of the MDC (which advocates neo-liberal, right-wing economic policies). ZANU-PF accuses them of being funded by American and British imperialism, and it would not be at all surprising if this were the case – the US and British have a long history of meddling in Third World politics, and have openly declared their intentions to effect regime change in Zimbabwe¹. There are also unverified reports of foreign NGOs telling voters that if they do not vote for the MDC, food distribution will stop.

Nepal votes for Maoist revolutionaries

In the recent Constituent Assembly elections, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) won 220 out of 575 seats, making them by far the largest party in the Assembly. (The two next biggest, the Nepali Congress and the revisionist (ie claiming to be Marxist, but acting counter-revolutionary) Communist Party of Nepal (UML), won 110 and 103 respectively, making them smaller than the Maoists even when put together!)

The vote for the revolutionary Maoists represents the mass support they enjoy amongst the Nepalese masses, on whose side they fought during the decade-long People’s War. In the course of this struggle the Maoists liberated 80% of the countryside, before changing their tactics in order to move the revolutionary struggle into the urban areas.

The four next-biggest parties agreed on May 24 to back a Maoist-led government. However, there is still a great deal of conflict between the Maoists and the non-revolutionary parties. The Maoists are demanding that, as the largest party, they receive the two biggest portfolios in the government, the posts of Prime Minister and President. They have compromised to agree that the Chairman of the Constituent Assembly could be a non-Maoist.

The Nepal Congress in particular is calling for the Maoists to disband the People’s Liberation Army and the Young Communist League, but the Maoists have rejected this.

After a huge step forward, tensions remain in the new Nepal.

¹ http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/

NZ soldiers in East Timor: the Anzac myth plays a major role in legitimising this sort of imperialist military intervention

April 2008

Corporal Jack Cottam was 29 years old when the bullet hit him. He was one of the first to die at Gallipoli, killed on the first day of action. The day he died is now celebrated in Australia and New Zealand as Anzac Day, and perhaps no other day on our calendar is surrounded by as much emotion… or as much bullshit.

Every year we are told that the young men whose lives were snuffed out at Gallipoli died gloriously for our freedom. We are told that the “liberties” we supposedly enjoy in New Zealand today exist only because of the sacrifice of these soldiers. The message is that the soldiers’ deaths were worth it, and that the cause they died for was just.

There is no nice way to say this: it’s all lies.

War about territory, not freedom

In 1914, war broke out between the major imperialist powers of the world. They divided up into two blocs. On one side, the Allies, primarily made up of France, Russia and the British Empire, as well as the smaller countries allied to them and their countless colonies throughout the world. The ruling classes of New Zealand and Australia took this side. On the other side, the Central Powers, primarily made up of Germany, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, along with a number of smaller countries and the various colonies they controlled.
The imperialist powers of the world were squabbling with each other over who would have the right to control the world’s territory, who would have the right to exploit the world’s resources and the world’s people, and which group of rich capitalist countries would be top dogs over everyone else.
That’s what the war was about. It was not about defending democracy. It was not about defending free speech. It was not a battle to defend the world from the nun-murdering, child-raping armies of German aggression. It was a brutal and senseless conflict in which both sides were equally bad.

Strategic importance of Gallipoli

What was the Gallipoli invasion all about? The Allied High Command ordered the invasion of Gallipoli for several reasons. The Ottoman Empire, an Islamic empire stretching from Turkey in the North right down into the Middle East, had aligned with the Central Powers in the imperialist war.

The Allies wanted to open a supply route to Russia, strengthening its armies and in doing so relieving German pressure on the Western Front. The Russian government, a brutally repressive monarchy led by Tsar Nicholas the Third, was the same one that, a decade earlier, gunned down hundreds of unarmed workers who were protesting the inhuman conditions they had to live and work in.

As well as this, since late 1914 the Western Front in France and Belgium had effectively become fixed. The Allied imperialist generals desperately needed to open a new front and try and move the war into a new stage. Also, the Allies hoped that an attack on the Ottomans would draw Bulgaria and Greece into the war on the Allied side.

Army of conscripts

The New Zealanders at Gallipoli had no choice about whether they went or not. Unlike Australia, New Zealand conscripted soldiers. You got a letter in the mail telling you to report for duty, and you either made your way to the local recruitment office, or you went to jail. Early in the war there was huge social pressure to sign up, and it was considered an act of cowardice not to. According to New Zealand Prime Minister William Massey, “the state comes first” (before conscience) and that “if they won’t do their duty they must be driven”.

Some New Zealanders stayed true to their principles anyway, and refused to fight. Peter Scott Ramsey, President of the Christchurch Anti-Conscription League, was sentenced to 11 months jail with hard labour for telling a public meeting:

To hell with the consequences. I have the courage of my convictions. I have been a member of the peace movement since I was 14 and a half, and I am not going to give up the principles for which I have fought for so many years for the class to which I do not belong.

Apart from the fact that most of the soldiers heading off to Gallipoli hadn’t volunteered but were in fact conscripts, they weren’t actually told about where they were heading. The Allied High Command purposefully let them believe they were heading off to France to fight the Germans. They figured that the soldiers would be more willing to fight on a front that they saw as defending Britain, than they would be to invade a country that a lot of them had probably never heard of, let alone considered a threat to them.

Maori resistance to Pakeha war

There’s much propaganda about Maori participation in WWI; it is often suggested that young Maori men joined up eagerly in great numbers to fight in the war and thus earned the respect of their Pakeha brothers, who linked arms with them before they marched off together in racial harmony and equality.

In fact many Maori were fiercely opposed to fighting in the war, and were some of the strongest fighters against conscription, along with Christian pacifists, communists and trade unionists. Of 552 Maori called up in conscription ballots, only 74 joined.

Tuhoe leader Rua Kenana was the most celebrated Maori objector. He was arrested at his Tuhoe settlement at Maungapohatu and charged with sedition. Rua’s “seditious” argument was that Maori should not fight for a pakeha king and country when Maori ancestral lands had been taken by a pakeha government 50 years before in the confiscations in Taranaki, Waikato and Bay of Plenty that followed the New Zealand wars.
Waikato Maori were particularly resistant to conscription. In traditional fashion they performed whakapohane (baring of the buttocks) to insult the government envoy Maui Pomare who came to plead with them to join the war. Forty-four Maori were arrested but refused to wear the military uniforms they were given. Six were court-martialled and sentenced to two years hard labour at Mt Eden jail.

Disproportionate losses

The New Zealand ruling class sent no less than 10% of our population to fight overseas and invade countries that had never threatened us. We were further away from the war than anybody else, but we sent more troops as a percentage of the population than any other country in the world. Of those 10%, half became casualties and of those, 18,116 died. That means that 5% of New Zealand’s population were killed or injured in the First World War.

Anti-imperialism Day?

I don’t oppose Anzac Day. While I’d prefer to call it “Victims of Brutal Senseless Imperialist War Remembrance Day”, I think we need at least one day a year to sit back and remember the young Kiwis whose lives were thrown away all those years ago.

But we go about it totally the wrong way. Rather than using this day to ask, “What was this all for? How could we have let this happen?” and pledging never to allow anything like this ever to happen again, pledging to oppose ALL imperialist war, Anzac Day has instead become a day where war is glorified.

If we truly wished to avoid a repetition of the horrors of 1914 to 1918, we would use Anzac Day to teach this basic truth: Do not believe what you’re told. War is never glorious, and the soldiers who bled to death in the Belgian mud died for nothing.

Jack Cottam, my great-great grandfather, was 29 years old when the bullet hit him. He had a wife and two children, and owned a small grocery store in Sydney. Last year I read the letter he sent home to his family shortly before he was killed. One line in particular struck me: “We saw some wounded veterans in Egypt. While I do not intend to go into detail as to the extent of their injuries, the sight has led me and many of the lads to suspect that this venture may not be quite so simple a matter as we thought.”

How right he was.