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Black Lives Matter protest Wellington

In Wellington at the symbolic time of 12:01pm a protest march was held in solidarity with the people of Ferguson, USA.

A collection of between 50-60 (mostly high-school students) gathered to show their support and outrage at the ongoing police violence in the US.

A number of people got up to speak before the march on what had happened and what was ongoing in the US. A number of speakers noted the importance of dealing with police violence and structural racism in the justice system, drawing out the problems of a prison system where around 50% or the male prison population and 60% of the female prison population are Maori, with Maori being 6-7 times more likely to be convicted of a crime as a Pakeha also charged with the same offence.

The group marched towards the US embassy. Police in attendance forcibly moved the marchers off the street and into the crowded sidewalks, claiming that there was no ‘approved traffic management plan’. Organizers had attempted to organize this in advance but had been told they needed to provide 6-8 weeks notice beforehand. What this was in effect was the authorities trying to bully the young organizers from asserting their legal right to march. The behaviour of the police extended beyond that “the cops were at the back of the march making whip cracking noises and making jokes about being slave drivers, it was gross and totally not cool on a march against racism and police violence” said march attendee Chase Fox.

Once the march had reached the US Embassy a four and a half minute ‘die-in’ was staged in memory of all those who have died due to police violence. A number of people spoke. Mentioning that the Ferguson police force, which was overwhelmingly white already, has had most of their non-white officers quit. As well as the need for those involved to learn our own history of police brutality in Aotearoa, referencing the murder of Stephen Wallace, the Dawn Raids in the 70’s and the invasion of Rua Kenena’s community at Maungapohatu in 1916.

An obituary offered to The Advocate by Minnie Bruce Pratt, Leslie’s spouse.

Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on November 15. She succumbed to complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease, babeisiosis, and protomyxzoa rheumatica, after decades of illness.

She died at home in Syracuse, NY, with her partner and spouse of 22 years, Minnie Bruce Pratt, at her side. Her last words were: “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”

Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation,” and her work impacted popular culture, academic research, and political organizing.

Her historical and theoretical writing has been widely anthologized and taught in the U.S. and international academic circles. Her impact on mass culture was primarily through her 1993 first novel, Stone Butch Blues, widely considered in and outside the U.S. as a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies and also passed from hand-to-hand inside prisons, the novel has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Hebrew (with her earnings from that edition going to ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women).

In a statement at the end of her life, she said she had “never been in search of a common umbrella identity, or even an umbrella term, that brings together people of oppressed sexes, gender expressions, and sexualities” and added that she believed in the right of self-determination of oppressed individuals, communities, groups, and nations.

She preferred to use the pronouns she/zie and her/hir for herself, but also said: “I care which pronoun is used, but people have been disrespectful to me with the wrong pronoun and respectful with the right one. It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect.”

Feinberg was born September 1, 1949, in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Buffalo, NY, in a working-class Jewish family. At age 14, she began supporting herself by working in the display sign shop of a local department store, and eventually stopped going to her high school classes, though officially she received her diploma. It was during this time that she entered the social life of the Buffalo gay bars. She moved out of a biological family hostile to her sexuality and gender expression, and to the end of her life carried legal documents that made clear they were not her family.

Discrimination against her as a transgender person made it impossible for her to get steady work. She earned her living for most of her life through a series of low-wage temp jobs, including working in a PVC pipe factory and a book bindery, cleaning out ship cargo holds and washing dishes, serving an ASL interpreter, and doing medical data inputting.

In her early twenties Feinberg met Workers World Party at a demonstration for Palestinian land rights and self-determination. She soon joined WWP through its founding Buffalo branch.

After moving to New York City, she participated in numerous mass organizing campaigns by the Party over the years, including many anti-war, pro-labor rallies. In 1983-1984 she embarked on a national tour about AIDS as a denied epidemic. She was a key organizer in the December 1974 March Against Racism in Boston, a campaign against white supremacist attacks on African-American adults and schoolchildren in the city. Feinberg led a group of ten lesbian-identified people, including several from South Boston, on an all-night “paste up” of South Boston, covering every visible racist epithet.

Feinberg was one of the organizers of the 1988 mobilization in Atlanta that re-routed the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan as they tried to march down Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave., on MLK Day. When anti-abortion groups descended on Buffalo in 1992 and again in 1998-1999 with the murder there of Dr. Barnard Slepian, Feinberg returned to work with Buffalo United for Choice and its Rainbow Peacekeepers, which organized community self-defense for local LGBTQ+ bars and clubs as well as the women’s clinic.

A WW journalist since 1974, Feinberg was the editor of the Political Prisoners page of Workers World newspaper for 15 years, and became a managing editor in 1995. She was a member of the National Committee of the Party.

From 2004-2008 Feinberg’s writing on the links between socialism and LGBT history, “Lavender & Red,” ran as a 120-part series in Workers World newspaper. Her most recent book, Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, was an edited selection of that series.

Feinberg authored two other non-fiction books, Transgender Warriors: Making History and Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, as well as a second novel, Drag King Dreams.

Feinberg was a member of the National Writers Union, Local 1981, and of Pride at Work, an AFL-CIO constituency group. She received an honorary doctorate from the Starr King School for the Ministry for her transgender and social justice work, and was the recipient of numerous other awards, including the Lambda Literary Award and the American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award.

During a period when diseases would not allow her to read, write, or talk, Feinberg continued to communicate through art. Picking up a camera for the first time, she posted thousands of pictures on Flickr, including “The Screened-In Series,” a disability-art class-conscious documentary of her Hawley-Green neighborhood photographed entirely from behind the windows of her apartment.

Diagnosed with Lyme and multiple tick-borne co-infections in 2008, Feinberg was infected first in the early 1970s when little was known about the diseases. She had received treatment for these only within the last six years. She said, “My experience in ILADS care offers great hope to desperately-ill people who are in earlier stages of tick-borne diseases.”

She attributed her catastrophic health crisis to “bigotry, prejudice and lack of science”—active prejudice toward her transgender identity that made access to health care exceedingly difficult, and lack of science in limits placed by mainstream medical authorities on information, treatment, and research about Lyme and its co-infections. She blogged online about these issues in “Casualty of an Undeclared War.”

At the time of her death she was preparing a 20th anniversary edition of Stone Butch Blues. She worked up to within a few days of her death to prepare the edition for free access, reading, and download from on-line. In addition to the text of the novel, the on-line edition will contain a slideshow, “This Is What Solidarity Looks Like,” documenting the breadth of the organizing campaign to free CeCe McDonald, a young Minneapolis (trans)woman organizer and activist sent to prison for defending herself against a white neo-Nazi attacker. The new edition is dedicated to McDonald. A devoted group of friends are continuing to work to post Feinberg’s final writing and art online at Lesliefeinberg.net.

Feinberg’s spouse, Minnie Bruce Pratt, an activist and poet, is the author of Crime Against Nature, about loss of custody of her sons as a lesbian mother. Feinberg and Pratt met in 1992 when Feinberg presented a slideshow on her transgender research in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the local Workers World branch. After a long-distance courtship, they made their home for many years in Jersey City, NJ, where, to protect their relationship, the couple domestic-partnered in 2004 and civil-unioned in 2006. They also married in a civil ceremony in Massachusetts and in New York State in 2011.

Feinberg stressed that state authorities had no right to assign who were or were not her loved ones but rather that she would define her chosen family, citing Marx who said that the exchange value of love is — love.

Feinberg is survived by Pratt and an extended family of choice, as well as many friends, activists, and comrades around the world in struggle against oppression and for liberation.

SODELPA leader Ro Teimumu Kepa

Byron Clark (Fightback/MANA Otautahi).

On September 17 Fiji held its first election since Voreqe “Frank” Bainimarama  seized power in a 2006 coup. With his Fiji First party receiving 59.2% of the vote, Bainimarama will remain in power. Aman Ravindra-Singh, a candidate for the Peoples Democratic Party took so social media in the following days to declare “It is business as usual with the same old crooks this time they are in suits”.

A 3 News report the week of the election stated the election was “considered pivotal to ending the archipelago’s “coup culture”, which saw four governments toppled between 1987 and 2006 amid instability stemming from tensions between indigenous Fijians and ethnic Indians.”

This soundbyte oversimplifies the history of Fiji. As a British colony, indentured servants were brought from India to work on sugar plantations, and in time equaled the indigenous population in number. The divide-and-rule system implemented by the British persisted following independence, with electorates for ethnic Fijians and electorates for Fijian Indians.

Electorates were not based on population, meaning people in densely populated areas (more likely to be Fijian Indian) had less representation in parliament than the rural electorates, more likely to be populated by ethnic Fijians.

‘Ethnic tensions’ does not tell the whole story, the coups in 1987 and 2000 were indeed led by men wanting to retain the political power of ethnic Fijians, but the governments they overthrew were led by the multi-ethnic Labour Party which had its base not in any one ethnic group but in Fiji’s working class, which had been instrumental in independence struggles with industrial action as a tactic, and has retaining its fighting spirit though the subsequent decades.

The Bainimarama coup was different in that he promised to reform the electoral system to end the ethnic division. The election was held with electorates of equal size under ‘Open List’, a form of proportional representation similar to the MMP system used in New Zealand, but giving voters some control over the order of candidates on party lists. As in New Zealand, parties had to cross a 5% threshold, disadvantaging small parties and independents.

During the eight years since the coup the Bainimarama regime attempted to crush the union movement, arresting organisers and strike leaders, and issuing decrees limiting the role of unions in political life. “The current Decrees deny workers their most fundamental rights which are part of human rights and attempt to decimate workers unions and all the gains that workers have made through decades of struggle,” wrote then Council of Trade Unions general secretary Felix Antony in February last year.

“Such onslaught by the Regime and aided by some Employers is unprecedented. The uncertain political climate is seen by some employers as an opportunity to turn the clock back on workers and their unions.”

Around the same time the FCTU ended its support for the Labour Party, which was seen at the time as becoming an Indian Party drawing most of its support from just one union. Support for the Labour Party has collapsed completely, from 39% of the vote in 2006 to just 2.6% this year. Unfortunately, the new party formed out of a mass meeting of union members, the Peoples Democratic Party, didn’t do much better gaining just 3.2% of the vote.

Anthony, who had left his FCTU role to lead the new party (a government decree meant union office holders could not stand as candidates) resigned from the party leadership saying he takes full responsibility for the party’s poor performance.

The main opposition is now the Social Democratic Liberal Party, a reformation of the Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewenivanua who were in government until the coup (the new party is known as ‘SODELPA’ rather than SDL because of a decree banning new parties using the same initials as old ones)

Fijis labour movement will continue to face challenges in the coming years as Bainimarama continues his rule with a supposedly democratic mandate. The Multinational Observer Group (MOG) stated that the “casting and counting of votes” was fair and the election results “broadly represented the will of the people” but as Wadan Narsey writing on Scoop pointed out:

“The good governance organisations know too well that elections are far more than just the “casting and counting” of votes, especially in a Fiji where draconian military decrees and total media control have restricted and shaped public opinion over the last eight years.

Books will now be written about this second Fiji case study (the first being Rabuka) on how a military commander, treasonously deposed a lawfully elected government, and managed to become legitimised as an elected Prime Minister.”

The struggle for democracy in Fiji is far from over.

“Our allies are the genuine revolutionary fighters like those defending Kobane. They need support not from the US or Turkey who will only seek to dominate and betray them but from fellow revolutionary fighters in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and across the globe” (photo from timeturk.com)

Article by Mike Treen, UNITE Union General Secretary (but the views expressed are his own and not necessarily those of UNITE). Reprinted from UNITE and the Daily Blog.

Working people in the advanced capitalist world should reject appeals by the rulers of their countries to support the foreign policy of “their” country.

Inevitably that foreign policy is simply a programme to advance the interests of the super wealthy owners of industry and services to grab the biggest possible share of the wealth available on the world market. They disguise their naked self interest with appeals to the so-called “national interest” with claims that we are fighting for lofty goals like “freedom and democracy”. We are even asked to wage war for these goals. Often it is the working people on both sides of these wars who are being shafted or killed. But inevitably a few years down the line we discover that it was all lies.

I want to touch on a few of these wars from my lifetime and the lies told to support them.

The New Zealand Army participated in the Vietnam war from 1965 to 1972 when the troops were withdrawn by the newly elected Labour government under Norm Kirk. The previous National Party Prime Minister Keith Holyoake had declared: “Whose will is to prevail in South Vietnam? The imposed will of the North Vietnamese communists and their agents, or the freely expressed will of the people of South Vietnam?” Every word was a lie. It was widely accepted that if the elections promised at the 1954 peace conference had been held the Viet Minh forces led by Ho Chi Minh would have won easily. Instead the US installed a puppet dictatorship in the South of extreme brutality. Twenty years later the US was forced to leave Vietnam, the southern dictatorship soon collapsed and the country was reunified. But Vietnam had suffered several million deaths and a legacy of destruction they still are recovering from today. The US lost 58,000 troops. NZ lost 38. Every one of the killed was murdered in defence of a world capitalist empire.

In 1975 the Indonesian military regime invaded Timor and annexed the territory. The action was taken with the support of NZ, Australia, and the US. What the imperialist West feared was that the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) would create what was dubbed “another Cuba” in the Pacific. Ten years earlier this same military regime in Indonesia (again with the support of Australia, NZ, and the US) slaughtered a half million of their own citizens to remove a nationalist left wing government. While the UN passed a resolution deploring the invasion of Timor no action was taken. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the US ambassador to the UN at the time, wrote in his autobiography that “the United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook [with regard to the invasion of East Timor]. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with not inconsiderable success.” Later, Moynihan admitted that, as US ambassador to the UN, he had defended a “shameless” Cold War policy toward East Timor. A quarter century and several hundred thousand dead later Indonesia was forced to withdraw and Fretilin won the subsequent election. That has not stopped Australia in particular from trying to bully tiny Timor out of access to oil and other resources off its coast.

In December 1978 the Vietnamese government intervened militarily to remove the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime from power in Cambodia. This was an very popular move inside the country. Cambodian forces opposed to the Khmer Rouge supported the Vietnamese action and a Cambodian run government was established. Vietnam was met my extreme hostility by the imperialist West who imposed a brutal economic blockade on both Cambodia and Vietnam. China, the US, Australia, the UK and NZ supported the Khmer Rouge keeping their diplomatic seats in the United Nations and claiming to represent the victims of their genocide for another 15 years after their overthrow. In addition they allowed the Khmer Rouge to take control of refugee camps in Thailand and military and financial aid poured into their coffers to use for attacks on Cambodia and Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of people starved to death as a consequence.

In 1975 a conservative monarchy was overthrown in Afghanistan by forces associated with the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). It was an urban based based with broad support in the middle classes and professional layers. It was also deeply influenced by an authoritarian and bureaucratic approach to politics from its association with Soviet style Stalinism. Many of its leading cadre had also been trained as engineers and military officer in the Soviet Union under the monarchy. The programme of the government was however very popular, especially in the cities, and included expanded rights for workers, women, and peasants.

Very soon a rural based war was sponsored by the US and the right wing military regime in Pakistan against the regime. The conservative tribal leaders (who also doubled as the rural gentry) feared the land reform and abolition of usury. They used the proposed education of girls to mobilise opposition to the “athiest” regime in Kabul. The Kabul regime in turn responded in increasingly brutal manner to force the policy changes down the populations throat.

Billions of dollars in aid flowed from the US through Saudi Arabia and Pakistan into the hands of the Mujahideen. They were dubbed “Freedom fighters” by US President Reagan.

The mujahideen consisted of at least seven factions, who often fought amongst themselves in their battle for territory and control of the opium trade. To hurt the Russians, the U.S. deliberately chose to give the most support to the most extreme groups. A disproportionate share of U.S. arms went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, “a particularly fanatical fundamentalist and woman-hater.”‘ According to journalist Tim Weiner, ” [Hekmatyar’s] followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department officials I have spoken with call him ‘scary,’ ‘vicious,’ ‘a fascist,’ ‘definite dictatorship material.”There was, though, a kind of method in the madness: Brezinski hoped not just to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan, but to ferment unrest within the Soviet Union itself. His plan, says author Dilip Hiro, was “to export a composite ideology of nationalism and Islam to the Muslim-majority Central Asian states and Soviet Republics with a view to destroying the Soviet order.” Looking back in 1998, Brezinski had no regrets. “What was more important in the world view of history?… A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War”.Read more.

Tens of thousands of foreign fighters were recruited and got their baptism of fire in Afghanistan including the most famous “freedom fighter” Osama Bin Laden. In 1992, the Mujahedeen drove the Soviets out and seized power themselves. However they soon fell into a fratricidal civil war that killed tens of thousands more Afghans. The Taliban then ousted the Mujahideen faction in power in 1994.

The Taliban were ousted in turn in 2001 by US-led forces installing other factions from the old Mujahideen based in the north of the country. New Zealand has supported the military occupation since then and actively participated at times. All of the governments in Afghanistan since the US-led occupation are reactionary warlords, drug dealing despots and murderers. The current vice-president General Dostum earned notoriety for suffocating several thousand Taliban prisoners in shipping containers during the final offensive against them.

The lies associated with the Iraq wars are more well documented. NZ also played a more limited role. However the NZ government did support the criminal sanctions regime against Iraq between Gulf War One in 1990 and Gulf War Two in 2003. This led two leading UN officials who had been placed in charge of the sanctions to resign as it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of people were killed as a consequence. On May 12, 1996, Madeleine Albright (then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) appeared on a 60 Minutes segment in which Lesley Stahl asked her “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” and Albright replied “we think the price is worth it.” While not part of the invasion force in 2003 Helen Clark’s Labour-led government did send a unit of military engineers to assist the occupation forces in 2004 because otherwise Fonterra would miss out on lucrative oil for food contracts. The morality of the occupation was no different to that of the invasion so the culpability remains.

We should remain very suspicious of any claims the US has that their promotion of renewed military intervention in the Middle East has anything to do with naked self-interest. Oil and the control of where it is extracted remains a geo-strategic objective of immense value.

Preventing the people of Syria and Iraq from exercising any notion of genuine self-determination or democracy is part of that reality.

The Kurdish people in Syria and Turkey (or Iraq and Iran for that matter) are not considered allies of the US and its allies because they desire a genuine social revolution that will liberate their people from being divided up and exploited. The Kurdistan Workers Party has mass support in Turkey and Syria. That party has led the resistance in Kobane to the ISIS attacks. Turkey has killed more Kurds in Turkey this past week than ISIS fighters in Syria. On the BBC tonight I heard a Kurd who lives in Turkey declare “We don’t need your support, or your weapons, we just need you to stop supporting ISIS”. NZ, Australia, The UK and The US have all listed the PKK as a terrorist organisation because it also fights the recationary Turkish regime (and Nato ally).

ISIS is a product of the attempt over three years to overthrow an autocratic, nationalist regime in Syria that won’t bow down completely before the US empire or Israel. Billions of dollars in arms and fighters have poured across the border since the revolt began against the Assad regime in 2011. The most reactionary gulf states (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) funded like-minded individuals and groups. Turkey opened its borders to foreign fighters and promoted their own groups. No one cared if fighters went from the UK, Australia or NZ. The main allies that the imperialists and their local allies are able to find in their fight against these increasingly unpopular governments were often the most reactionary and gangster like tribal leaders, warlords and businessmen.

But once you unleash reactionary forces like this they can take on a life of their own that gets out of control. This is exactly what occurred in Afghanistan with the Taliban and Libya with the armed gangs vying for control of that country.

We must completely reject the propaganda of the empire. Our allies aren’t the US military or the local gangsters they support. Our allies are the genuine revolutionary fighters like those defending Kobane. They need support not from the US or Turkey who will only seek to dominate and betray them but from fellow revolutionary fighters in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and across the globe. Those fighters cannot be the ones who sell their souls to the empire but ones who want a genuinely progressive and democratic transformation of their country.