TV3 image from the Queer the Night march, 9/6/11. Click link above for TV3 footage.

I’m one of the organisers of this march, but I’m also here as an organiser for Schools Out.

Homophobia is something each of us has to live with.  We hesitate to hold our partners hand in public because we fear straight people’s reactions, their dumbfounded staring, their screams of dyke or faggot, their fists and their bottles.

Their homophobic actions aim to rein in our various identities and orientations, to keep us off the streets and in the closets. Its intent is to make queer and trans-people live in fear.

We’re here to say we’re not afraid. We’re here to say we stand as a community against homophobia and transphobia.  We’re here to fight until everyone has the right to express and explore their queerness without religious, economic, legal restrictions.

More specifically, we’re here because we’re outraged.  We’re outraged that 39% of queer youth seriously consider suicide as a method of dealing with homophobia, a rate three times higher than their straight counterparts.  We’re here because we’re outraged that 20% of queer youth actually make attempts on their life, a rate five times higher than their straight counterparts.  We’re here because we know that these are not just statistics but actual people, our friends, family and community.

Homophobia and transphobia affect us all on a day-to-day basis too varying degrees.  The majority of us, queer youth included, manage to live out and a proud life, to connect with other members of the community, to ward off the isolation and fear homophobia tries to instil within us.  However, a significant part of our population remains under constant lethal attack.

So what do we do about it?  The only way to eliminate homophobia and transphobia is to collectively organise for the struggle.  If we want equality and a society without fear, we have to be prepared to fight for it.  Simply put, we need to build movement—the types of movements queers haven’t seen since homosexual law reform.

I don’t think anyone has the illusions that homophobia and transphobia will come to an end with the close of this march.  This is just the first step.  We need strong community action before we can begin to effect heterosexual culture.  The next step in building this movement is to attend our public meeting “homophobia and transphobia and how we respond” at Trades Hall, at 126 Vivian St at 7pm next Thursday.

The third step to ending queer oppression, homophobia and transphobia is to link with other struggles.  We alone cannot end our oppression.  We need to link our allies in other progressive movements. We need to stand with women struggling against sexism and patriarchy for equal pay, free and safe child care and free and legal abortions.  We need to be standing with migrants and Maori against racism, for legal rights to work of all to work here and against land confiscation.  We need to link ourselves with the radical and progressive elements of the Labour movement fighting for a living wage.  The Wellington Unite Union organiser has been instrumental in helping organise this march.  She has taken the first step and I call on everyone here to stand in solidarity with McDonalds workers potentially going on strike next week.  Their struggle for a living wage and workers’ power is connected to our struggle for community power.

Activists gathered in Auckland today outside the US consulate to protest the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Marking the anniversary of the Iraq invasion 7 years ago the protesters demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops, including and especially the NZ SAS and other military in Afghanistan.

The Workers Party had a PFLP banner, as part of a solidarity campaign with the Palestinian liberation movement

Workers Party with the PFLP banner

The protested ended on a fitting note, with old shoes being hurled at the Consulate.

Why burn the New Zealand flag?

The New Zealand flag is a symbol of imperialism. This is most obvious in its design, a tribute to the British Empire. This design was adopted after the Second Boer War, which devastated South Africa but resulted in a surge of Kiwi patriotism.

Lest we forget

A simple re-design, while reflecting our emergence from the shadow of the British Empire, would not change the imperialist nature of the flag. It’s a tool of the ruling class, inseparably linked with militarism. From the Boer War through WWI and II, right through to armed involvement in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the flag has marked New Zealand’s presence. Flags mark military conquest, the subjugation of nations.

Flags and borders divide the working majority. ANZAC soldiers had more in common with their Turkish counterparts than with the bureaucrats who sent them to Gallipoli. The working majority has interests in common worldwide, including an end to imperial war. Ruling class nationalism is a barrier to recognising this.

What purpose does ANZAC day serve?

Kevin Rudd used ANZAC Day to facilitate a new ANZAC Task Force.

Many argue that ANZAC Day is not a glorification of war, but a commemoration of those who’ve lost their lives. However, the rhetoric of ANZAC Day does not simply honour the soldiers who lost their lives, it justifies those who sent them to die. This facilitates moves such as Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s decision to form a new ANZAC Task Force.

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 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.

Gallipoli was not about defending democracy or free speech. The Ottoman Empire did not pose a threat New Zealand. The Allied High Command ordered the invasion of Gallipoli for strategic reasons, primarily opening a supply route to arm their then ally, the Tsar of Russia. This battle served ruling class British interests.

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

To honour the men who lost their lives, we must condemn imperialist war. Only when ANZAC Day facilitates disarmament and solidarity with those resisting imperialism, only when the War Memorial is showered with white poppies, when speeches are made about a generation of men slaughtered to serve imperialist interests, only then will the Workers Party support it.

Afghanis burning NZ flag.

New Zealand: an imperialist nation

While New Zealand has eked out a degree of independence from the US, it remains a junior imperialist nation. Contrary to popular myth, New Zealand was a member of the coalition of the willing which legitimised the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, sending troops to both countries.

Afghanistan is in the mess it is today because of Western involvement. Since the nineteenth century, Britain and the United States have deliberately stirred up communal divisions in the Middle East in a bid to prevent the formation of any united resistance to their plans for plundering the economic wealth of the region. During the Cold War, the CIA funded and recruited an army of Islamic mujahideen fighters based in northwest Pakistan to fight the Russians and their Afghan allies. Sectarian violence was exacerbated by this and by the subsequent occupation. The pro-Western government that replaced the Taliban has shown its stripes by legalizing rape within marriage. Yet the US and its NATO allies continue to peddle the line that the only solution to the worsening violence is greater Western military intervention.

Imperialism in the Pacific

More locally, we have treated Pacific neighbours as sources of cheap labour and trade, often interfering in governance.

While capital may flow freely across borders, workers only move when it suits the ruling class. When the post-war boom ended in the 1970s, the NZ ruling class turned to shutting off working class immigration, especially from the Pacific. 100,000 Samoans were stripped of citizenship rights, in a piece of legislation that has been maintained ever since. The Workers Party calls for open borders and full rights for migrant workers.

Despite the line of “democracy promotion” in the Pacific, the ruling class is primarily interested in having stable elites to trade with. In 2006, New Zealand and Australian troops were deployed to quell pro-democracy riots in Tonga. Only 9 of the 34 seats in the Tongan parliament are elected, and Tongans have voted for pro-democracy candidates in all 9 of those seats. However, New Zealand backs the monarchy, a major source of trade.

Yet paradoxically, New Zealand has isolated Fiji since the coup carried out by Bainamarama; why advocate democracy in Fiji and not Tonga? We did not isolate those who carried out the Fijian coups in 1987 and 2004. In fact, Fiji has never been a full democracy, with a voting system that entrenches a tribal elite, at the expense of Indo-Fijians. The current interim government however, is pledging to hold elections once there has been electoral reform, disestablishing the racially segregated voting system and instituting one person one vote. This may yet be shown to be empty rhetoric, indeed some of the actions of the interim government seem rather undemocratic and should be of concern, but New Zealand’s stance is clearly not based on democracy. There are powerful New Zealand interests in Fiji, which is New Zealand’s largest export market amongst the Pacific Islands. New Zealand’s attitude to Fiji is not based on humanitarian interests, but on the interests of capital.

*      *      *      *      *

Accompanying every justification of New Zealand militarism and imperialism is the national flag. It stands for unthinking obedience to orders and the false god of nationalism – the idea that working class New Zealanders share common interests with their bosses against the rest of the world.

Workers and all oppressed people of all countries , unite to resist imperialism.

During the lead-up to the 2008 US election, Barack Obama made much of his plans to end the war in Iraq. His bold declaration – that “on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war”. Across the world, many people pinned their hopes on this promise.

Obama’s policy was never really about ending America’s imperialist war policy. It was always about managing the US war effort more effectively.

Obama only wanted out of Iraq because he believed that war was a poor use of US military assets. In an Op-Ed in the New York Times (14 July 2008), he declared: 

“As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.”

 For Afghanistan, read “Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven”. Since taking office, Obama has escalated the war in Pakistan and his recently announced Iraq troop withdrawal has freed up troops for redeployment there. Obama always stated that Iraq was an unnecessary distraction, that the real focus in the “war on terror” should be Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that his Iraq pull-out would be accompanied by an increased deployment in that theatre. It was his legions of hopeful believers who convinced themselves that Obama would somehow be different. In fact, Obama’s much touted withdrawal plan provides for 50,000 US troops being left in Iraq until the end of 2011, the same time frame as the Bush administration’s.

He has surrounded himself with many veterans of the Bush administration and so far only demonstrated a more sophisticated and effective hand on the levers of US imperialist power.

Gus Vant Sant’s new film “Milk”, is a biopic of the 1970s gay rights activist Harvey Milk, played by Sean Penn. Penn gives one of his best performances to date as the charismatic and outspoken gay leader, portraying him from his very few last days as a Republican-voting, Wall Street bureaucrat in the late 60s early 70s to his awakening as a fighter against gay oppression and subsequent assassination in 1978.

The film documents much of his early progressive community organizing, such as successful boycotts of anti-gay shops and businesses in San Francisco and later on helping with a Teamsters Union boycott of Coors Beer, in which he managed to get it removed from all the gay bars in town. Coors Beer caved soon after and in return the Teamsters hired their very first openly gay drivers. It then goes on to portray his perennial election campaigns and subsequent election to City Supervisor in 1977.

While this can be seen as reformism, it must be noted Harvey Milk was no leftist revolutionary, his only aim was for gays to be accepted as normal human beings and not sexual deviants.

Make of his strategy what you may, this film is a very good depiction of someone with such an outlook and activists of any cause can learn from the organizational methods that Harvey Milk employed. And it is clear in the film that Milk used his position as a platform for gay rights rather than for mere opportunistic careerism,; for example he was one of the lead campaigners against Proposition 6, a 1978 anti-gay referendum in California with eerie similarities to 2008′s Proposition 8. This referendum would have made anyone known to be gay or who supported gay rights lose their teaching jobs. It initially polled 80% in approval but it lost by a landslide in large part due to his highly publicized debates with anti-gay State Senator John Briggs, which he likely would not have had the opportunity to be a part of if he had not held some sort of public position.

And looking at the film from a larger angle than simply as simply a biopic, the film is an excellent documentation of the early gay rights movement, a subject not often touched upon in films. The film shows first-hand the persecution that gays faced and still face today, which may awaken a lot of people who think of anti-gay discrimination in a more abstract way. The film depicts how gays were in such danger that they carried whistles to alert people nearby if they were being attacked. The film also implicates the authorities, especially the cops, in turning a blind eye to anti-gay murders and assaults and in many cases being the ones undertaking the persecution themselves. The film starts with archive footage of the police raiding gay bars in the 1950s and in one scene, the police are seen viciously assaulting gay citizens for “blocking the sidewalk”. When Harvey Milk receives his first death threat and his boyfriend urges him to call the police, he responds by saying “They probably wrote it”. When Milk’s then-future assassin, highly conservative City Supervisor Dan White, resigns from his position, it is implied the police pressured him into taking the job back.

Overall, Milk is a very informative and entertaining film on gay rights and discrimination.

Reviewed by Eli Boulton

MidEast Solidarity Spring 2001 mideast17

No to West’s war of terror

The West’s mass murder in Iraq

Israel’s war on the Palestinians

From Zionism to socialism

One year of the new intifada

Fear of fundamentalism

How the West made Bin Laden

Labour wages war on workers and poor

The problem is capitalism

Towards an anti-imperialist movement

MidEast Solidarity Autumn 2002 mideast22

Black Hawk Down actor speaks out

United Nations – friend or foe?

Peace is not good enough – against the invasion of Afghanistan

Palestine – solidarity urgently needed

Behind the wars on the Palestinians

Deir Yassin massacre

Who is in Palestine?

Liberation Spring 2002 liberation11

Liberating ideas and the movement we need to oppose the war on Iraq

Depleted uranium – another weapon of Western terror

How the West strangles the Middle East

One year on in Afghanistan

Represssion and resistance in Turkish jails

John Edmundson
What future for Palestine?

Phil Ferguson
Iraq five years on

Nick Scullin
The present war in Afghanistan

Condoleezza Rice just called in to say thank you.

Thanks for the “long history of partnership”. Thanks for New Zealand’s military participation in wars in Korea, the Pacific and more recently in Afghanistan.

Hang on a minute, isn’t Helen Clark supposed to be a  peacenik camouflaged in a power suit?

Well no, not quite. She did, after all, send defence personnel to Iraq in the first days of the war when the US was desperate to cobble together an international alliance.

In Afghanistan the commitment has been much greater, with SAS troops and other personnel  spending years there. Currently there are just 136 NZ defence personnel  in Afghanistan doing “reconstruction work”, like building stations and purchasing equipment for the Afghan police force.

Rice appreciates that while New Zealand is a small player in US military adventures, this is a long term partnership. What’s more, this multilateralism gives a stamp of legitimacy to the imperialist occupations of countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Imperialists these days mostly prefer a humanitarian guise and New Zealand is a master at this. We shouldn’t be fooled by the pretext for the New Zealand personnel in Afghanistan. They are part of a force of nearly 250,000 foreign and local army and police seen as enemy forces by the people.

As Rice made clear –  America sees  New Zealand as a friend and ally.

What can a pint-sized imperialist like New Zealand do to help out the top imperialist these days? More troops to Afghanistan could be in order.

Both Obama and McCain want to send more troops to Afghanistan in a war that is predicted to last decades. There is talk of Condoleezza Rice being McCain’s running mate. Clearly, the next US government – whether it’s headed by a Democratic or Republican president – has its sights on stepping up the occupation of Afghanistan.

Before Condoleezza Rice arrived in New Zealand,  Auckland University students offered a reward of $5,000 for a citizen’s arrest of her, and the stakes were raised by Victoria University students to $10,000.

The worst storm in 10 years didn’t stop protesters who rallied outside Government House and followed her to a reception in Auckland’s Langham hotel. She was originally to stay at the Grand Hotel at the SkyCity casino, but strikes planned to coincide with her stay saw her move to the Langham hotel.

The war criminal left New Zealand to head to a summit in Samoa with Winston Peters at her side.

Chevron held its meeting at its world headquarters in San Ramon, Ca. ExxonMobil convened in Dallas, Texas. Antiwar, environmental and other social justice organisations conducted protests at each event.

The statement below from the Federation of Oil Unions in Iraq to the shareholders of each corporation was presented at press conferences conducted in conjunction with these protests. The statement was transmitted by Hassan Juma’a Awad, President of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, to US Labor Against the War for presentation at these events.

Original statement posted here

To: The Shareholders of ExxonMobil and Chevron Corporations and All Peace Loving People of the World

From: Hassan Juma’a Awad, President, Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU)

We call upon the governments, corporations and other institutions behind the ongoing occupation of Iraq to respond to our demands for real democracy, true sovereignty and self-determination, free of all foreign interference.

Five years of invasion, war and occupation have brought nothing but death, destruction, misery and suffering to our people. In the name of our “liberation,” more than a million of our citizens have been killed or wounded, our nation’s schools, hospitals and other infrastructure have been destroyed, our neighbourhoods have been bombed, our homes have been broken into, our children have been traumatized, many of our family members and neighbours have been assaulted and arrested, our national treasures have been looted, and nearly twenty percent of our people have been turned into refugees.

The continued occupation fuels the violence in Iraq rather than alleviating it. The occupation has helped to foment and then exploit sectarian divisions and terror attacks where there had been none.

The Ba’athist legislation of 1987, which banned trade unions in the public sector and public enterprises (80% of all workers), is still in effect and continues to be enforced against us. Our union offices have been raided. Union property has been seized and destroyed. Our bank accounts have been frozen. Our leaders have been beaten, arrested, abducted and assassinated. Our rights as workers are routinely violated. This is an attack on our rights and the basic precepts of a democratic society. It is a grim reminder of the shadow of dictatorship still stalking our country.

We call upon you and all the world’s peace-loving peoples to help us to end the nightmare of occupation and restore our sovereignty and national independence so that we can chart our own course to the future.

1. We demand an immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from our country, and utterly reject the agreement being negotiated with the USA for long-term bases and a military presence. Iraq must be returned to full sovereignty.

2. We demand the passage of a labour law promised by our Constitution, that adheres to ILO principles to protect the rights of workers to organize, bargain and strike, independent of state control and interference and on which Iraqi trade unionists have been fully consulted.

3. We demand an end to meddling in our sovereign economic affairs by the International Monetary Fund, the USA and UK, and multinational energy corporations, and recognition that no major economic decisions concerning our services and resources can be made while foreign troops occupy our country.

4. We demand that the US government, oil companies and others immediately cease lobbying for the oil law which would fracture the country and hand control over our oil to multinational companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron. We demand that all oil companies be prevented from entering into any long-term agreement concerning oil while Iraq remains occupied. The Iraqi government must tear up the current draft of the oil law, and begin to develop a legitimate oil policy based on full and genuine consultation with the Iraqi people. Only after all occupation forces are gone should a long term plan for the development of our oil resources be adopted.

We seek your support and solidarity to help us end the military and economic occupation of our country.

We look forward to the day when we have a world based on co-operation and solidarity. We look forward to a world free from war, sectarianism, competition and exploitation.