COMMENTARY: By Saige England
Citizen journalists bring to our attention the truths that we need to know. Being a witness to such truths is different to doom scrolling. It is about awareness.
This is about knowing the truths that the people who run this deteriorating world, want to hide.
Victims everywhere are begging to be heard and seen. And some people are revealing these truths. Some are trained in journalism, some are freelancing because the mainstream is not the clear clean truth stream, and some are self-trained.
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The role of filming and reporting the truth is vital in an era when books are banned, when the names of predators are redacted, when the people at the top are part of an oligarchy that supports murder and rape.
A couple of years ago — almost to the day — I was pepper sprayed by a frontline policeman for filming police brutality against peaceful protesters standing on the footpath in Lyttelton Aotearoa New Zealand.
In that situation police seized people and hurled them to the ground. In other instances, as with human rights activist, John Minto, they seized baffled people and hauled them onto the road.
The men and women in blue vests and black gloves, formed a scrum over each seized civilian. They pummelled and beat them viciously, and hauled them into vans. Minto suffered a gash down his forehead.
Nightmares last longer
Others had similar wounds and thanks to the direct illegal use of pepper spray, many suffered a sense like glass in their eyes. In my experience, those painful symptoms lasted weeks. The nightmares lasted longer.
Early last year, I was banned from my own Town Hall for witnessing the State of the Nation speech by Winston Peters. One of that leader’s loyal fans complained that I was taking notes. I produced my press card. Made no difference.
I witnessed a leader inciting hatred. Witnessing. The security guards banned me. The police upheld the ban. I am a multi-award winning reporter who has reported from conflict zones around the world. And I see the conflict increasing.
In the United States, in Europe, in Australia, in Aotearoa New Zealand, what are we learning?
The right to support the right of all human beings to live on their land is decreed a crime by our leaders. Why? Because some have more than others and they want to protect their “more” and push others to have less, even nothing.
These are the actions of totalitarian capitalist regimes intent on retaining power over the land, the rivers, and all the waterways.
We see it in the US with ICE killing a woman who was poet and a mother, we see it in the killing of a nurse, and all the disappearances, people — including children — hauled off streets and “disappeared”.
Police kicking 2 women
We see it with police kicking and beating two women wearing abayas in the Netherlands. If they are assaulting women in public we can be certain they are also molesting women behind the public gaze.
We see totalitarian push back against human rights in Germany and France, Australia and New Zealand.
Let’s call this flagrant attack on democracy what it is.
It is imperialism. Yes I know, it sounds like I’m recalling Thatcher. But hey she never went away. Her Daddy abused her friends and she loved him. Thatcher was an abuse enabler.
Like Blair. Like Trump. Like other abusers who hold power. It is no surprise that many of these leaders who were raised by power hungry predators, become predators. They exploit others.
Really it is a very simple equation. Democracy is impossible under financial imperialist capitalism.
Imperialism upholds the right of one people to reign supreme over another. We aren’t talking about something that ended over a hundred years ago. We are talking about something that is being perpetuated now.
Shameful exploitation
And by now, those of us who are descended by people who usurped and enslaved, are coming to a difficult conclusion — that it is shameful, this history of exploitation.
As one Quaker researcher said: “What I have learned is that if my ancestors were not as radical for human rights as I have hoped, I can at least be different, be radical for human rights now.”
Greed, predatory behaviour is handed down from predator to predator. It used to favour the oldest son. Now it just faces those prepared to sell out to buy in.
Mercenary capitalist entrepreneurs control society and they govern our countries. The brutes who exploit are connected.
So back to the streets. Back to what some reporters saw and reported and what others who aren’t real reporters, failed to report.
Let’s pick apart the claims of incitement. Incitement for what?
Chanting crime
The authorities in NSW deem that it should be a crime for any citizen to chant these words.
From.
The.
River.
To.
The.
Sea.
What next? Will Jews be told they can no longer chant in Hebrew: le shana haba b’yerulashaem. See the parallel.
Next.
Year.
In.
Jerusalem.
Every year Jews around the world chant — as they have for decades and decades — the vow that next year they will be in Jerusalem. They lived in Europe. They lived in the US.
And this they chanted.
Perhaps that is why it bothers Zionists and supporters of genocide. But it wasn’t a return.
Jews who recite this are Europeans and Americans, New Zealanders and Australians.
When they talk of exile, they are talking in mythological proportions, invoking the Bible and tribalism, Goliath and David.
Zionist regime supreme
But one group is reigning supreme. The Zionist regime has pushed thousands of Palestinians out of their homes, and murdered tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands, and still this genocide continues.
But has New South Wales deemed it a crime for Jews to chant “next year in Jerusalem”?
No.
Nor should it. People have the right to chant.
But let’s understand the real history, rather than the propaganda pumped out by a multi million dollar US-Israeli think thank.
Thanks to very real anti-semitism, Europe did not want to rehome Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Britain helped out with an imperialist Zionist strategy that pushed Palestinians out of their homes.
Some Jews fled, refused to do what had been done to them. Good on those Jews. And good on those Jews around the world who stand for societies that care and share, that don’t steal and kill.
I am worried about the implications of any law that bans a chant by exiled people. Will it become a crime for any group of people to chant about their desire to return to lands from which they were exiled?
Governments around the world are leaning that way. They stomp down on Indigenous people, on refugees, on immigrants. They protect their excessive power and privilege.
Blaming immigrants
It’s very popular among these regimes to blame immigrants who come from land that was raped and raided by imperialism. Just tune into our ageing playboy Winston Peters.
Make no mistake under regimes such as this, no one is safe. No one.
It is clearly a crime for others to stand alongside those who have been oppressed and exiled, so will it one day be deemed a crime to talk about ALL the stolen children? Like the stolen indigenous children? The children born in a certain place, on certain land, near a river, near the sea.
Will it be a crime to talk about those abused in state homes?
Will the imperialist histories be redacted? Oh they are. The narrative is changed. The victims can barely survive.
I witnessed some of this so I can remind myself and I can remind you.
When I first went to Israel in 1982 the Begin regime invaded Lebanon. Desecrated people dreaming under cypress trees.
The Israeli Offence Force assisted then, in the genocide, of around 3000 children, women, and men — Palestinians — in refugee camps.
Evil massacre
It was a bloodbath, an evil massacre carried out under stealth, at night. The victims did not have a chance. They had no one to defend them. They were murdered by mercenary Israeli soldiers.
One Israeli soldier, Ari Folman, later made a film, Waltz with Bashir which depicts how he came to realise he was among the soldiers who surrounded the camps and fired flares to illuminate the area for the Lebanese Christian Philangist militia.
Like most soldiers, he was only “following orders”. It haunted him.
The ghosts of every massacre carried out by every totalitarian state like Israel haunt the world. And every regime that supports it is responsibile.
Imperialism is the bloodstain that won’t wash out until the notion of super and special entitlement due to race or class or religion is extinguished.
It is racist and classist and it is wrong.
I wrote my novel The Seasonwife because I wanted to show the truth — that people down the bottom rungs of the class system were exploited by those at the top to exploit indigenous people.
Criminalised the poor
We need to know these truths. And they can be proved. Settler colonialism is not a pretty policy, it was dreamed up by a country that created poverty and criminalised the poor. It sent them out to do its dirty work. Oh some rode on those waves but others were submerged. And Indigenous people lost their rights.
Here in Aotearoa a Treaty was forged, a treaty which clearly gives Indigenous people the right to rangatiratanga. And successive legal acts pushed indigenous people down, breached the principles of that partnership.
When one partner is the abuser the partnership is not equal.
We must remember the crimes of imperialism. We must. Because the past is now.
The massacres of Palestinians is an extension of every colonial crime. The crimes are connected: slavery; forced servitude; exile due to poverty; apartheid, assimilation, extermination.
It is a thread from this ocean to that river to that ocean. From here to there. From Europe to the Levant and the Middle East. All the greed-mongers benefit.
The crimes against Palestinians have been going on for more than seven decades. Research the Nakba. Before the British aided and mounted a violent rape-and-kill takeover, Muslims and Jews and Christians worshipped alongside each other in Palestine. It is easy enough to find documentary evidence of this pleasant land on YouTube.
Look at it now. Look at the difference between Haifa or Tel Aviv and Gaza.
Standing against supremacy
Any Jew who has a soul, who has a conscience, will not stand for the slaughter of innocents or for the creation of a white apartheid supremely state. In the US most Jews are against this, and increasingly so are Jews in Australia and New Zealand, standing up against the supremacy of Zionism.
And Christians need to stand too. It is KKK fundamentalist to support the extermination of people. There is nothing holy in supporting theft and expulsion and the gunning down of women, children, and men.
When we invoke laws that support genocide we create a soul-less compassionless society.
A truly Humanist, Animist, any Values-based system will create a society with laws that uphold rather than extinguish, human rights.
It was a white Australian male who used his inheritance to kill 51 people praying at two mosques in Christchurch New Zealand. The Iman who greeted him at the door welcomed him as “a brother”.
It was a Muslim man who risked his life and suffered terrible injuries while tackling two ISIS-inspired extremist gunmen at Bondi Beach in Sydney. That Muslim man stepped in front of a gun to defend Jewish children, women, and men.
I met many such kind, brave, peace-loving men when I lived in the Middle East and I experienced the utmost hospitality from Muslims.
I differentiate between all people and their regimes.
Greed in common
The regimes that uphold human rights violations are all connected. They all have one thing in common: greed.
Their rulers are predators.
Israel is a US-supported state responsible for mass murder, for genocide, for apartheid, for stealing children decade after decade.
Every government that has failed to denounce that State of Hate is acting against the right of people — all people — to real and precious freedom.
Once again, I call down my Jewish ancestors who experienced, as I have, anti-semitism — in standing against the supremacism that is Zionism.
I stand with Jews Against Zionism. I stand with Jews for Peace. I stand with Jews Against Genocide.
I stand with Jews who support the right of Palestinians to return. Yes to the land, yes to that beautiful river, and to that precious sea. I stand with their right to live where they want to live.
Right to protest
And I stand with the right of all citizens to protest. I stand with the right of citizen journalists to film and report human rights violations.
In my social media posts I continually put aggressive impulsive patriarchal police on notice. I let them know that violence by people who are supposed to protect, is unacceptable.
Their actions could lead to them being incarcerated.
Maybe not now, not yet, but one day. Their violent actions could certainly lead to them being jobless.
Their violent actions will be seen over and over again. The truth won’t be erased.
And I say this to mainstream reporters, please do your job. Join a union and oppose the patriarchy that presents propaganda as truth. Some reporters on the ground in Sydney who said they saw violence by the police and no violence from protesters, but the BBC and RNZ changed that narrative.
News presenters who were not present at the scene presented a skewed version provided by their government. They became a mouthpiece for propaganda. And in doing so they supported totalitarianism.
Reporters must not be mouthpieces for what one commentator so aptly described as the Broligarchy. Predators.
Out of police
The policeman who pepper sprayed me, two years ago, when I took footage of assaults against peaceful civilians by violent police, is no longer in the force. Perhaps he has joined the great raft of unemployed.
I would like to think he can be educated into compassion, that he can learn, that the hard look in his eye will one day be softened when he holds a brown grandchild in his arms.
Think twice police. Think twice reporters. Think twice every one who reads this.
Would you want your children to support all human rights? Do you think words like river and sea and return should be banned? Do you think the colour of the grass and the colour of a rose should be denounced as evil?
Do you think people should have the right to live on their land unmolested? Do you think the land and the waterways should be respected or bombed to dust, drained for its minerals?
Do you believe in freedom? If you do, then know that those who are upholding the right of one people to strip the rights of others, will not leave it there.
These totalitarian leaders are united. As one commentator put it, they are the broligarchy. They are connected. They are predators. And they will use force to shut you up and shut you down.
But I hold hope.
Moral weapon — the truth
Every citizen journalist who films human rights crimes being carried out by the arm of the government is armed with a valuable moral weapon: the truth.
Every citizen journalist reporting these truths is a hero.
The truth might be redacted, those who speak it or shout it might become victims, but in calling it out, they fall on the side of freedom and they will be remembered.
Freedom will come. Because it must. The greed mongers who rule must not prevail.
When the truths of victims is heard, the predators lose the narrative, and then they lose their power.
We are all connected in the lifestream of this tiny, precious blue planet. A spark is born and that spark is creativity, it is the spark that rises from destruction and despair.
Never stop witnessing
Harmony. Peace, and Tranquility is possible if our goal is cooperative living.
So be a witness, and never stop witnessing. Raise your voice, raise your heart and your soul. We are all connected and related because we are all brothers and sisters and cousins, spinning on this spinning orb, sparks in the eye of the universe.
Sparks of creativity are born in societies where nurturers are valued rather than predators and exploiters.
In such a world, peace will prevail.
One fine day.
Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
