Socialist Aotearoa

by Emir Hodzic, artist and social justice activist Being in New Zealand now, while the Middle East burns and Europe is overwhelmed with refugees, is like being on the other side of the planet. Well, New Zealand is actually on the other side of the planet. So far away in fact, that nothing disrupts Prime Minister’s “rebranding” project. Nothing except rugby, that is. Everything is fine and dandy in Godzone. Except, sometimes thousands of “uninformed” and “politically irrelevant” New Zealanders take to the streets in protest of the TPPA free trade agreement, and the unusual secrecy behind it. Unfolding human tragedy does make it to the 6 o’clock news, but it is so far away that it isn’t our problem. Most have accepted the Government’s explanation that we can’t afford to take more refugees, and some have even embraced good old-fashioned racism and bigotry. “All they will do is sit around dreaming of ways to kill us” one concerned Kiwi commented, “What you people need is a boo

  can’t share that picture of the drowned toddler on the beach of Fortress Europe. He was the age of my daughter Aoibheann. But things need to change. The boy’s name was Aylan. He was 3, and came from Kobani. Kobani, where the socialist and feminist grassroots resistance to ISIS is now attacked on the other side by the Western ally, Turkey. I’m an Irishman who moved here from the North of Ireland first in 1999. Our hometown Dundalk took a huge amount of refugees from the Loyalist pogroms in the North of Ireland in the early 1970s. It was the biggest movement of displaced people internally in Europe from the end of World War Two, until the fall of Yugoslavia. We grew up in a town of solidarity, where thousands of people fled for their lives from burning houses and deathsquads, from a regime that shot civil rights protesters dead on the streets. We did it then, we can do it now. Some of these people who talk about “looking after our own”, I’ve never seen marching against priva

By The Coordination of the International Socialist Tendency 1. Europe is facing what has been called its “greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War”. Global levels of displacement due to war and persecution have reached horrific proportions. Some 13.9 million were displaced in 2014 alone. The numbers entering Europe in July were three times higher than a year earlier. The largest source of refugees making the desperate journey to Europe is Syria. Here the civil war that started with the Assad regime’s attempt to crush the uprising that began in 2011 has been exacerbated by the rise of Islamic State. However, this can only be understood in the context of the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, led by the US and Britain. This Western-led offensive, the devastation it caused and the attempt of the occupiers to use sectarian forces to stabilise the country paved the way for the sharpening of conflict across the region. Afghanistan, another country invaded an

As an Irish Kiwi, I could never be represented by a flag with that Butcher's Apron in the corner. It flew over Ireland when British imperialism put our people through a Late Victorian Holocaust, a famine genocide where millions died and millions more were dispersed through diaspora. The origins of the Irish community in Aotearoa and Australia spring from that trauma. The Butcher's Apron was flown by State forces that crushed the revolutions of 1798, 1848 and 1916, and flew over my head as we endured the military occupation and repression in the North of Ireland through thirty years of deathsquads , civil rights violations and slaughter some call "Troubles". The flag that makes my heart rise in Aotearoa is the red, white and black of the Tino rangatiratanga of the Maori people, and the red flag of the international working class. The red on both of these flags has a deeper spiritual symbolism than the blood that the Butcher's Apron is soaked in forever. Jo