Dead sheep and human rights

The Prime Minister of New Zealand, who is the son of a Jewish mother, is visiting the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia to talk business. Six years ago a trade deal fell through because New Zealand would not agree to live sheep exports. 550,000 sheep had died on the way to the Middle East between 2000 and 2012, so live sheep exports were stopped. Though the sheep would have died anyway, dying of seasickness seemed more cruel than dying at the hands of slaughtermen. One of the spin-offs of the prohibition on selling live sheep to the the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia was that the head of the largest meat company suggested to one of its shareholders, the then Minister of Agriculture, David Carter, that it may be politically expedient to stop kosher slaughter in New Zealand to placate the Arabs. Now live sheep export is back on the agenda. Business is business. Sheep were not consulted. John Key is urged to talk to the heads of the Gulf States and particularly the King of Saudi Arabia about human rights abuses while visiting there. I suspect that the trade deal will take precedence over issues of women's rights, arbitrary cruel punishments of anyone critical of the regime, beheadings and amputations as a punishment. In the 1930s New Zealand's trade with Nazi Germany increased sharply, despite Britain's objections. Britain tried to put pressure on the Nazi regime through limits if not embargoes on trade. Like now, business was business for New Zealand. Issues of human right abuses were of no concern of the New Zealand government. Those abuses were part of the story of John Keys' own family. It will be interesting to see whether he has those in mind when negotiating with the Arabs.

Remembering the Holocaust
Yesterday I gave a talk at Victoria University of Wellington to Jewish students and anybody else who was interested about the Holocaust as viewed through my own personal experiences. My talk was well received, I had some nice feedback and the talk prompted very good questions. The text of my talk is below:

Talk about the Holocaust at Victoria University

Wellington Loop – War Memorials

With the opening of the Pukeahu National War Memorial this week and the new Gallipoli exhibition at Te Papa a visit to the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand completes the loop of War Memorials. The scale of the Holocaust Centre displays of course does not compare with the massive cost no object Gallipoli displays, but although modest in scale, it poses challenging questions:

• Why remember?
• What to remember?
• What is the appropriate way to remember?

Jews were always big on remembering. The Jewish narrative is full of catastrophes that Jews are commanded to remember, from slavery in Egypt, to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD on the 9th of the Jewish month of Av, to the numerous massacres and pogroms throughout history including the Holocaust. The 2779 New Zealand soldiers who died at Gallipoli, even the 16,697 killed in the First World War, or the 11,625 casualties of the Second World War, great personal tragedies though these were, do not compare with the slaughter of a third of the Jewish population of the world during the Holocaust, 3 million in Poland, 90% of Polish Jews, 90% of the Jews of the Baltic countries, 88% of the Jews of Germany and Austria, 70% of the Jews of Hungary, about 5.600,000 altogether. Commemorating a slaughter on such a scale appropriately was such a huge challenge that for many years there was no Holocaust Memorial at all in Wellington beyond a plaque above the door of the synagogue. It was not until Ziggy Relis, who fled Germany before the war, most of whose family had been murdered, erected a public monument in the Makara Jewish cemetery at his own expense because he felt that the Holocaust needed a Memorial. The Holocaust Centre evolved from a discussion of the need to honour the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, who included members of families of every Jew, and reflect on the tragedy of the Holocaust as part of European and incidentally, New Zealand history by teaching and talking about the Holocaust and keeping its memory alive. The premises of the Holocaust Centre of NZ is a memorial in itself. Within the walls there is a display of some of the million and a half buttons collected by students of Moriah College from every corner of the world to commemorate the number of children killed during the Holocaust. There are two suitcases, one as a reminder of one half of a family that managed to find refuge in New Zealand, the other remembering the family that could not make it here. There is Clare Galambos's smock that she wore as a slave labourer in the Allendorf munitions factory in Germany during the bitterly cold winter of 1944 – 45, with her prisoner number as a substitute for her name and individuality. Clare saved this garment, brought it with her to New Zealand, and never talked about it or her experiences in Auschwitz during the 32 years that she played in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. The panels showing the lives of Hanka Pressburg and Clare Galambos record the members of their families who were killed. The stories of the Deckston children show the orphans and family members who were left behind in Poland and were killed in concentration camps or locked inside the great synagogue in Bialystok and burned to death. The image of the candle flame and the tray of stones show the Jewish way of mourning. The quote from the Ethics of the Fathers inscribed on the ceiling, 'Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.' — Mishnah Sanhedrin4:9; Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 37a. reflects the value Jewish tradition places on life and the great sense of loss experienced by the murder of every individual.

The fate of Jews in France and Hungary

The Hon. Chris Finlayson talked about his visit to Auschwitz for the 70th commemoration of its liberation as the representative of the New Zealand government, together with Annette King the deputy leader of the Labour Party. He mentioned the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and said that were he a Jew in France or Hungary he would seriously consider leaving. Two young women from the south of France, visiting my daughter in England said that they would never go back to France because of the danger to Jews. Yet walking away from where you were born, where you lived all your life is not the answer. The Jews of France are Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, the Jews of Hungary are Hungarians. Wherever they would move they would be strangers. They would not be Israelis, English, or New Zealanders. They would have no sense of belonging. They would be cut off from their roots and traditions. The answer to their dilemma is to stand up for who they are, deny the right of North African Muslim immigrants  or native anti-Semites to question their identity. Jews made enormous contributions to both of these countries just because they belonged, they were integral parts of the nation that defined these countries as French or Hungarian. Perhaps the fate of Jews is to defy bigotry and confront it.

John Campbell, James Shelley, who owns the airwaves, and the role of public broadcasting.

John Campbell is the face of the TV3 current affairs programme after the daily six o'clock news. He is a hard hitting journalist deeply concerned about issues of social equity and individual rights. Unfortunately, pitted against a light weight entertainment programme of vaguely newsy character on TV1, his audience ratings have been gradually dropping. As advertisers call the tune, there is talk of axing John Campbell for something lighter and frothier with greater appeal to advertisers. Somehow over the years various governments lost sight of the purpose of broadcasting. When the then Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, appointed Professor James Shelley, the most popular and dynamic educator at Canterbury University, to take charge of New Zealand broadcasting in 1936, Shelley injected a vision into public broadcasting that shaped Radio New Zealand and public television for two generations. For him education was no mere technical enterprise, 'but the relentlessly discriminating pursuit of the good life, and the arts must lie at the heart of this'.  Broadcasting was a public good. Then the barbarians took over. They saw broadcasting, and television in particular, as a cash cow. They didn't care that the air waves, like water, didn't belong to any privileged group but to the people of the whole nation, they flogged off the right to make private money from it, and on the way the government clipped the ticket. So now we have a situation where advertisers decide what programmes people should see, and if this means dumbing down the choice offered it matters not as long as at the end of the day they turned a profit. Milo Mindebinder, the fictitious character of Joseph Heller's  Catch 22,  who saw the merit of bombing his own troops because there was profit in it, would approve. The possible dumping of John Campbell, despite enormous public support for him, raises the whole question of what should the purpose of public broadcast be. Is it appropriate to leave it in the hands of a private corporation the legitimate object of which is to make money, not to enhance the educational well-being of the public? Perhaps the whole programming schedule should be reviewed. Why should challenging, searching news items be screened at a time when families should sit down to dinner with their children? Would it not be more appropriate to screen light programmes for family entertainment?  Why do both the main television channels have to screen cooking competitions, house renovations, talentless talent quests at the same time? Would it not be better to give viewers a choice and screen Campbell Live at a later time when grown ups watch grown up television? We should all care about John Campbell and his style of mature news broadcasting. To have a well-informed society that can make sound democratic decisions we need serious informative programmes, and we should resist the kind of political interference that saw the destruction of the state of the arts Broadcasting House to be replaced by a large phallic symbol made of pebbles just because the then Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, didn't like some of the questions when he was interviewed on television. We should also resist handing decision making to advertisers who believe that there is more money in advertising on cheap light mindless television programmes because aimed at young minds reluctant to watch programmes that require concentration and thought.

Zero hours, minimum wage, the workers strike back

This week McDonald workers picketed some of the restaurants, demanding the end of Zero hour contracts, which stipulate that workers have to be available for work as the company demanded, without any guaranteed minimum hours offered. Last week the chains under the umbrella of Restaurant Brands, KFC, Starbucks,and  Pizza Hutt discontinued Zero Hour contracts. The Warehouse agreed to pay recommended minimum wages, some three dollars above the basic mandatory minimum wage. Child poverty and wage inequality is  subject of editorials and frequent debates. The book of the French economist, Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century, in which he argues that income inequality is bad for business, bad for the economy of the nation, is widely reviewed and discussed. It shows that countries with the least income inequality like the Scandinavian countries, have better records of economic performance than countries with large inequalities like the US and to a lesser degree, New Zealand . To me this does not seem surprising. Globalization that Roger Douglas and the Fourth Labour Government bought into and since then has become accepted as the ideology by both main political parties meant that the low wage economies of China and other developing countries were imported into New Zealand. New Zealand wages were depressed to compete with the wages of these countries, and a degree of unemployment was tolerated to endure labour competition. While wages were artificially depressed, to ensure that poverty does not reach a politically unacceptable level, wages were topped up with government subsidies, so the tax payer, that is wage earners, subsidized employers, including many large international corporations. While wages were kept low, corporates enjoyed public support. A bank that got into difficulties, was bailed out by the government. Multinational corporations could minimize their taxes by shifting profits from New Zealand where they were earned to tax havens where they paid little or no tax. Labour laws were altered to suit large Hollywood film corporations. The pickets outside McDonalds may be a small indication of the turning of the tide.  It may be the end of consensus politics with very little differences between the policies of the major parties nominally on the right and the left of the divide. We might yet see the interests of the working men, and the middle classes gain political traction and the accumulation of the wealth of those with capital come under the spotlight.  

Iran and the bomb

Obama, like his Democrat predecessor, Bill Clinton, is reluctant to commit American troops to a confrontation with Iran, and for this he is to be applauded. Last time American troops got involved in a Middle Eastern conflicts not only were a large number of young, mostly poor and black, Americans killed, but their involvement had unexpected and tragic consequences. Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan had disintegrated as functioning states. America's allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia don't like the framework of agreement with Iran cobbled together by the US and the European powers, including Russia, but an agreement is better than war. True, there may be a likelihood that ultimately, despite oversights, Iran might develop a nuclear weapon and add to the countries in the region who already have nuclear weapons, but over the years the threat of a nuclear war has greatly diminished. Despite the enormous advances in technology, the greatest present day threat is a young woman with an explosive belt blowing herself up in a busy market place. If you have to have nuclear weapons it is better if they are under the control of stable states, not rogue states that are just a combination of disaffected tribesmen. Like the Mullahs and their government in Iran or not, Iran is at least a stable, and democratic state in a region of unstable and ungovernable states. And through the amazing convolutions of history, Iran and America, sworn enemies, are at least in the same side in their conflict with ISIS. Iranian troops and their proxies are fighting the war that the Americans are reluctant to engage in. The striking ingredient in the conflict that is absent is the conflict between communists and Westerners. For generations Americans were focused on keeping communism at bay. The CIA overthrew regimes that were perceived as leaning towards the communist camp, murdered Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran, Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected leader of the Republic of Congo, Salvador Allende of Chile, among others, all with disastrous consequences. There are still those who believe that it is appropriate for Western colonial powers to interfere and force regime changes on governments they disapprove of, but old Cold War rivalries no longer enter into consideration. George Orwell could foresee this.