Prashad urges NZ public to confront dangers of emboldened imperialists
Not enough mobilisation is happening in the Pacific and Palestinian rights protestors need to be firmly anti-imperialist as the US squares up to China, esteemed Indian writer tells Auckland meeting.
New Zealanders need to mobilise much more to confront Israel’s genocide in Gaza and avoid their nation being used in a war against China by emboldened imperialist ‘madmen’, Indian writer and historian Vijay Prashad says.
Addressing a crowd in Auckland this week as part of a five-day stay in the North Island where he had several speaking engagements, the celebrated left-wing scholar said victory for Israel in perpetrating genocide in Gaza and an expansionist policy of war in West Asia would encourage the US to bring chaos and war elsewhere, including to the Asia-Pacific region.
He said the US and Israel were working as one in what was taking place in Gaza and the wider region, with supposed US diplomatic efforts of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to broker peace deals subterfuge.
“You can’t be pro-Palestinian and pro-war elsewhere,” he told an audience in Auckland’s Western Springs on Thursday, October 24.
“You got to put it together. This is imperialism. They think more than half of the world are a lesser people, that we need to behave ourselves and if we don’t behave, they’re going to pummel us. Don’t think you can just stay on the Palestine level - your politics have to expand. We cannot afford these guys to win against the Palestinians. We cannot afford them to win anywhere, because it will embolden them to continue this madness of using ‘Promethean fire’ to keep us in our place.”
Speaking on the theme of Palestine and anticolonialism in the Global South, Prashad said Israel was devastating Gaza and now Lebanon with bombardment from the air, just like colonial power Italy with its aerial bombing of Libya in 1911, followed by Britain’s bombing of Iraq in 1924, both actions a means of disciplining those peoples of the world deemed inferior.
Prashad pointed to a memorandum written by Britain’s notorious Air Chief Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, which revealed the logic of aerial bombing was not only to kill without risk, but also to instil fear and teach a lesson on Western superiority - by raining down God-like ‘Promethean fire’ upon them.
The obscene colonial lesson was now being repeated in occupied Palestine and being forced on those resisting across West Asia. This was also meant as a warning to the rest of the world to keep in line, Prashad told the audience.
“They are trying to teach the rest of us to behave,” he said.
“This is a lesson for the Chinese. ‘You, lesser people, stop producing phones, behave, or we can do this to you’. This is a lesson for the Sahel states, ‘don’t think you can have sovereignty, this is a lesson for you’. This is pedagogical. Palestine is the laboratory for the rest of us. They’re telling all of us, ‘if you don’t get into line, we’re going to get you’.
“There needs to be much bigger mobilisations around the Pacific because of this pedagogy. You can’t be anti-what’s happening in Palestine and not be afraid of how these islands are going to be used against China.”
He said there were not enough protests in New Zealand over moves by the government to participate in inflicting Western technological terror and participating in an imperialism agenda.
“The people of New Zealand joined RIMPAC and sent ships along with the Israelis and there were just not enough protests on these two islands and many others,” Prashad said.
In July, the Royal New Zealand Navy sent HMNZS Aotearoa and 250 personnel to Pearl Harbor, as part of the New Zealand Defence Force’s (NZDF) contribution to Exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC 24). Israel’s Navy also participated in the biennial multi-national exercise.
New Zealand’s military has also been playing a role in helping to target Yemen in a bombing campaign led by US Central Command (CENTCOM) since the start of the year. The operation was lunched in response to Houthi attacks on cargo ships breaking its Red Sea embargo designed to stop genocide occurring in Gaza.
The National Party-led government has signalled its realignment with US foreign policy and NATO, and that it will likely join Pillar II of troubled anti-China nuclear submarine alliance AUKUS.
Pillar II offers technical support to the proposed nuclear fleet, including hypersonic and quantum computing expertise, as well as AI-based targeting systems. The US Defence Department describes it as being “designed to harness the combined industrial and innovation bases of the tri-lateral partners to ensure that our forces are equipped with cutting edge interoperable military capabilities”.
Prashad also offered an unflattering assessment of New Zealand’s media landscape, which he pointed out had failed to cover the significance of last week’s BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, with tectonic shifts taking place in the world around emerging multipolarity challenging US hegemony. He urged New Zealand writers to organise and create a news website to address the problem and offered his help to set it up. Prashad is a journalist and former war correspondent.
“Whatsapp is not enough, email groups are not enough,” he said.
“You need a front-facing portal because your media is really crap. I mean, it is really, really bad. And what’s interesting is, everybody I talk to says ‘I get my news from watching Youtube, I watch some Americans, Democracy Now… Why are you watching American Youtubers? Why aren’t you producing your own view of the world. That is a sign of an extreme lack of self-confidence, if a people don’t believe they should have their own media”.
New Zealand media’s coverage of world events is largely viewed through the prism of Anglophile news perspectives, supplied from other countries attached to the Western Five Eyes intelligence apparatus. The country’s biggest commercial news company Stuff uses UK right-wing broadsheet The Telegraph as a source of international news, while national broadcaster Radio New Zealand uses CNN, Reuters, the ABC and AFP.
Prashad also took part in a talk on Marxism and Decolonisation at the University of Auckland on Thursday with Emmy Rākete. He also attended the Te Hui Oranga Conference in Auckland, was expected to address the NZ Federation of Socialist Societies National Conference in Wellington today (Sunday, October 27). He was invited to New Zealand by Māori activists.
Prashad flies out to Australia to commence a speaking tour on Monday, 28 October.
Thank you for this excellent piece.
Every word he said is correct.
Can I also add, if writers like you, Mick, and your network start a media portal for NZ writers, I'm there for the mahi. I got the degrees, the decades' experience, the writing, but no one establishment would ever pay for my perspective. Totally shut out, and I can't go writing "in the wind", it's pointless. None of us can. I'd do all I could for free to get NZ's anti-imperialist front up on the front foot. Just need the project.
Many of our real journalists can be found on substack. That is good, but it is not an adequate solution. The "great paywall of democracy" makes the western political system the preserve of the wealthy (who boast that it has a "small yard behind a high fence") and on top of that wall stand the smaller paywalls of substack which limit public engagement with some of our best and most honest thinkers. Could an Aotearoa substack collective be opened up giving wider access to more thinkers for a single low subscription fee? So if I subscribe to Mick Hall I get Bernard Hickey and vice versa? And maybe a few of the better international commentators such as Tarik Cyril Amar as well?