Like a relentless ocean, wave after wave of pro-Palestinian pro-human rights protesters disrupted New Zealand deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters’ state of the nation speech at the Christchurch Town Hall yesterday.

A clarion call to Trumpism and Australia’s One Nation Party, the speech was accompanied by the background music of about 250 protesters outside the Town Hall, chanting: “Complicity in genocide is a crime.”

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair John Minto described Peters’ attitude to Palestinians as “sickening”.

• READ MORE: Israel kills at least 51 in Gaza today as it prepares to send more troops
• No love lost as Winston Peters and Chris Hipkins trade barbs
• Green Party’s Swarbrick calls for urgent NZ action over Israel’s ‘crazy’ Gaza slaughter
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Inside the James Hay Theatre, protester after protester stood and spoke loudly and clearly against the deputy Prime Minister’s failure to support those still dying in Gaza, and his failure to denounce the ongoing genocide.

Ben Vorderegger was the first of nine protesters who appealed on behalf of people who have lost their voices in the dust of blood and bones, bombs and sniper guns.

Before he and others were hauled out, they spoke for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza — women, men, doctors, aid workers, journalists, and children.

Gazan health authorities have reported that the official death toll is now more than 50,000 — but that is the confirmed deaths with thousands more buried under the rubble.

Real death toll
The real death toll from the genocide in Gaza has been estimated by a reputed medical journal, The Lancet, at more than 63,000. A third of those are children. Each day more children are killed.

One by one the protesters who challenged Peters were manhandled by security guards to a frenzied crowd screaming “out, out”.

The deputy Prime Minister’s response was to deride and mock the conscientious objectors. He did not stop there. He lambasted the media.

At this point, several members of his audience turned on me as a journalist and demanded my removal.

This means that not only is the right to free speech at stake, the right or freedom to report is also being eroded. (I was later trespassed by security guards and police from the Town Hall although no reason was supplied for the ban).

Inside the Christchurch Town Hall the call by Peters, who is also Foreign Minister, to “Make New Zealand Great Again” continued in the vein of a speech written by a MAGA leader.

He whitewashed human rights, failed to address climate change, and demonstrated loathing for a media that has rarely challenged him.

Condemned movement
Slamming the PSNA as “Marxist fascists” for calling out genocide, he condemned the movement for failing to talk with those who have a record of kowtowing to violent colonisation.

This tactic is Colonial Invasion 101. It sees the invader rewarding and only dealing with those who sell out. This strategy demands that the colonised people should bow to the oppressor — an oppressor who threatens them with losing everything if they do not accept the scraps.

Peters showed no support for the Treaty of Waitangi but rather, endorsed the government’s challenge to the founding document of the nation – Te Tiriti o Waitangi. In his dismissal of the founding and legally binding partnership, he repeated the “One Nation” catch-cry. Ad nauseum.

Besides slamming Palestinians, the Scots (he managed to squeeze in a racist joke against Scottish people), and the woke, Peters’ speech promoted continued mining, showing some amnesia over the Pike River disaster. He did not reference the environment or climate change.

After the speech, outside the Town Hall police donned black gloves — a sign they were prepared to use pepper-spray.

PSNA co-chair John Minto described Peters’ failure to stand against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians as “bloody disgraceful”.

The police arrested one protester, claiming he put his hand on a car transporting NZ First officials. A witness said this was not the case.

Protester released
The protester was later released without any charges being laid.

A defiant New Zealand First MP Shane Jones marched out of the Town Hall after the event. He raised his arms defensively at protesters crying, “what if it was your grandchildren being slaughtered?”

I was trespassed from the Christchurch Town Hall for re-entering the Town Hall for Winston Peters’ media conference. No reason was supplied by police or the Town Hall security personnel for that trespass order..

It is well known that Peters loathes the media — he said so enough times during his state of the nation speech.

He referenced former US President Bill Clinton during his speech, an interesting reference given that Clinton did not receive the protection from the media that Peters has received.

From the over zealous security personnel who manhandled and dragged out hecklers, to the banning of a journalist, to the arrest of someone for “touching a car” when witnesses report otherwise, the state of the nation speech held some uncomfortable echoes — the actions of a fascist dictatorship.

Populist threats
The atmosphere was reminiscent of a Jorg Haider press conference I attended many years ago in Vienna. That “rechtspopulist” Austrian politician had threatened journalists with defamation suits if they called him out on his support for Nazis.

Yet he was on record for doing so.

I was reminded of this yesterday when the audience called ‘out out’ at hecklers, and demanded the removal of this journalist. These New Zealand First supporters demand adoration for their leader or a media black-out.

Perhaps they cannot be blamed given that the state of the nation speech could well have been written by US President Donald Trump or one of his minions.

The protesters were courageous and conscientious in contrast to Peters, said PSNA’s John Minto.

He likened Peters to Neville Chamberlain — Britain’s Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940. His name is synonymous with the policy of “appeasement” because he conceded territorial concessions to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, fruitlessly hoping to avoid war.

“He has refused to condemn any of Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians, including the total humanitarian aid blockade of Gaza.”

Refusal ‘unprecedented’
“It’s unprecedented in New Zealand history that a government would refuse to condemn Israel breaking its ceasefire agreement and resuming industrial-scale slaughter of civilians,” Minto said.

“That is what Israel is doing today in Gaza, with full backing from the White House.

“Chamberlain went to meet Hitler in Munich in 1938 to whitewash Nazi Germany’s takeovers of its neighbours’ lands.

“Peters has been in Washington to agree to US approval of the occupation of southern Syria, more attacks on Lebanon, resumption of the land grab genocide in Gaza and get a heads-up on US plans to ‘give’ the Occupied West Bank to Israel later this year.

“If Peters disagrees with any of this, he’s had plenty of chances to say so.

“New Zealanders are calling for sanctions on Israel but Mr Peters and the National-led government are looking the other way.”

Only staged questions
The conscientious objectors who rise against the oppression of human rights are people Winston Peters regards as his enemies. He will only answer questions in a press conference staged for him.

He warms to journalists who warm to him.

The state of the nation speech in the Town Hall was familiar.

Seeking to erase conscientiousness will not make New Zealand great, it will render this country very small, almost miniscule, like the people who are being destroyed for daring to demand their right to their own land.

Saige England is a journalist and author, and a member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A former Tuvalu prime minister says while the New Zealand government’s oil and gas plans show it is concerned about its economy, he is more concerned about the livelihoods and survival of the Tuvalu people.

Enele Sopoaga — who still serves as an MP in Tuvalu — says the climate crisis is the “main enemy”.

“There is nothing more serious and more important than that.”

• READ MORE: Other Pacific climate crisis reports

His comments come after New Zealand’s Resources Minister Shane Jones said it was “left wing catastrophisation” to suggest that waters would be lapping at towns in Pacific countries as a result of the New Zealand government’s decision on gas and coal.

Vanuatu Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu called on the New Zealand government not to reverse the ban at last year’s Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Rarotonga.

“We call on them not to do it to be in line with Paris, in line with the 1.5 degree target. The science says you cannot [make] new fossil fuels,” he told RNZ Pacific in 2023.

Despite this, the current New Zealand government has backed its plans, which Tuvalu is not happy about.

‘It’s going to sink Tuvalu’
“Go ahead and drill and open up new coal mining or get new gas stations,” said Sopoaga, “but don’t forget that whatever you are going to do, it’s going to increase greenhouse gas emissions, which are going to sink the islands of Tuvalu and kill the people.

“It’s just as a matter of fact, as simple as that.”

Jones was asked by RNZ’s Morning Report how New Zealand’s Pacific neighbours would feel about restarting exploration of oil and gas, and the associated environmental impact.

Jones said the Pacific understood Aotearoa needed reliable energy to generate an economic dividend to then be able to contribute to the Pacific region.

“[New Zealand] keeping the lights on and the hospitals functioning, you can’t hold that type of thinking responsible for the tide lapping around Tuvalu. Come on, give us a break,” Jones said.

Sopoaga called the comments “daft” and “naive”.

“I think it’s a completely stupid idea,” he said.

‘Early demise, rising sea levels’
“It’s just logical — the more you open up new gases and the more release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will simply cause the early demise and rising of sea levels that will affect the islands of Tuvalu.

“I would appeal to New Zealand to rethink about doing that.”

Sopoaga was prime minister from 2013 to 2019. He was re-elected as an MP in this year’s election and is part of Tuvalu’s 16-member parliament.

He now wants Aotearoa to stick with its ban on fossil fuel exploration, and to also contribute to the cost of adaptation.

Sopoaga said he wanted to remind Jones that “we are working as a global team in the world”.

“Countries cannot just take up their own initiatives, and then go the wrong way.

“[We can not] go with the national interests of countries, we have to discipline ourselves so that we don’t break up and claim that we are doing what the Paris Agreement and Kyoto Protocol are telling us.

“In fact, the Paris Agreement is a legally binding framework, and you cannot just simply say we open up new oil fields in New Zealand and these will not affect the Pacific Island countries.

“This is a stupid idea,” Sopoaga said.

NZ urged to pacify US/China
New Zealand is sending a political delegation on a five-stop Pacific tour next week.

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has recently spoken about New Zealand’s relationship with China.

“We strongly believe that in a mature relationship like ours it is possible to discuss differences openly, respectfully, and predictably. We will continue to share our concerns with China, where we have them.

“China has a long-standing presence in the Pacific, but we are seriously concerned by increased engagement in Pacific security sectors. We do not want to see developments that destabilise the institutions and arrangements that have long underpinned our region’s security.”

Peters has said he is continuing work started by the previous government to consider partipation in AUKUS Pillar 2, but that New Zealand was a long way from making a decision.

“I think the role of New Zealand is to de-escalate and pacify the situation, talk to China, talk to Australia, talk to the US,” Sopoaga said.

“There is no enemy, their biggest enemy is climate change.

“They are only using this [AUKUS] as a camouflage to move away from responsibility and cause global warming. And they want to ignore their accountability, their responsibility to deal with it,” Sopoaga said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Building on an unprecedented wave of settler violence in 2023, Israeli attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have intensified since October 7, with over 400 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers over the past five months. Last week, the Biden administration imposed sanctions on three Israeli settlers and two Israeli outposts in the occupied West Bank for assaulting, harassing and threatening Palestinians, and violently expelling many from their land. Investigative journalist Shane Bauer traveled to the territory to map out the violence against Palestinians that has escalated since October 7, and visited the illegal outposts of “two very dangerous men” targeted by the sanctions: Neria Ben-Pazi and Moshe Sharvit. “The elephant in the room here is that [Moshe Sharvit], along with Neria Ben-Pazi, is supported by the state of Israel directly,” says Bauer. “According to the language of the sanctions, that would mean that the State of Israel itself and all the various organizations that are supporting him should themselves be sanctioned, but of course they haven’t been.” Bauer describes how “the line between settlers and the army virtually disappeared after October 7,” as far-right Israeli cabinet members push for “a formalization of apartheid,” in the West Bank.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has been warned that Māori will not sit by without a fight if the government attempts to meddle with te Tiriti o Waitangi.

As politicians of all stripes have flocked to Rātana near Whanganui, it was a rare chance for Māori to address politicians directly on the pae — something that holds extra weight this year, because the annual celebrations come so soon after last weekend’s national hui.

Among those in attendance were Labour and Green MPs, Prime Minister Luxon, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones, while Te Pāti Māori were welcomed on Tuesday. ACT did not have a representative there.

• READ MORE: Former Pacific minister ‘lights fire of spirit’ supporting Māori at unity hui
• Rātana 2024 celebrations in pictures – RNZ

Rāhui Papa, a representative of the Kiingitanga and Waikato-Tainui, said they were watching the rhetoric coming out of the Beehive very closely.

“Quite frankly, te iwi Māori — and the hui at Turangawaewae confirmed, the hui here at Rātana has confirmed — that if there is any measure of meddling with Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Māori will not sit idly by.

“The message is: The Tiriti o Waitangi is sacrosanct in the view of te ao Māori. We truly believe that the only treaty in town is the one that was written in the indigenous language.”

Amid a climate of concern over the Treaty Principles legislation, Luxon is calling for calm over a bill he himself has said feels divisive.

Government ‘will honour the Treaty’
“The government has no plans and never has had plans to amend or revise the Treaty, or the Treaty settlements that we have all worked so hard together to achieve.

“The government will honour the Treaty.”

His speech to the Rātana faithful largely a speech to all Māori — and focusing on his favourite word: outcomes.

“Ours will be a government with goals for better healthcare, better school achievement, and less welfare dependency.

“When I talk about wanting better outcomes, I’m not talking about giving out hand-outs to close the gaps. I want to improve the opportunities so that people who are prepared to get to work and work hard, can make the most of their opportunities and get ahead.”

Ratana representative Kamaka Manuel told the government that promise of better outcomes was hard to believe.

“What we do see is the first part of the word ‘outcomes’ — or like ‘Māori out’ — and we’re left with the last part: ‘how come’.”

Māori outcomes ‘gone backwards’
He once again reiterated his claim that outcomes for Māori had gone backwards under Labour, and that National had “no intention and no commitment” to take ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill beyond a first reading.

There may be no commitment or intention at this point to do so, but Luxon has repeatedly refused to categorically rule out further support for it.

“It’s consistent with our coalition agreements, we have said and I don’t know how to be any clearer about it, there is no commitment to support it beyond the first reading.”

He was asked by reporters if he would say National would clearly say they would not support it further, but Luxon again said there was “no intention, no commitment”.

For a day full of politicians, Rātana is not supposed to be overtly political.

Deputy Prime Minister Peters acknowledged that — but still gave a political speech anyway — lashing out at Labour to pockets of heckling.

“These people will promise you a bridge where there is no river . . . I want to ask you this question: what’s their record?.”

impromptu standup
In an impromptu standup with reporters, NZ First’s Shane Jones said a review of the Waitangi Tribunal would need to address whether its powers should remain intact.

“An institution that’s been around for 50 years should not expect to continue on uncritically for another set of decades without being reviewed.”

Spurred on by speeches from the morehu, Labour’s Willie Jackson said it had made the opposition parties more united than ever.

“What they were saying the whaikōrero was that there was one enemy . . . and the enemy was the government, and so they wanted us to all . . . to come together as a group — Greens, Pāti Māori, Labour.”

Labour leader Chris Hipkins, in his first public appearance of the year, spent all of a minute talking about Labour’s deep connection to Rātana — and then went on the attack.

“The role of us as political leaders is to light that path forward, it’s not to exploit the fear that comes from uncertainty.”

Hipkins said the current government’s approach was emboldening racism, which he later clarified related to things like the Treaty Principles Bill.

Policies ‘enable racism’
“I don’t think those are things that a responsible government should do.

“The policies of this current government encourage, foster, and enable racism in New Zealand and we should call that out for what it is.”

This time last year, Hipkins was speaking as prime minister. He now admitted — from the benefit of hindsight — the last government didn’t get it all right.

“One of the things that we didn’t get right was that making sure we were bringing non-Māori New Zealanders along with us on that journey.”

There was a notable absentee — the ACT Party, whose Treaty Principles Bill National has agreed to support to Select Committee, but no further.

“We know there could have been some trepidation like last week at Turangawaewae where we only had a couple from the three-headed taniwha government that we have in New Zealand today,” Rāhui Papa said.

‘Dishonour’ to Māori world
Greens’ co-leader Marama Davidson told reporters that ACT’s no-show at Rātana was a display of “absolute ignorance” and a dishonour to the Māori world.

“It dismisses the mana and the importance of Ratana, of Wiremu Pōtiki Ratana, and te ao Māori and their political voice.”

But David Seymour was brushing off the criticism.

“There was a time when they didn’t manage to invite me and now they seem to be complaining that they’ve invited me but I haven’t come. I guess one day the stars will align.”

Seymour has never attended Rātana festivities, describing it as a “religious event”, but he will be attending Waitangi next month.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The glorification of the Child is based on the romanticization of maternity, in which women are predominantly conceived as baby incubators. Their bodies are never their own; they always belong to a higher ideal, in this case – the Child. Against this background of intense pro-natalism, it is refreshing to recall Periyar’s seemingly absurd statement that “for the true liberation of women, the problem of child bearing should be totally destroyed”. For him, it is because of child bearing that “women are unable to demonstrate that they can live without men. As men have no such burden, they are so placed as to declare that they can live without women. Besides, problems of maternity make women seek the help of others and this gives rise to male domination.” In order to destroy the illusion that women can’t live without men, Periyar exhorts the former to stop bearing children. When asked if this move wouldn’t lead to the eventual death of the human species, Periyar retorts: “What difficulty would fall upon women if the world doesn’t increase? What danger could befall women if the human race doesn’t multiply? We don’t understand what difficulty would arise (because of the human race not reproducing) for those who talk about such kind of justice? We don’t know of any benefit that has come out of the human race that has multiplied for so long.”

By supporting the extinction of the human race, Periyar opens a space where the unquestioned superiority of the Child can be displaced in favor of alternative ways of living. Since the figure of the Child forces subaltern groups to sacrifice their own identity for a superior ideal, any resistance to it has to begin with an act of assertive incineration whereby the solidity of long-held beliefs melts into the drain of oblivion. The theological splendor of the Child, the fullness of its presence, has to be erased in order to expose it as a historical construction that pretends to be a metaphysical fact. In order to do this, one has to step out of the fantasy of spiritual security, the ideologically enforced heavenliness of the child. In pro-natalist ideology, the Child functions as an emblem of permanent security: no matter how much atrocities the institution of procreation inflicts upon women, no matter how deeply one feels the arbitrariness of domination, in the end, everything turns out to be right, evident in the glow of the infant’s face. This “fascism of the baby’s face,” as Lee Edelman calls it, is predicated upon the belief that life has an ultimate meaning, that the future is a teleological endpoint towards which we are duty-bound to move. Thus, the image of the Child constructs a linear future in which human desire gets a clearly determined trajectory in the wider framework of an ultimately meaningful history. In opposition to the restriction of human desire within the continuum of a teleological temporality, Shane Greene proposes “the figure of a human life never even conceived. I call it the never-born. It exists but only in the minds of the already born and possesses no material manifestation whatsoever. No sperm hooking up with egg, no embryo, no fetus, no natal development, no forty weeks, no moment of birth, no child to care for, no adult in the making, no mortality to face.”

The identity of the never-born stands for a radical nihilism in which human desire loses any sense of meaningfulness. Whereas the Child symbolizes a locus of meaning that is visible in the divinized body of the infant, the never-born indicates a meaningless absence, a pure void that lurks in the ostensible stability of those who exist. The never-born doesn’t signify any existent thing; it is what defies those things, the medium in which nothing happens, everything perishes. That’s why it can be connected with the fact of cosmic extinction, which Ray Brassier articulates as follows:

[S]ooner or later both life and mind will have to reckon with the disintegration of the ultimate horizon, when, roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion (10¹⁷²⁸) years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment. Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience – irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call ‘asymptopia’, the stellar corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm of elementary particles. Atoms themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue, driven by the currently inexplicable force called ‘dark energy’, which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an eternal and unfathomable blackness.

Cosmic extinction underscores that the mind is dependent on matter, that mind itself is an intricate organization and form of matter. Since thought itself is a natural process, it is subject to the fact of extinction contained in universal material interaction. As a dissipation of material intensities, the human mind is marked by a loss that can’t be incorporated into the legible script of the Child. The Child promises to undo a loss that is located within the individual experience of the human being. By constructing a narrative of a linear desire, natalism positions the Child as an object that can provide immediate satisfaction. However, the loss represented by cosmic extinction is not a human loss; it an extra-human loss that constitutes the very foundations of humanity. Even as cosmic extinction subjects everything to a crippling impermanence, its working accounts for the transition from dead nature to organic nature. Since matter constitutes the basis of human experience, it can’t be exorcised. It is not a hole that can be plugged through the Child. Rather, it is a hole that forms our identity: as matter in motion, our organic lives are dissipations of energy on account of which we are dead already, death lives within us as the capacity of unbinding.

This “inbuilt loss,” as Alenka Zupancic calls it, means that the permanent security offered by the Child is false. The future can’t be secured through the fictional coherence of a fixed object like the Child, which stands aloof from all concrete interrelations to exude an untouched purity. On the contrary, “there are in general no things in the world that would exist in isolation from the universal links – things always exist in a system of relations to one another.” Universal material interaction – matter in motion – is the structural context within which human beings develop and deploy their capacities. As Evald Ilyenkov notes, “each individual phenomenon (thing, event, etc.) is always born and exists in its definiteness and later dies within a certain concrete whole, within a system of individual things developing in a law-governed way.” Our mode of enjoyment, then, lies not in the attainment of a final, invulnerable object lying beyond the system but in the exploration of our objective interdependencies with other components of the system. This enables a deeper understanding of ourselves and thus enhances our practical powers. Instead of remaining content with an ultimate object of satisfaction, human desire enjoys its own repetitive movement of self-development and self-expansion. Desire is concerned not with the realization of an authentic self, essence or identity but in its own consumption to the end, as it transcends its limited boundaries to relate itself to the entire system.

Given that human life is the dissipation and unbinding of matter, desire enjoys the negation of its own immediacies, the consumption of its restricted boundaries. In response to the question “How does one use life?” Max Stirner said, “In using it up, like the candle, which one uses in burning it up. One uses life, and consequently himself the living one, in consuming it and himself. Enjoyment of life is using life up…The question runs not how one can acquire life, but how one can squander, enjoy it; or, not how one is to produce the true self in himself, but how one is to dissolve himself, to live himself out.” Any reified social organization that pretends to offer the narcissistic solace of a solid existence is false. As a radical indifference towards everything, as the movement of nothingness, human life “refers to a persistent negation that offers assurance of nothing at all: neither identity, nor survival, nor any promise of a future.” It only insists on the self-consuming dynamic of desire whereby everything is treated as matter in motion, as consisting of its own dissipation.

It is the inevitability of extinction that forces us to think of ourselves as eminently historical, contingent creatures who can enjoy only by freely determining their own mode of dissipation. As organisms that are dead already, whose existence consists in the constant overcoming/negation of their own selves, our truth lies in accepting this unilateral fact. The unilaterality of extinction “means letting go of myself, renouncing my absolute will to be unique, separate from others, for that too traps me into one form of being I. To remain one’s own is thus to let go of the will to be only one’s own.” This process itself stands for the I, which constantly consumes itself by treating everything as nothing, by refusing to absolutize anything as an unbreakable limit. The overturning of all hierarchical ideals allows the human subject to locate itself in the system of universal relations that is constantly negating itself in the movement towards cosmic extinction. “I am an auto-cannibal, eating myself to protect myself from my own loss into something other, something fixed, alien. If I fail to destroy myself on my own terms, then I am destroyed by another.” The auto-cannibalism of humanity is obscured by the “economic bilateralization” of extinction’s unilateral terms, whereby the latter is subsumed under an exclusivist regime of dissipation.

Through the symbol of the Child, natalism enacts such a bilateralization as it construes heterosexual reproduction as the sole form in which the human species can articulate its negativity. Insofar as the Child becomes the exclusive manifestation of human future, the inevitability of extinction is trivialized as a trifling matter when compared to its grandeur. In response, we need multiple modes of dissipation, which means making motherhood one option among many others; and it is actually optional only if people have access to contraception and abortions, if people who don’t have children are not stigmatized. Once alternatives are promoted, reproduction itself will be divested of its mystical aura to become a mere historical arrangement. Currently, the materiality of sex – its transitory status as “expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy” – is translated into the eternal durability of procreation, manifest in the Child. Once people have access to alternatives to reproduction, they will be able to assess hetero-genital sex in a level-headed manner as a contingent practice, and not view it as an overbearing moral imperative. Furthermore, with the democratic development of artificial reproduction technologies, concerned with the ability for ectogenesis (the growth of a fetus outside the body), the practice of having children could be divorced from the fantasmatic figure of the Child. The end of the Child, the end of patriarchy, could thus open a future unbound by any specific future.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yanis Iqbal.

The post Give Me that Flipper Shane appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

In the early 1990s, one figure broke through the stuffiness of willow bats, pads, leather balls and white flannel.  When life left the overly worked body of Australia’s Shane Warne, who expired in Thailand at 52, the reaction was global.  In India and Pakistan, hundreds of millions mourned.  This most celebrated of error-prone buffoons was, as the emperor Vespasian might have said, becoming a god.

The Melbourne Cricket Ground, on March 30, became the venue for one such occasion: a state memorial service held in honour of the cricketer.  For a brief spell, a sporting stadium had become a cathedral, the occasion heavy with solemnity.  In it, Warne’s followers and admirers communed.

When Sir Elton John appears to commemorate you, the celebrity value is bound to inflate and discombobulate.  There were others from the Hollywood set with recorded speeches (fittingly, Warne, with his peroxide hair, ear adornments and lifestyle had been given the name of “Hollywood”).  The more cynical observer might wonder whether these people would necessarily know what a cricket pitch looked like, let alone what Warne’s expertise entailed.  But sport in this era can enable a figure to move beyond fringes, catapulted to permanent, social media dissemination. Even prior to the advent of the tech giant platform, Warney had already broken the mould.

Nothing can be taken away from his expertise, in so far as it was practised on the cricket ground.  The smell of leather whirring and whizzing upon flattened grass.  Deception and guile, packed into the movement of the delivery.  A mastery of tactics, field placements, with a sublime ability that enabled him to execute the “ball of the century” in 1993 against England’s bemused Mike Gatting.

Memorials, however, always risk going too far, slipping into soppy hagiography.  Malcolm Knox tearily glistens by claiming that the cricketer was “a force of nature and an everyman”.  Writing like a starstruck admirer, Knox is dewey.  “If you ever walked behind Shane Warne through a crowded place, you might get an idea of what it was like.  Some deferred by looking away again.  Others grappled with their phones to take a quick shot.”

Another admirer of Warne’s, sports commentator Sam Newman, was aghast about Warne’s other, lesser-known activities.  It came out during the memorial service itself.  Warne, Andrea Egan of the UN Development Programme revealed, had joined its wildlife fund, Lion’s Share, in 2021.  Her address seemed to transform the late sports figure into a modern incarnation of St. Francis of Assisi.  She explained how his legacy lived on “in the people of Sri Lanka promoting sea turtle conservation, in an all-female anti-poaching unit in South Africa and the team of the Byron Bay hospital, who were supported in the wake of the bushfires.”

Egan’s appearance stunned Newman. “They had a representative from the United Nations!  I tell you what, if that man has not taken all before him, I’d like to see someone who can top that.”  It’s not often you hear a good word about the UN in these circles – Newman is as parochially soaked as they come – but he had to concede that Warne’s involvement, and the acknowledgment, “nearly blew me out of the water”.

Memorial services also serve to iron out wrinkles and add cosmetic touch-ups.  Brilliance, or genius, can be mistaken as being broad rather than confined, somehow seeping into other areas of life.  Unless you have a particular affection for laddish and occasionally loutish behaviour, for acts of spectacular stupidity in public life, cricket remains the throne upon which Warne sat most comfortably.  But when he got off it and wandered around without orb and sceptre, the messiness began.

Warne made no secret of this tendency, though he proved unapologetic about it.  In one of his three ghost written autobiographies, No Spin, he conceded to having “made a number of mistakes in my life and I will continue to make them. This is what it means to be human.”

With that standard in mind, Warne proved particularly human in accepting $5,000 in 1994 during a one-day tournament in Sri Lanka from a shady Indian bookmaker by the name of “John”.  This was a stroke of good luck – Warne had frittered away about that same amount at the hotel’s casino in Colombo.  This “gift” with “no strings attached” transpired because Warne’s own Australian teammate, Mark Waugh, had received $4000 from “John” for supplying weather and pitch reports.

In reflecting upon this incident, Warne gave one of his famously baffling reasons.  He did not wish to insult John, who was offering the money to a figure he described as “a great player”.  He would recall that this was “the sort of conversation I might have had with my dad and brother.”  This dubious family analogy did not extend to the Pakistani cricketer Saleem Malik, who, fortunately for the slow bowler, failed in an attempt to make Warne throw a match for $200,000.

Family, however, makes an appearance again in 2003.  The occasion was the injudicious taking of tablets, which pushed Warne, and Australia, into the less than flattering light of sports doping.  That year, Warne was found to have taken a banned diuretic.  Like many an idiot son in the lurch, he blamed his unwitting mother, who wished him to look “nice” when facing the media.

At the time, Dick Pound, former vice-president of the International Olympic Committee, found that explanation incorrigible, “laughable” and on par with the excuse, “I got it from the toilet seat”.  In February 2003, the Australian Cricket Board drugs panel imposed a twelve-month ban.

An unrelenting Pound would continue to find Warne’s account dubious.  In his 2006 book Inside Dope, the former sporting administrator is withering to the cricketer.  Pointing the finger at his mother for wishing to see a more streamlined version of her son before the cameras concealed the fact that Warne was nursing a shoulder injury.  “The diuretic was a masking agent that could have hidden the possible use of steroids that would help the injury cure faster.  He had returned to play almost twice as quickly as the experts had predicted.”

With Warne’s entry into the pantheon of cricket’s immortals, ethicists and philosophers will have no reason to lose sleep.  Dick Pound will remain unconvinced.  The most profitable exercise will be to regard the player’s talent on the field with admiration, and his ability to command loyalty as remarkable.  Keep him on cricket’s throne.  He looks best there.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.