The fatal course of the Communist Party of Indonesia – Part 1
The documentary ‘The Act of Killing’ has opened a discussion of the 1965 slaughter of up to one million supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party. However, it leaves the political […]
Monthly Archives: October 2013
The strength and weakness of ‘The Act of Killing’
The recent documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, ‘The Act of Killing‘, provides a chillingly intimate portrait of some aging thugs who, nearly fifty years ago, took part in one of the […]
A fine mixture of gross hypocrisy and brutality
So the Parole Board in its infinite wisdom and mercy has decided not to grant a release on parole to Teina Pora. By now there seem to be very few […]
The fatal logic of class collaboration
My recently-published novel, The Chain, is set in the freezing works (meatpacking plants) of the Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, in the 1980s, and draws on my experiences when I spent […]
A salute to a courageous fighter, unbroken after 41 years of torture
This week’s Militant tells the story of Herman Wallace, who spent almost his entire life fighting a frame-up murder conviction from within the Louisiana prison system. Wallace was released from […]
Defending Malala: the well-intentioned errors of some atheist campaigners
Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani woman who campaigned for equal rights for women, especially the right to education, is a worthy recipient of the European Union’s Sakharov prize for human rights. […]
Convergence, political and evolutionary
Among the papers in the archives of Harry Holland which I have been looking at over the past week in Canberra, I found a talk he gave in the early […]
Australia and New Zealand
Whenever I visit Australia, it is the differences between that country and New Zealand that I notice first – the vegetation dominated by a single genus of trees – the […]
A worker at large 