Was New Zealand’s participation in the Second World War avoidable?
A Review of Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society in the Second World War, by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, with Hugh Eldred-Grigg. A guest post by Terry Coggan. World War Two is seen […]
Author Archives: James Robb
If this is how you propose to defend free speech, then freedom of speech is in grave danger
An open letter to Jan Thomas, Vice-chancellor of Massey University. Massey University in Wellington is the venue for an event on 13 November called Feminism 2020, organised by Speak Up […]
Ukraine’s “History Wars” and the political descendants of Stalin and Walter Duranty
A friend has drawn my attention to a criticism of my review of the film Mr Jones. (See here for the review – this post will make more sense if […]
Trump, Greenland, China, and the unenviable predicament of the minor imperialist powers
US President Donald Trump’s public bid to purchase Greenland from its present ‘owner’, the Kingdom of Denmark, has been universally derided as a bad joke. In the words of the […]
The profound political implications of Ihumātao
The most important shift in New Zealand politics in almost three decades was registered last month, when a long-simmering Māori land occupation at Ihumātao erupted into a mass struggle. In […]
The Holodomor in Ukraine and the obfuscations of “Mr Jones”
Few countries in the world suffered more than Ukraine in the twentieth century. One of the nations of the Soviet Union favoured with fertile soils and bountiful agriculture, geography made […]
Cotton, slaves, war, and measles in colonial Fiji
Second of two articles on Land Labour and Epidemic Disease in the capitalist penetration of the Pacific First part here. Almost one hundred years after the Sydney Cove epidemic, a […]
Land, labour, and epidemic diseases – two articles on capitalist penetration of the Pacific
When the deadly epidemic of influenza swept the world in the months following the end of the Great War of 1914-18, the toll it took in the Pacific Islands was […]
Child welfare in the age of capitalist decay – a glimpse of New Zealand’s stolen generation
[Note: this post was updated on 24 June with comments on the obfuscatory character of the term ‘domestic violence,’ and on the source of Oranga Tamariki’s tendency to act on […]
Teachers in New Zealand take a step towards West Virginia, and ponder their next move
A nationwide one-day strike by 50,000 teachers in both the primary and secondary sectors took place in New Zealand on 29 May. It was the first time in the history […]
