I am alarmed by reports that Filipino journalists were flown in by the Israeli government to participate in what is essentially a whitewashing campaign for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

At least two articles, atrocious excuses for journalism, have come out of this trip.One is a piece by Wilson Lee Flores for The Philippine Star, entitled “Israel beyond the headlines: Where ancient stones speak.”

By attempting to divert attention from the massacre of Palestinian civilians to “the Old City’s labyrinthine alleys,” Flores acts as an apologist for war crimes, akin to writing a travel blog about Nazi Germany.

In a Facebook post, Flores further parrots Israel’s propaganda by highlighting how the brutal IDF employs both men and women to carry out atrocities, a cynical weaponisation of “feminism.”

Even more repulsive is the piece from the Daily Tribune about “Gaza’s Fake Famine” from Vernon Velasco. It is a parody of a story, overly simplifying the famine of Gaza to a matter of food truck logistics, and uncritically quoting an IDF Officer.

Fittingly, the article contains three photos of shipping containers but not a single photo of a human being.

This runs counter to facts laid out by UN officials, including Joyce Msuya, the UN’s Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, who points out how half a million people face “starvation, destitution, and death”.

‘Moral failure’ over Gaza
A study published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet points to the “moral failure” as 1-2 million people live in the most extreme food insecurity level (phase 5 or catastrophe famine) according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

This famine unfolds as shameless journalists make food vlogs kilometres away.

The facts are clear. At least 63,000 people have been killed and 150,000 injured, with women and children making up a significant portion of the casualties. The UN has also reported that nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s population (around 1.9 million people) has been displaced.

Widespread destruction has left over 70 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, including more than 94 percent of hospitals either damaged or destroyed. No amount of narrative spin or “complexity” can sanitise this genocide.

As we celebrate National Press Freedom Day, I implore friends in the press to not fall for the lies of the murderous Zionist regime.

It would be tragic for journalists to provide cover for a regime that has murdered at least 240 of their peers.

Filipino journalists must shed the unhealthy culture of silence and non-intervention, and not hesitate to criticise errant colleagues.

They must make it clear that these recipients of Zionist gold are a disgrace to Philippine journalism. The Philippine government must look into the activities of the Israeli Embassy and their manipulation of local media narratives to sanitise their genocide.

Filipino journalists must stand in solidarity with their slain colleagues abroad, not with their killers.

Walden Bello is a Filipino academic and analyst of Global South issues who was awarded Amnesty International Philippines’ Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights Award in 2023. He has also served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

On Saturday I came into possession of this letter, transcript below.

I will note that the recipient of the letter is someone I know a bit about; I would like to know more about his time in London, circa 1930-1932. I understand that he attended the London School of Economics. I never met him; but, me being a student of the Great Depression, I wish I had known him while writing my MA thesis.

Eric Salmon lived from 1903 to 1990. Certainly a patrician, he was an Auckland City Councillor and associate of Auckland’s ‘Mayor Robbie’. While he would never have had any sympathy with the Nazi cause, I would like to think that, like me, he would have had some empathy for the German people in 1933; and the many other people then caught up in events – indeed zeitgeists – moving too fast, and on too great a scale.

Sadly, I will never be able to see Mr Salmon’s letter to his German contact (probably written late in 1932). I do not know if he replied to the letter below.

Home Address:

Schwelm (in Westfalen)
Kirkplatz 7

Schwelm, 6th VI. [June] 1933

Dear Mr. Salmon,

                                    Your letter with the interesting account of your native [town?] and the economic position of New Zealand was a great joy to me, and I thank you very much for it. I hope, you won’t take it amiss that my answer comes so late. During the last months I spent all my time in finishing the dissertation for my doctor examination. Some days ago I finally handed it to my professor, and I am now preparing for the oral examination which will take place in the end of July. – How are you getting on with your work?

                        In the course of rather a short time the political situation in this country has thoroughly changed, and the questions you put to me in your letter have found a sudden solution. I may add : also a good one. You are perhaps astonished to read that, for – as far as I know – most of the great newspapers of the world tell you just the contrary. The reason for it is that the European nations, above all France and Polonia [Poland], but England too, fear a new war, and this fear is in an inexcusable way nourished by all those German people who don’t agree with the new spirit and the new methods. The Jewish question is also of great importance. The measures we took against the Jews were not at all cruel or unjustified, as you read in English papers. All we try is only to reduce the enormous influence and power of the Jews in Germany to an extent which compounds to their small number. More and more their influence has become a destructive force in our national life. What you see nowadays in Germany is not a warlike or an extremely militaristic spirit or a mass barbarism (as many foreigners suppose), but the will to build a new nation, in which no longer the unchecked liberalism of the postwar years reigns. We were standing just before a complete breakdown and the chaos of Communism, which would have been fatal for the whole world. In this dangerous moment came the revolution of our nationalist party under the great leader Hitler. It marks the beginning of something quite new in Germany. We know that a great many tasks are waiting for us, but seeing them we are no longer desperate as it was the case in the last years. The new Germany has a new hope, a new will, and a new energy, and with them we shall overcome all problems and difficulties.

      What do you think about the change in Germany, and what do you read in the papers? I should be very glad to hear something about it from you. Hoping you are quite well I am with kindest regards, yours Theodor Hort.

Herr Hort – presumably Dr Hort, soon after – is writing from Schwelm, eleven kilometres east of the Westphalian city of Wuppertal. To the west of Wuppertal is Düsseldorf, on the Rhine; Cologne is to the south, near where the river Wupper flows into the Rhine. To the north of Wuppertal is the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s western industrial heartland. Between Düsseldorf and Wuppertal is Neandertal/Neanderthal. Most of the journey between Wuppertal and Schwelm can be taken on the ‘world-famous in Westphalia’ Wuppertal Schwebebahn, the suspension railway, built between 1897 and 1903, which runs above the Wupper River. I am privileged to have ridden on that railway in 1984.

I had hoped that, because the railway is still there, that Wuppertal had not been bombed by the RAF during WW2. No such luck. I found this article in the Burnie Advocate (Tasmania), 1 June 1943: Wuppertal raid one of heaviest of war. This was eight weeks before Operation Gomorrah decimated Hamburg. (On Wuppertal, refer also: Planning a Bombing Operation: Wuppertal 1943, My grandfather, the bomber pilot, When the singing stops on Christmas Eve, German tragedy of destiny, Wikipedia.)

I have no idea what Theodor Hort’s fate was. Maybe he was recruited for the notorious Einsatzgruppen, which was top-heavy with academic doctors? More likely he turned away, at least in his mind, from the excesses of the New Germany; nevertheless serving his country in some capacity, albeit out of the kind of obligation that would have been hard to refuse. There is a high chance he died during the war. I’m guessing he would have been about 35 years old in 1943.

Throughout the twentieth century, many young Australians and New Zealanders studied at the London School of Economics. (William Pember Reeves was its Director from 1908 to 1919.) So did many upper-middle-class Germans; Herr Hort clearly fell into that class-category. Other Germans to study economics at the LSE included Heinrich Brüning and Ursula von der Leyen.

Brüning was Chancellor of Germany from mid-1930 to mid-1932. Brüning was the centrist politician most associated with the economic collapse of Weimar Germany during the Great Depression, thanks to his ‘liberal’ policies of stubborn fiscal conservatism. He sought to balance the Budget at any cost. Germany and the world paid a very high cost indeed. I understand that the “unchecked liberalism” Hort refers to is the economic liberalism of Brüning and others (think today’s neoliberalism), and not so much the social liberalism of Berlin that was an icon of 1920s’ Germany. (As a part of that social liberalism, Germany in 1918 – Germany’s first annus horribilis last century – became a proper democracy, with proportional representation, and votes for women.)

I would imagine that Hort’s parents would have voted for Bruning’s Zentrum (Centre) party. While it started as a Catholic party, it was actually the foundation party of German ‘Christian Democracy’, having already broadened its base by 1930. Westphalia, Düsseldorf and Cologne represented the West German heartland of centrist Christian Democratic politics. And consistently these places cast the fewest votes for Adolf Hitler’s party. (The city of Cologne, the least-Nazi-supporting city in Germany, was the first large German urban centre to be carpet-bombed by the British, in 1942.)

Nevertheless, at least in March 1933, young Theodor probably voted for the National Socialists. (Although his “great leader” epithet was probably a direct translation of ‘führer’ rather than an expression of devotion.) The Enabling Act of 1933, which ended democracy in Germany, had been in force for three months before Herr Hort wrote this letter. He, like many others in a desperate country, was willing to forego democracy if other goals might better be achieved without it. Further, by 1938, Hitlernomics – borrowing ‘as much as it takes’ to re-arm and reorganise along Spartan lines – was looking like a great success. (Something suspiciously similar took place in the Bundestag in 2025, exactly 92 years after the Enabling Act, using the outvoted ‘lame-duck’ parliament to get the necessary two-thirds majority. This time it was the ‘fascists’ – AFD – who were against borrowing to re-arm; and the outvoted fastidiously-anti-borrowing neoliberal FDP, who should not have been there.)

Finally, here, we should note that Germany as a whole – and certainly western Germany – while Judeophobic, was probably not much more Judeophobic than other European countries (including the USA); and that most German Jews, to 1918 at least, had seen themselves as more Germans than Semites, and played a significant role in the German armed forces in World War One. The circumstances of 1918, however, made it a relatively easy task for would-be-politicians with nationalist agendas to scapegoat Jews. There were vastly more Jews living in the countries east of Germany, and they from 1940 to 1944 ended up being very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Germany in 1933, ‘Jewish’ identity was used very much as proxies for the twin-devils who many Germans believed had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ in 1918 (at a time when Germany appeared to be winning on the western front) and again in (and around) 1931; ‘Bolshevik’ Communists and big-finance capitalists. The 1918 claim of a ‘stolen war’ was an evidentially-false conspiracy theory which had the appearance of credibility to many desperate people looking for simple answers, and scapegoats.

On the Bolshevik matter, while Theodor Hort and others will not have known about it until much later – the winter of 1932/33 was the peak of the Holodomor where four million mainly-Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death by Josef Stalin’s Moscow-based regime. Too many elements of the western press were looking the other way. Soviet Communism was being romanticised in certain middle-class and working-class circles in ‘the West’ (though demonised in others: refer Three Women who Launched a Movement); the mega-atrocities were downplayed by mainstream journalists such as Walter Duranty.

It was the full discovery in 1939 of the Holodomor and the later Great Purge(s) that enabled the Nazis to contemplate an even worse genocide, a substantial part of which became the Shoah. The Shoah, while the worst genocide ever, was neither the first nor the last real-world example of ‘hunger games’ in the last 100 years.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The Green Party has called on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to rule out Aotearoa New Zealand joining the AUKUS military technical pact in any capacity following the row over Ukraine in the White House over the weekend.

President Donald Trump’s “appalling treatment” of his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a “clear warning that we must avoid AUKUS at all costs”, said Green Party foreign affairs and Pacific issues spokesperson Teanau Tuiono.

“Aotearoa must stand on an independent and principled approach to foreign affairs and use that as a platform to promote peace.”

US President Donald Trump has paused all military aid for Ukraine after the “disastrous” Oval Office meeting with President Zelenskyy in another unpopular foreign affairs move that has been widely condemned by European leaders.

Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of Ukraine’s Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, declared that Trump appeared to be trying to push Kyiv to capitulate on Russia’s terms.

He was quoted as saying that the aid pause was worse than the 1938 Munich Agreement that allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia.

‘Danger of Trump leadership’
Tuiono, who is the Green Party’s first tagata moana MP, said: “What we saw in the White House at the weekend laid bare the volatility and danger of the Trump leadership — nothing good can come from deepening our links to this administration.

“Christopher Luxon should read the room and rule out joining any part of the AUKUS framework.”

Tuiono said New Zealand should steer clear of AUKUS regardless of who was in the White House “but Trump’s transactional and hyper-aggressive foreign policy makes the case to stay out stronger than ever”.

“Our country must not join a campaign that is escalating tensions in the Pacific and talking up the prospects of a war which the people of our region firmly oppose.

“Advocating for, and working towards, peaceful solutions to the world’s conflicts must be an absolute priority for our country,” Tuiono said.

Five Eyes network ‘out of control’
Meanwhile, in the 1News weekly television current affairs programme Q&A, former Prime Minister Helen Clark challenged New Zealand’s continued involvement in the Five Eyes intelligence network, describing it as “out of control”.

Her comments reflected growing concern by traditional allies and partners of the US over President Trump’s handling of long-standing relationships.

Clark said the Five Eyes had strayed beyond its original brief of being merely a coordinating group for intelligence agencies in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

“There’s been some talk in the media that Trump might want to evict Canada from it . . . Please could we follow?” she said.

“I mean, really, the problem with Five Eyes now has become a basis for policy positioning on all sorts of things.

“And to see it now as the basis for joint statements, finance minister meetings, this has got a bit out of control.”

Check out my interview with @GuyonEspiner on @NZQandA today on the implications of the disruptive reorientation of US foreign policy & its implications for Europe & #NZ; Chinese 🚢 🚢 🚢 in the Tasman Sea, & the #CookIslands debacle: https://t.co/QD2N9NaBD1 via @YouTube

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) March 2, 2025

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz