Passchendaele – Absent with Leave, a Soldier’s Story
John Alexander (his real name, but not his full name) – commonly known as ‘Jack’ – was 25 when World…
culture
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Galipolli or Mangatawhiri? – selective memory of war
It would be much more appropriate for New Zealand to scrap ANZAC DAY (25 April – dated for the landing at Gallipoli in World War I) and shift our national remembrance of war to 12 July – the day in 1863 that imperial troops crossed the Mangatawhiri River and the great war for New Zealand began.
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GUEST BLOG: Karl Pearce – Sid, The man who would set himself alight on Parliament Grounds; His Story.
When I found out what happened to him I wanted to tell his story. Not only because I had met him just the day before. Not only because of the shocking nature of his death, But because we wondered what drove him to such a lengths to set oneself alight on parliament grounds in protest and pure frustration. And that his story is the story of so many others in a broken Family Court System.
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How Neoliberalism Made me Selfish
Saturday was election day in New Zealand, and while the final configuration of parliament is still being negotiated, as has become normal under the proportional representation system, it’s petty clear that New Zealand has voted for a continuation of a neo-liberal approach to governance.
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Can we pause and consider what just happened to Metiria back there?
Metiria’s crime was not that she had told the truth about needing to game the draconian neoliberal welfare system, but that she had the audacity to tell her story with her chin up in defiance at the injustice of that system rather than the self-shaming we all demand from anything that is attached to the virgin sacrificing sacredness of ‘taxpayer money’.
In NZ we accept the dignity of the broken, but never the dignity of the resistant.
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National Party Voters: An electorate or a cult? Understanding the viciousness spat at Metiria
As a small country, we have mistaken NZ as an equal country where people can freely move up through the social strata. I would suggest to you that statistic of 70% of National voters not knowing anyone unemployed actually shows that we are a highly segregated culture.
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Can we please have weeks of intense outraged Rugby frame-by-frame navel-gazing headlines screaming at injustice of a draw for a game barely anyone else on the planet plays?
As a very young and juvenile country, New Zealand has all the cultural maturity of a can of day old Coke. Rugby dominates our sense of identity like a jealous tyrant. This myopic focus allows Kiwi’s to distract themselves to the point of outright denial over the numerous social ills currently rotting our society.
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A Tale For The Times
WHY IS “THE HANDMAID’S TALE” so bloody scary? The movie was bad enough, but the television series is so chilling I find it hard to watch. And what, exactly, is the raw nerve which the story is touching this (it’s third) time around?
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Herald & Fairfax Watch: We are in denial over the why of suicide in New Zealand
The Herald are copying Stuff by running big current affairs campaigns. This week Stuff is looking at cannabis reform and the Herald are attempting to talk about suicide.
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Ariana Grande, Manchester, London, Zbigniew Brzezinski, toxic masculinity, the War on Terror and us
…responding to cruelty, hate and twisted spiteful inadequacy with compassion, kindness and love will do more to ending this war on terror than any military escalation or civil liberties clamp down ever can.