And welcome to The Fix. It is Monday the 14th of August, which is known in more esteemed media circles as Silly Season, the season in which a parliament is off, all of the more pasty sections of the front benches are off getting sunburned on their millionaire mate's yachts, and journalists are scrabbling around trying to fill column inches by looking at silly stories. Sadly, this August, we are not so blessed. With the far right on the march across Europe and North America, we've got a lot to unpack this show. We're going to be talking about the Newcastle abuse cases and the dog whistle racism in that coverage, and we're also, of course, going to be tackling what's going down in Charlottesville. Just a quick note to say that due to the nature of the subjects we're going to be tackling, this show will contain discussion of sexual violence and racialized violence, so consider this a fair warning on that note. So, joining me to unpack this cavalcade of horrors, I have the inimitable Aaron Bostani at Aaron Bostani on Twitter, and the unstoppable Ash Sarka at IOC's at High. How foxed only by arithmetic and telling left from right. They told me to do the L thing with my hands, and I was like, yeah, cool. Don't listen to a word I say. So, yes, diving straight in. Ash, could you lay down what's been happening with this Newcastle abuse case? So, last week, there were 18 prosecutions of men involved in sexual offenses regarding minors in Newcastle, and they formed part of the grooming gang, which involved plying young girls with drugs and alcohol and sexually exploiting them. It was absolutely horrific. Some of these men had absolutely disgusting things to say about what their reasoning was for it. One of them was identifying it in racialized times in terms of white girls being considered fair game. And I don't think that I have to go into detail about precisely why that's so disgusting. What I will say, however, is that abusers of all races and ethnic backgrounds have their own warped reasoning for why their particular choice of victim was considered fair game. This was the form of language chosen by these particular abusers. Now, similarly to the cases in Rotherham, also in Rochdale, this has been reported in the media and also by political classes in highly racialized terms.  And I think what's really striking about what's happened in the last few days is that Sarah Champion, who's Shadow Equalities, yeah, right? Shadow Equalities Minister wrote an op-ed in The Sun saying, British Pakistani men are raping white girls. There, I said it. If that makes me a racist, then so be it.  I had the weird honor of being raised by loads of social workers that were surrounded by shop talk from a very early age, and also being Muslim, being an Asian woman, and being someone who is really concerned with how do we fight endemic sexual violence without reproducing any recent narratives. I really wanted to check out these stats. Now, what Sarah Champion has said that there is a trend of British Pakistani men who are overrepresented in cases of child sexual abuse, and they are raping white girls, isn't really held up by the data. So if you look at incarceration rates for child sexual abuse in general, it pretty much falls in line with the breakdown of ethnicities that are found in the population. So roughly 80% white, 5.6% Asian, 2% mixed heritage or multiple heritage, et cetera, et cetera. Now, even when you look at so-called grooming cases, and I think that we should talk about how this itself becomes a particularly racialized category, the data does say that 20% of offenses are committed by British Asian men. But it's been posited as like a problem of race, right? A cultural problem rather than economic. But let's even look at that figure a bit more closely. So that figure is I think 240 something escapes me of those identified cases are perpetrated by Asian men. Of that figure, 30 of those are Pakistani. So that isn't actually a wild over representation of Pakistani men in that figure. But that data set, which is from 2007, which is the only data set that exists on the breakdown of ethnic representation in grooming cases is not a national data set. It's from some police forces or others. And that report specifically says, specifically says regarding racial and ethnic representation do not draw national patterns from this. There simply isn't enough data. So unfortunately, Sarah Champions arguments start to break down when put into scrutiny. Now as for the second part of her proposition, that it is white girls who are being targeted overwhelmingly in cases of child sexual abuse, again, the data doesn't bear this out. So the majority of child abuse cases that are reported, the victims are white, I think something like 26%. The biggest disparities between makeup of the population and makeup of the population of victims of child sexual abuse are black children, Asian children and those of mixed or multiple heritage. And before we kind of throw this out as a free for all, we need to start thinking about what kinds of child sexual abuse are dominant in our society. Now, one third of all cases of sexual abuse are actually committed by children or youth offenders. That's something which none of us talk about, which is that it's not always a case of adults sexually preying on children, but sometimes children sexually preying on children.  So that means family or close family friends, right? So at most these grooming cases that we're talking about are 10% of cases of child sexual abuse, and probably a bit less than that. So we're talking about very, very limited data sets. And yes, this is being presented as something that is endemic. Now I'm not minimizing the seriousness of it, not one bit. But I'm saying that the evidence that we have does not match up with the racialized narrative that we're being presented with, because it's a system, these abuses of power take place in systems of relative power, right? And so to be able to pinpoint one group to say that, to shift the blame onto them actually invisibilizes the role that's played by people with an enormous amount of relative power in society that is often rich white men. And we saw this in U-Tree, we see this endemic in society, in parliament, in football, in football, in any kind of institution that you want to pick. And so this is why the move that Sarah Champion is making, even under what may be a good faith guys of trying to tackle sexual violence, it's such a devil's bargain, it really won't work, because what you're doing is you're creating this enormous administrative and cultural blind spot when it comes to facing up, honestly, to the enormous amounts of crimes that are committed by white men and the complicity of all white people in those crimes by projecting that as a cultural racial problem onto these abject other bodies, right? I mean, let's also just bring this down to what I think the priority has to be here, which is how do we form an effective child protection policy around this. So Sarah Champion came up with a five point plan, which was set up an expert task force. We must have primary school education on healthy and unhealthy relationships.  Now all of those five things I don't have a problem with. They are very, very vague in terms of how these things will actually play out.  But all five of those things actually become really actively detrimental to the project of protecting children if you racialize them. Because if you teach children, imagine if the statistics did support Sarah Champion, they don't, but let's imagine that they did. If you teach children, okay, right, reality is white girls, you're going to be preyed on by Pakistanis. You are creating a blind spot, right, where girls of color will not see themselves represented, and they will not know how to articulate their own experiences of victimhood. And you've projected a kind of predatory, you know, stereotype onto one group of people, which means that when there's predatory behavior from other groups of people, it won't be recognized in the same way. In terms of how this will play out on an allocation of resources nationally, this is really very troubling, it won't be useful. And there's no mention of actually what does work in terms of tackling child sexual abuse and specifically exploitation of grooming settings, which is harm minimization rapport building social work. So finding ways to form productive relationships with girls who are being exploited who don't necessarily recognize what they're going through is abuse, in order to get them to feel comfortable in breaking off those relationships. And then if they feel up to it, participating in the criminal prosecution of the offenders. And what I want to pick up on the use and misuse of this kind of castle impulse, among feminist circles as well, because often, castle statistics are used to sort of prove the profundity with which women's testimony is dismissed and treated with contempt.  That's, you know, shockingly low. And there's a whole, there's a whole problem, obviously that a lot of this stuff takes place behind closed doors and the sort of the boundaries of proof that obtain in a, in an actual criminal court aren't really aren't really equipped to deal with that. But obviously, there is a problem in these cases, where perhaps the the victims have been brainwashed into thinking that these men actually care about them. The castle impulse actually prevents people coming forward because they think that these people are going to be locked up factor in the effect of immigration policing. And you get and you put such a high price on people coming forward, that it will be completely impossible. That's why this these strategies just pay like, they sound very good if what you're trying to do is sound like you're tackling child sexual abuse, right? But they don't really work if you're actually trying to tackle it. So if you move or tell it not beyond, but if you try and expand your repertoire for tackling child sexual abuse beyond castle mechanisms, you actually need a lower burden of proof. Yeah, and it puts less of a strain on victims coming forward as witnesses. So I think this is the technical term for what social workers can do in order to present a case to move forward with either care proceedings or other forms of intervention to protect child from sexual abuse is something called validity analysis. So really, it's a form of rapport building and interviews where the questions are not hostile or antagonistic. But it's a way of building up a picture of detail. So the way my mom explained it to me was, actually, they'll have a, you know, most victims of sexual abuse, I have an excellent memory for like, what was the color of the duvet? Or like, what was the light looking like when I was coming through the window? Other things might be really blurry. But with that picture of details, I can say I've got enough evidence to be able to act in terms of bringing forward care proceedings and moving forward this case, moving forward that case. Those things might not necessarily work in a court of law in terms of securing a conviction, but it can work for securing social work intervention. And so if you fund these, these other forms of institutional intervention, I'm not saying that social work is absent of racialized dominance, by the way, but I'm saying that like, you know, it's a, you know, it creates different relationships to carceral models, that we might have a better chance of tackling this problem effectively. I don't think that the measures outlined by Sarah Champion in terms of let's explicitly racialize this and also coming up with very vague proposals are in any way adequate for tackling the problem that we face. Yeah, I mean, she's Sarah Champion. I'm looking at this camera. Sarah Champion, I think is saying what she's saying, because she's obviously a member of Parliament for Rotherham. This is a very politically salient issue locally. So I can understand the intention from a sort of political point of view, not excusing it, but there's the explanation. Okay. As long as alongside obviously her shadow cabinet position. What she's done with this issue is to about Operation Newtree. Yeah, there were people on Twitter who were saying, everybody in the BBC is a pedo. Now nobody would say that's it's quite funny, but nobody would say that's a serious critique or position. And we've now got a member of the shadow cabinet underneath a socialist leader, I would argue probably the best type this country has a progressive change doing exactly the same thing as egg Twitter accounts were against, you know, former Tory MPs or members of the BBC a few years ago. So that's deeply disturbing. And there have been people saying that she needs to go, she needs to resign, she needs to quit. I would ask you two guys, what do you think Jeremy Corbyn should do? Or what would be the best outcome here in terms of a progressive politics and shadow champion? If she apologised, could she stay on? Because it's obviously this is going to keep it happening, right? There will be transgressions by a shadow cabinet which reflects a very broad range of opinions, not all left wing. Well, I think it's it's just the language around the language around the the need to protect the the sexuality or the purity of white women and white girls is just completely indefensible.  It's one of the kind of key linchpins of racialisation. What was that film in the American South in the 20s? Oh, Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation, and that was one of the central tropes. Birth of a Nation, Emmett Till.   But I want to return to... Should she resign quickly? Yes. Is it like, should it end your career? And can I explain why? Is that there are very clear historical lineages for this, which like you very articulately laid out. But for me, it comes down to something very, very basic, because she's a smart woman and she's experienced when it comes to dealing with issues of gendered violence. So she knows that these are dodgy stats that she's wheeling out. Because listen, right, for me, numbers are like mystic ancient rooms. I am outfoxed by them. I did two English degrees.  If I can find out and go through the data and see, well, hang on, this is inaccurate, she definitely knows already. So in terms of do I want a labour government that is effective at producing policy that is capable of protecting women and girls from patriarchal violence? I don't think she's up to that job. If she will sacrifice the truth for political convenience. Yeah. I mean, she's definitely done as a qualities minister. I mean, the absolute absurdity of the minister for women and qualities, reproducing a discourse that A does nothing to protect women and B doubles down on enormously racialized, extracurable abuse that probably wouldn't look out of place on Nigel Farage's Twitter account on Katie Hopkins Twitter account. Like, yeah, she's she's got to go. But really, I'm almost less concerned. I'm not really surprised about this from this Labour government, right? Because you look at the government. Oh my goodness. Sorry, where are we now? Yeah, from this Labour administration is the because just look at their stance on immigration. They have proved themselves repeatedly willing to sell migrants and people of colour down the river for political convenience. So in terms of what Corbyn should do, I don't really care. I'm really like I really am starting to care. We're talking about it. So you do care. I mean, I mean, I can want there to be consequences for this kind of behaviour from whatever party, surely. Sure, sure. But I'm just not sure in terms of tackling the kind of because Sarah Champion is doing this knows that this will work for a reason, right? Because this kind of discourse has been normalised. I don't think that the most effective way of tackling these sort of far right views is just is simply for her to lose her job, right?  And it's explicitly saying we are not going to look at this as a racialised issue, because what that does is leave more girls, women and also young boys too vulnerable to the predilections of predators, right? So if it wouldn't just be a case of getting rid of Sarah Champion is produce a decent policy. And that's what my frustration is here is that when we get sucked into these discussions, I've been cast as an abuse apologist for saying, well, hold up, right? This isn't actually accurate. Is that becomes a game of abstracts, right? And you're dealing with floating signifiers signifiers of like, well, hang on, what does, you know, the abuser look like? And what you've come more and more distance from is situation on the ground, which is how do you help social workers, health care professionals, teachers tackle these problems, right? By arguing over what an abuser looks like you are not doing that. Can I just quickly say for me, what the appropriate course of action because people saying Corbyn should sack her, I agree with you. Fundamentally, that changes nothing about the political culture changes nothing about Labour Party policy. But it's that's clearly the same question that people are now asking. But for me, it would be get a motion, if you're a Labour Party member, get a motion passed at the CLP saying she should go.  So I think people need to feel a bit more agensive around this because champions comments are taking place in a broader context, which I think is probably where a lot of the mainstream vote, which Labour now has to win is at. So we're going to see more and more of this. And I think the expectation of just Jeremy Corbyn firing people, thing like you're saying it's kind of sufficient. And also because like, I'm just I'm just baffled that Labour MPs think that this is a strategy that's going to work, because you're really not going to be able to do racism better than the Tory Party and still maintain the constituencies that you kind of are at the moment relying on for your vote. That's people of colour and metropolitan. They've got nowhere to go, right? That's the presumption. Yeah. Well, that's a presumption, but it's also it's OK, assuming assuming, for instance, that it isn't a complete load of crap, which I think it is in terms of electoral strategy. I'm really not interested in that electoral strategy, right? If that's what it takes to win, what it takes to win is to is to sell out an enormous part of the population, which means that there is no hope for the left on a parliamentary level. And so, you know, that's the kind of calculation that we have to do, right? I mean, that's possibly why, because I do have hope in some set in some limited sense in the parliamentary sphere. So maybe that's maybe that's informing why my reasons behind thinking that this is doomed electoral strategy. But I just think it's all it's hopefully in some way. My problem is that I don't think it's doomed. Sure. In the sense of it's entirely coherent with the history of a racist British leftism. Sure. I don't think it's doomed at all. If, I mean, if Jeremy Corbyn wants to maintain the levels of support that he got from working class, urban people of color, I'm not saying urban like urban as code for round saying urban isn't living in the city. Yeah, I'm not saying I'm not saying like mobile urban. I'm saying like, you know, I'm not saying like garage or two step urban. I'm saying like, you know, literally living in cities. If he wants to maintain that energy, which was an effective campaigning force, he's got to show that he's bold enough to push back against racist narratives. And I think you do that in a way which can also appeal to essentially racist white people who are kind of looking to string up, you know, a Muslim or two by presenting a bold and substantive policy proposal. You shift the discourse away from these racialized abstracts and you get it onto brass tax. One thing, very quick. Yeah, there's no evidence of this informing of broader electoral strategy so far. So far, it's just an anomaly, but I'm inclined to agree with. So I want to be charitable to the leadership. But I agree with Ash that it could be. And what you would do is you have a very left wing offer. And then you just do the occasional, it's a bit what Boris used to do with the left, the occasional sort of you've plus your eyelashes are far right. And you keep channeled very cultural issues. I mean, what do you mean by flushing your eyelashes at the far right? So issues like this allow me these are issues which get you give votes are very irrational, right? So when people are knocking the doors in stoke, for instance, the number one issue that you give votes and stoke were talking about was halal butchers. I can't help it that the meat is better quality, delicious and cheaper. All right, Mr Halal has sorted me out. For labor to a majority, they would have a very left wing manifesto, I'm sure of it, but there would have to be some right wing red meat to these people. Obviously, we know first and foremost in freedom of movement, but I think there may be a few cultural issues as well. So conceding to this narrative around abuse, maybe sorry, so are you saying that this is a winning strategy? No, I'm not saying it's a winning strategy. I think it may be a strategy that they pursue with that in mind. But I mean, my father's a taxi driver, an Iranian taxi driver. He's had people say, I'm not getting in your car, you're a Muslim, you're right. I'm not, I know, I'm not. Yeah, obviously, I'm just trying to terrify where you're going. We need to preempt what the direction could be at the moment, like I say it's an anomaly, but I could I could imagine it being a relatively intelligent path to go down that the failure it was with labor before was they did the right wing stuff with centrist economics. I've always thought there's a big part of this country, which I've always called red UK. So I think if you have socialist economic policies, and then you, like I said, only occasionally, intermittently appeal to sort of certain flag UK issues, I think they may believe that will pay off. I agree with you. I don't think it will. That's why I'm involved in the project. It's from the Labour Party member. But it may be it may be a sign of things to come. I just want to come back to you, Ash, on the honour of turn this to racialised abstracts. Yeah, I know.   By the way, Godwin of Godwin's law has officially declared Godwin's law null and void so we can go to town on the Nazi comparisons. You guys, hooray, this is the world we live in now. So yeah, I mean, so I woke up this morning, was drinking my cup of coffee in some scrambled eggs. Good day. Check my phone. And the first thing I see on Twitter is Trevor Kavanaugh's op-ed in The Sun, in which he's talking about, you know, well, if we relinquish power over freedom of movement in Brexit negotiations, what do we do about and capitalises this the Muslim problem? And I was and I'm not using this emotive language like in a hyperbolic way. I was I was chilled because after the weekend's events in Charlottesville, where you have people marching around with swastikas and doing hyal Hitler's salute to use phrasing like the Muslim problem, which of course calls back to the framing of the Jewish problem, right? And for which there was a solution, a final one. Yeah, I was going to say it was a final, which Katie Hopkins had earlier tweeted a final solution to the migrant problem. The use of this language, this rhetoric. I had always known that the violence genocide is not something that is contained to the early and mid 20th century, right? Because I mean, if you ran, you know that. And you know, it also means that you're not complacent about how these violence might flare up again. What I did not think I would ever see in my lifetime is that the call back to that rhetoric and those aesthetics would be so direct. I thought that it would have to cloak itself in a kind of new respectable iteration in order to succeed. Whereas you look at what's being printed in the sun. And I think that Sarah Champion's opinion piece on Newcastle kind of falls in with this as well. I think it's fascist in terms of a propaganda project of demonizing Muslims.  And we must now start assertively challenging people who consume it. I'm not saying beat up everyone who reads the sun. I'm saying like talk to people because the the figure of the at once barbarous, libidinous, but also somehow effeminate weak, submissive British Asian man who was coming for your children is actually very is remarkably similar to the Nazi figurations of the Jew. I think that's interesting in terms of what that what that hate figure, what that bogeyman is actually doing, right? Because you need a different sort of like racist hate figure for different modes of population control. And this particular fascism is aims to sort of paper over the class differences which are heightened by by economic crises and what this sort of paradoxical figure like Schrodinger's Schrodinger's Muslim Schrodinger's Jew is supposed to do is to at once appeal to the fears of the caricature and fears of like a working class which feels which is supposed to fear like being ruled over by the sestues of like this effeminate elite and caricature what ruling class people think about working class people, right? It's kind of like that they're cockroaches that they are that they're thoughtless that they're thugs, etc, etc, etc. And so you have to like packaging, packaging up in like one racialized iteration, this figure that can, you know, unite those fears and prove a kind of common commonizing force between classes which really should have nothing in common.  Sorry, but you just there was the Irish problem. Maybe this has the Muslim problem is that I will steal your man. Yeah. And there's the Irish problem, of course, in 19th century England. But I think the first account of this is the German problem in Caesar's conquest of Gaul. And he sort of offers an explanation as to why they've conquered school France, which is full of Gauls. Well, we're not quite sure German. They call them Germans and Gauls, Celts, but obviously, it's just a bunch of tribes really. And they do this because of course, they pose a threat. And Gauls, Celts of you, there's like wildly sexually promiscuous, not to be trusted, violent. And you think, wow, we this 2000 years ago, and you can pretty much map all of this.  Yeah. So this is as old as it's as old as the hills. So and Trevor Kavana, by the way, looks like, like I'm up around you, he looks like it's a lot of mania. So I find that quite funny that he could be so so racist. He's kind of like, sort of like he's kind of half brown or something. That's not surprising. I mean, that's because race isn't a biologically contingent formation, right? I'm tough joking, but he looks maybe like mixed race.  I'm going to be texting all my mixed race cousins being like, which what have you been writing in the sun? Yeah. I'm serious in saying that we need to be a lot more assertive in tackling these right wing papers, because we have seeded so much ground as the left in terms of media operations. And this isn't me bigging us up or they like, let's pick ourselves up. But I'm saying that we were in this bizarre position where people who are reading the sun every day, people who are reading the Daily Mail every day, people who are reading the Spectator every day even don't trust it, right? But we have seeded the ground of like, well, we have to speak to people where they are, and we can't challenge them too much. We can't tell them that what they do is very school alienated. Sun patronizing. Whereas I think like, no, actually have this conversation. Yeah. Because if you ask someone reading the sun, do you trust the editor of the sun? They will say no, you ask me, do I trust the editor of the Guardian?  Well, we had the stats right from you gov. Only around 50% just under 50% of sun readers voted 30% of them voted Labour. So they're not looking to the sun for its political line. They just happened to buy the sun. I remember when I was on probation, and I'd go to I'd have to basically just do odd jobs, derelict school in South London. And of course, most of the people there were, it was all young boys, young black boys, primarily. There was the occasional thing where it was like a older black woman who'd done like a trip like a driving offense. It's like, I'm here for, you know, something quite significant. And like, anyway, so it really brought that home to me anyway, we'd all go there, the two guys who were at sorts of circle with a Jamaican, older Jamaican men, and they'd have to be reading the sun. And all these boys will be reading they're all like 18, 19, 20, and they're all reading the sun.  They know it.   So I think conversations where you go look, the sun tries to pedal a set of ideas within society, which wants to blame you for everything. Like when you see it, put it in the bin. Like I think there could definitely be a movement to that end. And it could at least take off in major cities pretty easily. It's a lot of ways. And that's what I mean is like, let's start having these conversations. Because do you see, and this might be a kind of segue into Charlottesville is my mind, what happened when you don't challenge like the kind of, you know, quagmire of racism, which I think even as a white person, you are, you know, benefiting from? No, incubated in the whole time you go, when you go, when you kind of, you know, have your, I don't know, Americans have Thanksgiving, I don't really understand the whole two turkey thing.  I'm just going to tweet about it. Right. And it's not actually having that confrontation.   What I am saying is that we need to be so much more active in our everyday lives in terms of challenging people consumingly repeating racist propaganda. It's suddenly, it's fringe until suddenly it's very violently and very murderously not, right? It's fringe until the Tiki tortures come out. Exactly. And I want to move us on to Charlottesville. And I was wondering in the haze of everything that's been going on in the last few days, wondering if you could lay out a little bit what the hell has happened? I'll drop the heat. So I'll be super I'll be super quick. Yeah, there was a process in Charlottesville, Virginia, because there's been the proposal to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee. He was a general in the Confederate Army during the Marathon of War 1861 to 65, 1860s. Now that's important because Southerners or people who are defending the statue who are mostly Southerners are saying, well, this is part of our heritage. Entirely white. So this is part of our heritage. And that's quite a compelling argument until you find out the statue was built in 1924, 60 years after the end of the Civil War. First and foremost, the absolute peak, the crescendo of the Ku Klux Klan. So it was really it was a huge gesture to white supremacists far right when it was built. So beyond the no illusions about it being some, you know, some momentum of a history that shouldn't be forgotten. We shouldn't erase history. Yada, yada, yada. It was the repurposing of history at very particular moments. So don't get sentimental bars, sentimental bars. Anyway, this then became a kind of cause celebra for the far right. They then had a protest called Unite the Right in Charlottesville, where this statue of General Robert E. Lee was proposed to be taken down. They were then met by a much larger counter protest. The night before, you know, at the right, there was this assembly of people with these what they called tiki torches, maybe a couple of hundred, right? Wasn't as big as the following day, it seemed. Few things I was surprised by the fact that they were just not masked up. They were openly displaying who they were, obviously mostly men, no, 90 percent men, really, from what I could see. Surprisingly, many were sort of very slick, well presented. Now, I say that because and we've since found this out, they've lost their jobs. They're in perfectly respectable positions, decent careers, and then they were very disinhibited, which suggests to me they're new to this, which is in itself quite important and be they thought there'll be no consequences, which is partly an extension of them being new to this, but also that they think that this politics has traction and momentum and that there'll be no sort of overhead. Being an extrovert fascist and let's be clear, this wasn't like an EDL demo or even ones you've seen in Germany where they try and cloak it in even populist language. This was explicitly how Hitler were going to get rid of blacks, get rid of Jews, you know, blood and soil, blood and soil. I mean, this was this was the I mean, you know, I've never seen a process of this intensity in terms of foreign politics in Europe on the scale ever. So that's that was what shocks me, even though it's only about five hundred to a thousand people. Yeah. And in the light of that context, we're just going to let that marinate for a bit and we're going to go to a quick break and then we're going to come back and drop some more heat. Over the last 10 years, things have really changed. But for all the darkness, every cause has an effect. For all the talk of change, the present moment is really one of crisis, a crisis of democratic representation of identity, a climate crisis of a failing economic model, which isn't working for most people. We can't have a media that's beholden to advertisers or the political ambitions of oligarchs, which is why in 2013, we founded Navara Media, online corporate media. We are funded by our subscribers. There's no tax avoiders. There's no oil money and there's no lords. What we're creating is media for you, which quite simply, you make possible. Looking to raise £40,000, that will allow us to not only keep on paying our contributors, but give them a little bit more as well as keep our studio and take our fantastic Navara events nationwide. To help us get there, go to support.navaramedia.com and give a one off donation or even better, sign up for a subscription. We've already achieved so much, but the truth is, we've barely started. Welcome back. We are back online and we have sorted out what I understand were a couple of technical problems. Sorry about that. We've also had... Harsh lighting. Yeah, harsh lighting. I can't be dealing with that. I need all the help I can get. So, Aaron's just going to pick up on the history and the context of this particular moment that's happened in Charlottesville, right? Because some people are shocked by what's happened to it and those people are mostly white people, like white liberals in America who haven't really been able to see what's been in the post, really, for the last, I mean, certainly since Trump got elected and, you know, inevitably way before. So, how do we how do we trace the origins of where this has come from? Because in many ways it does seem extraordinary on this episode. So, I'll quickly recap by saying that the protest was 500,000 people. Yeah. Which isn't that big, is it? But, like you've said, it's explicitly right-wing politics and iconography and rhetoric. I think I've never seen anything like it. I never thought I'd see anything like it in a first world country. So, where's it coming from? What's the background? Well, Southern Confederate nationalism has always been a thing, right? The Lost Cause. That's why this statue was built in 1924. It was the base of the Ku Klux Klan. We have to remember the Klan was actually very intimate with the Democrats in the 20s. The reason why you didn't get more of a political coalition was because they don't just hate black people. They also hate Jews and Catholics, which for, you know, the Democrats in the North was a problem. So, you've got Southern nationalism, the Lost Cause of the Civil War. And that's a thing. And that grievance won't ever go away. And fascism feeds off a sense of historical injustice, just like the Nazis did of World War I. Very similar thing with that and the American Civil War. Then I think of the two newer elements. So, you have the alt-right who are newer. And what's interesting is that they are right-wing, but they also try to feed off a culture of transgression. And transgressions are good way of putting it. So, Marley and Opolis seems to me to be the inheritor of something like a Pap-Bucanan, right? Conservative, Republican in the United States. He's a gay man. He wears a Gucci baseball cap, which costs $600. But you can't hate it, LGBT people. So, that's quite interesting. We can talk about that later on, I think. And the alt-right come from a bunch of primarily digital subcultures, which I think are kind of they're united by not much. One is hating women, like really. And we can talk about this a bit more as the show progresses, but also really just the liberal values of the 1960s, which they view as the status quo, but which of course are an unfinished revolution on trans rights, gender rights, racial equality.  And then finally, there's American nationalism, which is what I think Trump genuinely is, but he knows that these other two people are really, two groups are really important in his coalition. American nationalism, mechanicalism upset with globalization, upset with free trade, upset with the Washington establishment. They want made America, jobs in America. They want economic mechanicalism. They hate immigrants. So, there's a bunch of groups here. And for now, they're all on side because it's very difficult to hold political coalition together, which includes the people we saw in Charlottesville and Antonio Scaramucci, going as a hedge fund on the East Coast. But so far it's... I'm actually not so sure it's that difficult, because if you look at all the doxing that's gone on of people who are portrayed in these videos, it's not just that we talk about the fact that there are as many fascists wearing expensive suits as there are fascists in jackboots and even white hoods who turn up to protest like these. But actually, it's not just that they're closely linked. It's that they're often the same person. They're often pictured in the same video. Can I quickly respond? I just quickly respond. Because I'm saying it's a coalition and it's new. And the point is you've got Southern Confederate Nationalists who would have been on those demos 20, 30 years ago, gun militias, and they're with newer groups who, I would say primarily identify as the alt-right or as American nationalist. And they don't actually have the same objective as Southern secessionists, but they're in the same group for now. So the intervention that I want to make here, honey-chilled baby cakes, one word missing from your otherwise excellent historicization of these demonstrations is, drum roll please. Whiteness! Hooray! All right, so what is it that's holding this together? And it's something which, you know, we talked about the limitations of Afro-pessimism as maybe understanding global racism, but Afro-pessimism, I think, is the best history of America that has ever existed. So what is it that can hold such a diverse social political coalition together?   And I think that this is something which we really cannot overstate, is that that is something which can hold together your, you know, free market, Paul Ryan with, you know, an absolute nut-a-butter, like the representative of Georgia, whose name I forget, who was like, well, the rural problem here is Antifa, the rural problem here is these thugs, the rural problem here is Black Lives Matter. That is the thing that's, you know, holding this together. And that is, I think, a historical lineage, which is kind of thinking about how American nationalism and Southern secessionism is actually a lot, you know, more closely interwoven than we might like to think. And also the power of whiteness as an organizing logic of violence also makes sense of what is a paradox. Sorry, that you picked up on, because I think you're completely right, right? That these subcultures that have been, these internet subcultures that have been mobilized as the foot soldiers that put Trump in power that are turning up to these demonstrations were trained on things like Gamergate and they were trained on hating on women, particularly women of color online, right? And so that would seem to kind of roll up against the possibility of women being involved in the movement. But what you actually see is that women are not just involved in the movement, they're actually at the forefront of championing its detoxification by being able to present a slick media image that differs from our usual picture of what like a Nazi looks like, right? But if you think of like, oh, it's whiteness that they're defending in between solidarity with women of color and solidarity with white men, they're choosing solidarity with white men, right? I mean, that showed up as well, of course, in the Trump election breakdown, right? So white women without ecology education voted overwhelmingly more for Trump than for Hillary Clinton. So she didn't, you know, the presumed coalition that Trump needed to win, people said it's not possible because Clinton's going to win so much people of color or with women, the problem is with white women, she didn't.  Now, if you look at the subcoach that's feeling the alt-right, it's completely different. There's even a movement called Men Going Their Own Way, MGTOW.com, and these people literally want to dispense with women in their lives. And that culture itself feeds into pickup artistry, into new rationalism. And a lot of this looks very presentable, new rationalism looks super presentable.  A great example is a guy on the 4chan forum, I think in 2013, 14, and he was incel. Now, Sam and Chris talks about this stuff a lot. I don't know if you're familiar with these cultures. What's incel? Incel and volse. I mean, this is how, this is really odd, right? Incel and volse, so incel is something who's involuntarily celibate. Oh, yeah, sorry, yeah, I'm with you now. Volse. Volse, that Mercury in retrograde. Volse is voluntarily celibate, and these are the MGTOWs, men going their own way.  Was that happened in Santa Barbara, was it? Yeah, it was, you see Santa Barbara, right? Yeah. And I'm not trying to minimize the role that misogyny plays as another organizing factor. At all, I would never want to do that. But I'm just interested in how the power of whiteness can allow some white women to act as basically the ultimate cool girl who's like really down with toxic masculinity, this thwarted, rageful toxic masculinity that is contributing to this. I wouldn't want to pathologize fascism as a problem of masculinity or as a problem of toxic masculinity, because I think it goes far beyond that and it's an economic question as well. But I think that we can't, obviously, we can't, intersectionality, we can't purely focus on misogyny, because misogyny draws white women, women of color. But if I may, I think something which can loop these things together is an understanding of whiteness, not as a kind of reified, trans-historical abstract concept. But let's go back to basics, right? Let's go back to whiteness as property. Great essay. So looking at whiteness, not as primarily a matter of identity, but as a property relation. And this is something which is a specifically American phenomenon, looking at it in terms of displacement of indigenous people, ownership and exploitation, responsibility of black people. And when you think about whiteness as a property relationship, a sense of a grieved or displaced ownership in the post-civil rights era, that doesn't mean some rights have been achieved, but saying that, you know, at least some of those rhetorical gestures, those politics were hegemonic for a time. And that sense of agreement chimes very well with the sense of masculine agreement and entitlement to the attention and sexual availability of women, right? So you think about this as a set of like aggrieved property relations, which manifests itself in taking over a town and murdering people. I mean, it seems bizarre to talk about these people, but they now inform this movement. So again, another element, what I'm saying is about the misogyny and whiteness being almost parallel. I'm speaking just simply in regards to the alt-right because I think it is different with the American nationalism, with the Southern secessionism, which are obviously much older and they will obviously be far more popular and more diffuse. But the thing about the property is really interesting because one of the kind of tropes, again, of the alt-right is this idea of the beta uprising. So they're saying we're not alpha males we're beta males, but we're gonna like overthrow this system of alphas. And it's almost like they look at women as the property of alpha males, like you're saying about whiteness. So it's also, yeah, it's kind of interesting. And it's also a very understudied culture. That's also a racialized trope, right? So thinking about stereotypes of African American men as being hypermasculine, hyperthugish, sexually voracious. And so for me, I'm not saying his race, his gender, I'm saying that in this context these things are intimately bound up. And they're the product of many of the same historical processes and that should affect our reading of current events. So what I'm saying is you're both equally wrong. I'll take that. But this is where cuck comes from, right? Yeah. Right?  So again, it's about property, but it's property of twofold where, right?  It's a double infraction of that property rights which makes it so galling, I guess. And I just want to return, I guess, to the violence of the moment that we're seeing. And, A, what do we make of this going forward? Do we think that this is going to be a pattern that spreads?  Is this a discursive failure for the alt-right? Because, you know, it might sort of serve to alienate people. I don't know. I find it incredibly difficult to speculate in terms of, like, will we see more of this, will we say less of this? I mean, I've been saying for years that this kind of violence was coming. I had hoped that I was being sensationalist, but no. What I worry about is that while maybe someone like Steve Bannon maybe becomes less influential in the White House, maybe that you see some fragmentation within the Republican Party itself, is that the optics of this violence will be appealing to just enough people to essentially encourage a spate of white supremacist terrorist acts, not just in the U.S., but in, you know, in the global North, generally. I think that this addition to the terrorist repertoire of car-ramming is really troubling because it requires no training, it requires really no forethought, and it's something which, I think, really changes our sense of belonging or safety in public space. I think it's something which is deliberately designed to do that. Particularly in America, right, where the car is such a symbol of hate. It was in this country, too. We had a act of white supremacist violence involving a car-ramming just a couple of months ago. I mean, like really, really recently. And Mike Davis has a good line on this when he talks about the evolution of the car. I mean, he's talking about the car bomb in particular, but the evolution of the car, as he calls it, like a proletarian weapon of violence because it's, not only because it's widely available, but also because it requires minimal state surveillance. And really, it's the incremental loading of state surveillance onto our everyday lives that is behind this tactic, like necessarily. But I was just kind of... So, you know, I'm scared that we're going to see an increase of these things. And I think that we need to think about white supremacist violence in a way which can deal with the new technologies and tactics of the alt-right, but is also looking at it beyond those particular rhetorical, aesthetic, or technological trappings. I mean, can I? Yeah, of course. So, I mean, Andrew Breitbart, who founded Breitbart News, says that politics is downstream from culture. He was very interested in changing culture. And even Milo says when he goes on stage, he goes, I don't really care about politics. What if Trump was indicted next year? He goes, well, that would be terrible. I don't really care about politics. He cares about culture and he cares about changing the ideas in people's heads. So, in fact, for them, Trump was kind of well ahead of schedule in terms of their revolution, which they're not upset about, but it obviously makes things more complicated. How far will this go is contingent, I would say, on one group within that three. I said, the Southern Secessionist, the old right and American nationalist. If the Republican Party, which is very happy to tie itself into, I can imagine, as it moves away from failing neoliberalism, it will tie itself to mechanicalism, harder borders, clamping down on migrants and American nationalism. I can see that being a successful project with the Republican base, even maybe with Wall Street, and it can work. So, the question is, to what extent will that agenda scale out? Because that's the thing that's going to bring people in and that's the thing that the Republican establishment will defend the broader project under. So, yeah. But if they have an instant, like a Lee Rigby instant, I'm worried about what can happen in America because anything like that Trump will use as license to really, really, really, now migrants, now people of colour. Muslims. I mean, yeah, it's contingent on what kind of thing happens, right? But basically, yeah. But does he need that kind of dissociative opportunity? He doesn't need it, but I think that it would accelerate things. Like, I think they want to get rid of certain bits of legislation. We've put the screen grab of that message, for instance, amongst the all right, about the 1965 Migration Act. Yes. So, shall I read that? Yeah. I think I have it here. Two seconds. Bear with me. I have my glasses on. All right. Oh, yeah. Here we go. It's fixed. The title of the post is Fixing the Alt Right by, oh, by anonymous. Don't get trapped in an echo chamber where you can no longer relate to normies.  We have a chance to actually make changes now that Trump has shifted the overted window to the right, but we need to be smart and make the movement appealing to the, and this is in caps, average white person. And then there are a few suggestions as to how they do that. One, disavow all Nazi slash KKK edgelord lappers. That's live action roleplayers.  There is no way to lose public support quicker than going around making Nazi salutes and holding wiki torches whilst chanting Jews will not replace us. We will. It's a lie. This instantly makes the average person hate you. Two, build a populist movement with realistic incremental over goals repealing the 1965 immigration act and replacing it with something that both limits total immigration and prioritizes white immigration is an actual tangible political goal. Three, keep the long term goals covert and don't ever reveal your power level. Talking openly about a white ethno state only leads to failure and the average public turning against you. So disavow anyone who reveals his power power level his leftist will recognize dog whistles and know that we're crypto but normies won't listen to them. Four, start first by focusing on multiculturalism because it is a lot easier for people to see how non-white countries produce culture that is at odds with our values. People like Peter Teal, Theo? Theo. There we go. Thank you. Should be the voice of the alt right. Not cringe lords like Richard Spencer. Now you have it from the horse's mouth. Richard Spencer, a cringe lord. The modus operandi is covert power and economic demands. What do we think? What do we make of that? These people are organized.  That's terrifying. They're organized and the thing is that these policy objectives chime very well with Zeno racist neoliberalism. So the point is that this doesn't look radically different from say proposals in terms of EU migration policy even. In terms of prioritizing white migration over others talking about incompatible cultures. This isn't far away from the status quo that we have or indeed the one the 48% are trying to heart back to. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if this was Nigel Farage's like personal notebook, right? Or not even Nigel Farage.  All right. We can talk about this violence as something which is normalized into the fabric of our everyday existence and has much more sinister goals at the end of it as well. And we need to be able to do some concrete political thinking about the interconnections between, you know, the abject right as in the one which is cast as other castes a kind of insurgent force into politics proper and the central right the normalized right or indeed the racist left. We need to think about these things as a continuum and not as a kind of, you know, form of discrete subcultures. While I think that work analyzing the right is really useful. I would never dismiss it for a second. I think sometimes it can overstate subcultural analysis in place of a political one. I think what this where the ideas are coming from is these people. And if we look at who in this ensemble of actors who are the Gramtians. It's the right. The people that are thinking that strategically ahead in terms of over and covert goals. It's the right. And of course they're using the institutions and the rhetoric of American nationalists, the Republican Party. So in terms of your question was a good one. What was it? Oh, I mean, it was probably fantastic. But it was really excellent. Which one were we talking about? Because you were talking about you. Yes. So how successful could it be? How would you challenge it? Oh, yeah. Oh, fantastic. Spencer.  He was doing a PhD at Duke University. If he'd not done all this Seacile bullshit, he could have got a nice Shogunatehink tank, shut his gob and done precisely, and assumed precisely the same goals. And he wouldn't have been found out. And those are the people that worry me. Because yes, the media attention will look. And maybe he knows what he's doing. Maybe he wants to shift the over to window and he'll sacrifice himself. But for every Richard Spencer who's out there Seaciling, there'll be another 20 young kids doing the exact same things in the Cato Institute, interning for the Republican Party, in Wall Street, but working with donors to the Republican Party. So there is a shift here in American public life. And it's incumbent on the radical left to persuade as many average Americans, white, brown, black as possible. But also there's something incumbent on the Republican Party. The Republican Party can stop this. But Aaron, aren't the anti-fascist communists just as bad as the Nazis?  But this is important. The Republican Party could stop this. But I've not seen anything. I mean, maybe I'm wrong. No, no. How could they stop it? I've not seen anything rhetorically from any Republican senator or congressman saying this is appalling. No, nobody's calling that Trump.  The point is... No, they're calling that Trump. Calling that Trump's response. I mean, the issue here is that they won't take any meaningful steps to ameliorate this explosion of white supremacist politics. It's simply because they're working too hard and vote suppression in key battleground states because the demographic shift is going one way, which means a rapid diminishing of the Republican base and what they need are legalistic frameworks to suppress that vote. And also why they need to change immigration, of course, quickly. Precisely. Yeah, exactly.  What is it, 2047? The white people will be a sort of... If you lump all kind of people of colour and immigrants into one block, by 2047 white people are supposed to be a minority in America. So, holding out for 2047 goes. No, but the thing is, and I think that this is a mistake. Yeah. Racism does not need numerical supremacy to work because hello, apartheid South Africa. Hello, slavery. Like, and it's actually that fear of being outnumbered indeed surrounded. And this is where the history of the plantation south is really important. That has been a catalyst for the most virulent and exuberant iterations of white supremacist violence.  Yeah, exactly. It's this kind of like... Which is why that there are... Which is why I think this stuff is happening, which is why you have a reinvigorated white supremacist street movement. I think that's why you have voter suppression laws making their way through different states. I think that's why you also have mass incarceration, which is a huge force for voter suppression. You also have, you know, energy moving in terms of changing immigration laws. All of these things are working in harmony. Yeah, and it's also one of the one of the reasons behind given this kind of like spurious faith in like a demographic shift being able to somehow like solve structures of violence that undergird racism as partly behind like a democratic party complacency, right?  You know what, bitch, we have always outnumbered you, right? Yeah, there you go. And that didn't... Like, we, you know, didn't have the upper hand. And I think there's a great phrase from Marx on this, right? Between two rights, force decides. So let's talk about force. Let's talk about power. Yeah. I don't want to talk about abstract like, if I just like, you know, pop out three babies, maybe racism will end. I mean, the only successful slave uprising in history, as I understand it, was the Mamluks in Egypt and enslaved societies... What was that only... What's that supposed to be? Successful long-term one that wasn't crushed. Haiti? What about Haiti? Yeah. They were crushed, right? That's the point. No, Haiti, what? They were crushed. They were completely crushed. In terms of economic sanctions on Haiti, in terms of its development over the course of the 20th century. Okay, we're measuring successful very differently. There's a lot of successful ones. I'm saying one that they've taken a state apparatus and then they've become annually and they've managed to reproduce certain situations. Okay, if you're saying that, if you're saying that, that's different. That's different. I would still say like, Haiti offers some challenges to this, although the kind of ongoing project of like, white supremacist economic immiseration, certainly. We've gone far away. But that's a great point, rather, the numbers were totally asymmetrical. We've gone over, but this is all great stuff. I want to close up with the question of, so if it's not about tackling frogs online, although you can buy touchpepe pin badges on Etsy, all profits go to anti-fascist causes. If it's not like that and it's not about this kind of like, weird liberal faith in a demographic shift, what do we do about it? What does resistance look like guys? We are 40 years on from the Battle of Lewisham. Near here. Near here. Just down the road. And we are having these battles again and again and again. What does long-term resistance look like? One. No pressure. One. You absolutely do not adhere to the rules of politeness when it comes to challenging racism, either in terms of saying like, oh, you know, don't get me wrong.  You see someone reading the sun, you ask them why you're reading that and you start normalizing these conversations because in silence, white supremacy can thrive. Two.  Yeah. Right.  Right. There are liberals who will tell you, no, that makes us just as bad as them. It's like, no, because we don't want a genocide, right? So no, it doesn't make us just as bad as them. Yeah, there is a line in that line is maybe actually murdering people. Like it's not hard, guys. Three. Is that when it comes to movements of racial emancipation, like Black Lives Matter or whether it's organizing against the far right in this country or whether it's migrant solidarity movements in Europe as white people or as indeed people of color with relative amounts of social or economic privilege, you loudly, noisily proclaim your support for it and you put your body to it. I was really struck by a tweet that I saw from a friend of mine who was saying that, you know, I'm thinking of activists in Charlottesville putting their bodies on the line without free healthcare. Which when you think about that as an image of solidarity and, you know, that is what people are doing in that context and some people can't even bring themselves to Black Lives Matter in case it makes a social situation awkward. No, none of that. Because we're in an unacceptable situation where people are saying, oh well, if it wasn't for Black Lives Matter maybe Charlottesville wouldn't be happening and we're like, oh, if you didn't call the Nazis maybe there wouldn't be Nazis. No. What we need to do is normalize this course of racial emancipation. Yeah. Final thoughts, Aaron? I agree with all that. I mean, I think in Britain we've done a bit better than in the US. That's not to criticize anybody. It's just a different historical trajectory. Obviously Europe's had fascist problems to a far greater extent. So anti-fascist tactical repertoires are far more familiar but literally shut it and also liberals are far less likely to say, you know, let them associate or they still say, of course. So literally shutting places down, you know, if you need to buy any means necessary, shutting any kind of association between fascists down is of paramount importance. Trying to break down any means that have communicating their ideas be it off or online, really, really important. And then for the left, anti-fascism is really important as an obstructive set of tactics but also you need to offer utopias as well. So to people that could potentially buy into those ideas, sometimes for me, it's like with arguments around the economic utility of migration. I think it's such a limited argument and I think it so easily feeds back into this stuff that you need to say, well, actually, no, there's, you know, if we distribute things well, if we subordinate things to people's needs rather than profit, we could have more than enough for a planet of 11 billion. Like it's the, now I'm not saying open all the borders, just say it willy-nilly, we need to, alongside that, formulate concrete policies and politics which make that, you know, a reasonable horizon. So we need to offer practical utopias and how to get there. So it's a bit about it's trying to shut that down and then opening up new, new vistas of possibility. So we have it. Smash the fasc, demand utopia.  And always punch Pepe. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been The Fix. I've been Eleanor Penny. This is Aaron Bostani. Ash Sarka. Join us on Thursday. For more hot takes, for more chat. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye. To be honest, like this is where we are. I've given conferences for ages and we'll usually expect some protesters. They'll do silly string or something like that. We've entered this new world where the leftist protesters know I'm not a neo-nazi.   We're too very a black woman. We're too very a black woman. Neo-nazis don't love me. They kind of hate me, actually. KKK, neo-nazi. NATO's people don't like me, to be honest. Are you like the history version of the neo-nazi movement? What? It's Pepe's become kind of a symbol.


Joining us today here in the USIP studios is Mr. Gordon Peake. He's an author and expert on all things Pacific Islands amongst other things and specifically he knows a lot about Papua New Guinea. Gordon, thank you for joining us today. Thanks Andrew, nice to be here. For us today, could you please help explain how instability, insecurity and fragility uniquely manifest in Papua New Guinea? Sure, it's great to be here Andrew and really grateful for the opportunity and really enjoyed the trip that we made to Papua New Guinea, which is a place that for many Americans is a real kind of far away over the horizon sort of place. We're asleep whenever they're awake, we're awake whenever they're asleep. It's half of the second largest island in the world, the island of New Guinea. It's to our flight from Australia and it's got a really unique kind of colonial legacy as well. You've got a challenge of a state that has a limited reach, a state that has aspirations to do a lot but has a fairly limited reach. You have a challenge of a growing population and you have the challenge of an everyday lack of sort of economic development that you can see there. So when we were in P&G we traveled into some of the settlements kind of you know shanty areas you would say in other contexts where a lot of Papua New Guineans live and they go there looking for work and they don't find work and I think that's one of the greatest everyday challenges that Papua New Guineans faced and that manifests then in lots of everyday security challenges. Other challenges are relate to what you would probably sort of character most sometimes gets glossed as tribal fighting which sometimes glossed as one group contesting against another, challenges over resources, challenges that relate to you know sort of broader socioeconomic development and also Papua New Guinea has got a unique challenge because it has in 2019 just before the world ended or seemed to sort of shut down because of COVID a set of islands on the eastern fringe of Papua New Guinea called Bougainville voted in a referendum and 97.7% of Bougainvillians voted in that referendum to secede from Papua New Guinea. Only South Sudan has a referendum where a higher number of people voted to secede so you've got a number of challenges you've got everyday challenges of insecurity that kind of manifest in places like Port Moresby the Capitol it's a place where there's a kind of heavy kind of private security presence where there's not a lot of people feel comfortable walking the streets but you've also got these kind of broader political challenges that are facing the place as well a want-away region and then the potential what the Papua New Guinea government worries about is they kind of domino effect that might come with that now whether that's a warranted concern or not is another matter but you've got this a whole kind of accordion full of challenges and a state that's not particularly well prepared to meet them. You started off by saying you know there's limitations to state authority and that leads to some of the problems we see with security and governance issues. Can you tell us more about where these problems are in the country and how this might lead to violence that the Papua New Guineans have been seeing over the past years? Yeah I mean it's a good question. I often think it's a useful way to think about Papua New Guinea almost sort of through sort of two lenses one of which is through the thinking of the kind of formal state and if you think of the formal state you don't really it's caused for kind of discouragement in a way because the state is limited when you actually go to go to the offices of the state sometimes you find that there's not a lot of people that are there you find that there's lots of kind of boxes and files and activities but not a lot of people that are there and it's a state that isn't delivering very very much for its people and that kind of manifests as well at the same time and it's really important to recognize that Papua New Guinea is not the kind of the bleak story that we sometimes think that it is it's a place of tremendous resilience which is a buzzword that is used to use too much but I think in this case it's actually warranted and that's because underneath the state and working through the state are these kind of thousands and thousands of kind of river rivers or rivulets of personal relationships and it's personal relationships that keep the country running in the in the way that it does and it kind of stops start chugging along in perfect sort of way but the challenge I think for kind of that then presents a South Andrew for for kind of countries like United States or country like Australia that are kind of wanting to work on fragility challenges is sometimes we automatically think we kind of see like states we kind of think oh we need to kind of work with the state in order to kind of address fragility concerns whereas actually the greatest source of strength in Papua New Guinea is is sort of beyond the state there are you know we met some of them on our on our trip we met there's thousands tens of thousands of kind of unsung heroes that are doing often unpaid work they're working with helping victims of violence they're helping victims of kind of sorcery accusation related violence which is a sort of major growing problem in the country if we'll talk about that going up but they're helping kind of lay little bridges between each other in order for the place to to work the way that it does local partnership is really important but sometimes we kind of see like states we know we look towards you know the Department of Defense looks towards the Defense Forces and PNG that the FBI might look towards the police the challenge in a place like PNG is we've got to kind of look beyond our kind of our kind of traditional blinkers and see that the source of strength there and the sort of areas to work with is within this kind of relationality this relational state that exists and you and I saw that you and I saw that when we were when we were there we traveled to a a place the second city of Papua New Guinea which is lay kind of reminds me but a Pittsburgh is sort of industrial place with a kind of sort of dine-at-heel sort of charm to it and we met communities that were actively and practically working to try to sort of snuff out violence that that was occurring now they weren't work they were sometimes working with the state but they were often kind of working off their own bat not being paid not really being recognized by the state and these are the kind of communities that are actually kind of working really productively and actively to stop violence indeed we visited some remarkable communities and met some remarkable people and to that and to the point of activities being locally led and partnerships being really centered around the the partners and the countries we're trying to help can you explain a little bit about the unique sort of culture and traditions and customs in in Papua New Guinea and and what that means for for partnering with them two things I think are really are really important the first is the importance of and sometimes we is kind of you know thinking it through Western lenses don't don't think this way we think there's something kind of wrong with this but but the importance of clan and tribe they've got these sort of huge family family units that look out for each other and it means that there's I mean I remember someone said to me that there's one of the reasons why you see very few homeless people in Papua New Guinea is that there's these tremendously strong family family units that kind of look out for each other that support each other and say if you're in employment sometimes kind of take a lot of money from you because it's a kind of communal communal society but that's one of the great and sometimes we as kind of Westerns and clans they kind of think oh the clan the tribal there's something kind of you know wrong about that but actually oh contrary it's one of the great sources of strength that is that is in the country and we saw that in our work as well which is people just practically and actively caring for their caring for their their kin the second source of strength that's worth mentioning and sometimes certainly in a place you know like I've come from Ireland originally but I lived a lot of my life in the southern hemisphere in Australia which is a fairly a religious place is that Christianity plays a really important rule in in in Papua New Guinea it plays a really important sort of fostering community rule and it also provides a set of kind of language and kind of rubrics that enable resolutions or enable sort of pathways to kind of maybe not resolve conflict but in order to kind of sort of talk about conflict in a way so let me give you one example PNG has got a a just a terrible problem with violence against women somewhere between sort of 60 to 70 percent of women have suffered some form of sexual violence in their lives if I remember the statistics correctly traditionally donors have worked with the victims of domestic violence and that's completely correct and appropriate so by providing safe houses provide providing hospital care for those as well but a number of these kind of unsung heroes these kind of peace builders that we talk about people who don't really get a lot of attention because they're they're kind of squirreled away and living in kind of settlements and sort of far away from the tarmac road they started using the language or they sort of say well it's it's really important that we work with victims of domestic violence but that's addressing the the symptoms and not the cause and the cause of domestic violence in kind of 99.99 percent of cases is man often the kind of disenfranchised man that we spoke about earlier on who are kind of just unhappy at their socioeconomic lot and especially in a country that's kind of it's a pretty expensive country as well it's an expensive country to make ends meet and so these kind of unsung peace builders have taken to using kind of Bible verse and a kind of theology and sort of theological concepts in order to kind of work with men in order to try to get at what are the sources of their of their kind of frustration their their rage I did I did also take note that that there was recent violence and instability related to the elections yeah and could you tell us a little bit more about that it's a winner-take-all system and it means that it's really important because if you get into Parliament you get accesses access to resources and resources means that you can build your build your political power and then you can reward your supporters and so that means it's incredibly tense time in a winner- take-all system it's like the US system there's a winner and there's a loser there's no proportional representation there for you to get into Parliament and that creates a kind of flashpoint and a kind of source of you know an open wound that kind of continues all through this election process because like in any elections going to be one winner there's going to be plenty of losers so that's sort of problem number one couple that with the fact that you've got a you've got a kind of rickety sort of out-of-date sort of imperfect you know pick your you know pick your kind of sliding skill of comments about it electoral rule which means that that many Papua New Guineans some estimates nearly as many as half of Papua New Guineans that we await the kind of results of election of so observation on this we're not able to vote so you can imagine just what a how you know frustrating that would be the challenge is sort of how you go about kind of addressing that and one of the tricky challenges I think is how do you convince Papua New Guineans political leader or the people who've kind of won the election or kind of you know got into power that it's in their interests to you know to change that it's I think that's one of the kind of the you know the the issues that's kind of going forward and we could see in our time in in lay Andrew some of the kind of hangovers off that off that violence was taking place we had a security guard in in in lay and he told us you know after we held a community meeting where the community talked about how some homes had been burnt he said yeah you know I was one of those people who had their their homes burnt so you know violence can come and losing really important things in your life can come really really close to home to flip it around in another way we know that there's going to be an election in 2027 there's not going to be an earlier election it's sort of constitutionally mandated to happen every five years to me that's a kind of golden opportunity to actually sort of have a kind of time horizon in front of you and think I think you know think how can one put work on this again though I think it'll also be one of these kind of litmus tests as well with the Papua New Guinean political lead are they interested in kind of changing the system because there's an argument that some of it of this kind of system kind of suits them because they emerge as winners of it so we would be remiss not to talk about what you what you opened one of the aspects that you open with and that is the issues surrounding the Boganville political process and and I must mention that you have a book coming yes I would be remiss and not pointing out that I have a book coming on Boganville so please could you just tell us about this this this crisis as they call it and the peace process that followed and where we are now it is the lot was the largest scale conflict in the Pacific since the Second World War and it had many drivers to it it had a sort of resource component to it it had kind of every day you know sort of rubs and annoyances that kind of sort boiled over but it also has an independent has a national nationalist kind of component to it as well a sense among Boganvillians that that they would be that they were different from elsewhere in Papua New Guinea so the conflict went from 1988 until sort of ceasefires and the sort of just stuff sort of 1997 1998 and culminated in a peace agreement in 2001 and the peace agreement is kind of relatively unique in a way because it has unlike a lot of peace agreements which are kind of implemented really quickly this one has been implemented over the course of the last 20 years three components the peace agreement the establishment of an autonomous government that was established in 2005 weapons disposal and a referendum on the on the region's political future it would be a as per the terms of the peace agreement which is again an unusual construction not unique because it's based on the the model that was used for East Timor there would be a non binding referendum and then the Parliament of Papua New Guinea would ultimately decide on on what would happen since the big question now is sort of what happens next and it's a question it was kind of a tidal wave of kind of not of sort of emotion and commitment among Boganvillians that kind of got them to the point where they were able to deliver this almost unanimous sort of peaceful referendum now it's a question of bureaucratic mechanics and kind of working out the process by which P&G and Boganville agree the terms of a divorce thank you Gordon for that thank you for your description of Boganville which which you know from my experience is a fascinating case study and for many parts of peace building the implementation of this this this peace agreement and thank you for painting this picture of Papua New Guinea which pointed out you know some of the struggles that they're having and definitely a fragile situation and violence and stability and but but seeds of hope no worries nice to be here