I have written on multiple occasions about how Canada, after the end of WW2, emerged as a sanctuary for Nazi war criminals and their Eastern European collaborators, especially Ukrainians, fleeing justice in Europe. This issue is important for a number of reasons, but mainly because the powers-that-be need to be held accountable for their actions.

Let’s approach this topic from another angle – being a change maker. The term ‘change maker’ or ‘change agent’ is one of the many corporate buzzwords that make the rounds. Lison Mage is a thoughtful and intelligent change makes, who writes a newsletter on her webpage. You may find her articles on LinkedIn.

She describes a particular incident, a change making episode, which has relevance for our purposes here. She goes to a local gym and sauna, which is supposed to be equipped with a digital clock timer. That timer is frequently broken, and a repair request has to be submitted to the appropriate contractors. Now, we wait….and wait….this period of waiting can take weeks, even months.

The digital timer is repaired, only to break down again soon afterwards. Another repair request is submitted, and the waiting period begins again. Needless to say, gym and sauna customers frequently grumble, venting their frustrations at the glacial pace of change.

One fine day, Lison Mage had enough. She went across the road to a shop, bought a cheap manual timer and gave it to the gym. The lesson here? Don’t wait for the authorities to move; if you see a practical solution, implement it according to your resources.

As Lison Mage stated, we do not always need permission from the top to make a difference and implement changes as individuals. That is a great lesson to learn. But I think that is only one side of the coin. We also need to hold the powers-that-be accountable for their decisions and actions.

From the 1950s onwards, members of armed Ukrainian Nazi-collaborating organisations – people who had actively assisted the Nazi military in carrying out the Holocaust – were provided sanctuary in Canada. Ukrainians belonging to the Waffen SS unit Galician were welcomed by Ottawa authorities as reliable anticommunists. What was the evidence of their anticommunism? Their SS tattoos.

Initially provided safe haven in the UK, the members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) who had actively served the Nazi armies and SS, made their way to Canada. Ottawa required an influx of new migrants, not only as a labour force, but also to combat the largely left-leaning Ukrainian Canadians, who has organised themselves in the labour movement of the 1930s and 40s.

These ultranationalist Ukrainians were useful in the context of the Cold War. Ottawa, similarly to other capitalist governments, wanted to combat the labour movement and communist organising in its own ranks. Former members of the Waffen SS certainly had experience in fighting workers’ unions.

Not only were Ukrainian Nazi collaborators welcomed into Canada, their wartime leaders were honoured and valorised as heroes. Statues memorialising Srepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and other antisemitic killers have been erected in Canada. Ukrainian Canadian schoolchildren are taught that the OUN were patriotic heroes, dedicated to an independent Ukraine – conveniently left out of this picture is the role of an OUN-run state as a Nazi proxy.

The political scandal of welcoming Nazis – and this while Canadian authorities closed their doors to European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution during the war – has been swept under the carpet. Ottawa authorities have avoided accountability for these policies until this very day. The only reason that this scandal has come to light is through the dedicated efforts of Canadian Jewish organisations and individuals, as well as antifascist groups around the world.

Multiple historians and investigators have written about the ratlines; underground escape routes used by Nazi war criminals to escape justice in postwar Europe. Let’s face it, their escape was facilitated by powerful institutions, such as the Vatican. That topic requires its own essay.

The role of Ottawa in providing sanctuary for Nazi criminals is a particularly egregious example of Cold War politics superseding concern for human rights.

Individual Jewish voices and groups have spoken out about this shameful episode in Canadian history. As individuals, we can all do our part to push the wheel of justice forwards. I am certainly not suggesting that we are simply helpless, and at the mercy of forces we cannot control. Each person that speaks up, and makes their contribution for change is invaluable.

This must be accompanied by a collective commitment to hold the powers at the top accountable for their actions. Strong vibes from a quiet source can certainly make waves. Ottawa’s reputation as a haven for Nazi criminals is well deserved; more people should know about it. Let’s not ignore Australia’s role in receiving the travellers of the ratlines, and providing peaceful sanctuary for Nazi criminals as well. Small ripples add up to large waves.

This article was first published on my Substack web page here. I am reproducing it here for consistency.

Finlandia, a symphonic tone poem by Finnish composer and national hero Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957) is a stirring piece of music. I first heard it at an event, Music in the Park, in Sydney’s Domain. The event, which features an extensive selection of classical music pieces, is an open concert. Everyone brings their fold-up chairs, dry white wine, cheese and crackers. Thousands of people attend. I went around about 1997-98.

When the Finlandia work was announced as the next in the repertoire for the night, an elderly upper-crust lady seated next to me exclaimed ‘oh, marvellous’. I thought she sounded like Dame Penelope Keith, the ultra-refined culturally sophisticated To the Manor Born Received Pronunciation accented lady (what used to be called the Queen’s English).

Behind me was a Turkish family, sipping wine from their esky which they brought for the open air concert. While I don’t speak Turkish, I can pick up the language: the words, tone and intonation are family to me. Each language has its particular characteristics that make it distinguishable. I thought, wow, another non-English speaking background (NESB) person who enjoys classical music, and in particular Finlandia.

Finlandia – national aspirations

Sibelius wrote this orchestral tableaux as a nationalist protest for Finnish independence from Tsarist Russia. Drawing from Finland’s nature and indomitable spirit, Finlandia is a stirring tribute to Finnish patriotism. Sibelius drew together Finnish folklore with inspiration from the natural environment to produce a masterpiece. He created an emotionally charged musical tapestry, reflecting his deep commitment to Finnish independence.

Sibelius himself, it should be noted, actually spoke Swedish as his birth language. He only learned Finnish much later in life. Sweden was the traditional occupying power in Finland, colonising the latter nation for hundreds of years. Swedish cultural influences persisted in Finland for decades, long after the Swedish empire itself was defeated.

This is not to impugn Sibelius’ character as a stooge of the Swedes, or anything like that. It is to simply reflect the fact that Finland’s independence was denied by Sweden for a long time. Finnish children grew up learning and speaking Swedish. Finnish culture had to break through institutional barriers. Yet, the two nations today enjoy friendly cooperation and mutual respect.

Sweden and Finland, longstanding historical adversaries, have put their differences aside, and constructed cooperative, friendly relations in the economic, industrial and cultural spheres. The same cannot be said for Finland’s relations with the historical adversary to its East, Russia. 

It is true that Finland, economically and demographically, is a mouse compared to the giant that is Russia. The mouse has had to fight for its sovereignty; there is no question of that. Imperial Russia was indeed a prison house of nations for its subject non-Russian nationalities. Tsarist censorship and greater Russian national chauvinism permeated every aspect of life in royalist Imperial Russia. 

It should be noted in this regard that Sweden, during its expansionist phase, did try to invade the Russian north, only to be defeated. This military defeat of the Swedish empire forced Stockholm to retreat, providing Finland with breathing space to assert its national aspirations. If you want further information on this point, read about the Battle of Poltava in July 1709.

After six centuries of rule by Sweden, Finland became a part of the Tsarist Russian empire in 1809. The Finns remained a subject people of Imperial Russia until 1918.

Finnish civil war, Karelia, the Winter War and the alliance with Nazi Germany

Let’s elaborate some relevant background here. Finland was given independence from Imperial Russia in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. This period marks the transition; Finland the victim now deployed its victimhood as a disguise for aggression.

Lenin and the Communist leadership accepted that non-Russian nationalities should have their independence. The Communist ideology inspired the abortive, short lived Red Finland experiment in 1918. Finnish workers established their own Soviet republic.

That experiment would be mercilessly crushed by an alliance of anticommunist privileged Finns, backed up by German troops. The Finnish ruling class, headed by General Carl Mannerheim, violently suppressed the Finnish workers, assisted in this undertaking by German light infantry, the Jaegers.

Ironically, Mannerheim had trained as an officer in Tsarist Russia.

The Finnish civil war established Mannerheim’s reputation as an able military commander, but also demonstrated his willingness to kill his fellow Finns, enabled by outside support. It was not the last time that Germans and Finns would fight together.

Mannerheim and the Helsinki government launched their own war of aggression, attempting to annex the territory of Karelia, along the Finnish-Soviet border. This was beyond the traditional borders of the Finnish nation. 

Acquiring Karelia would have meant the easy encirclement of Leningrad, (today St. Petersburg). The Soviet administration was worried that a hostile foreign power could capture Leningrad, then the cradle of the Bolshevik revolution.

In 1939, with tensions increasing between Moscow and Berlin, the Kremlin was worried that Finland would be used as a staging post for launching German troops. Leningrad was close to the Finnish border. Moscow was concerned that with Finnish-controlled territory surrounding Leningrad, the latter could easily become encircled.

The 1939-40 Finnish-Soviet war, popularly known as the Winter War, pitted the smaller and militarily weaker Finland against the might of the Soviet Union. This war has its origins in the 1918-22 Karelian adventure; only this time, Helsinki had the strong economic and military backing of Nazi Germany.

The Finns inflicted heavy losses on the Soviet army. However, the Finns eventually lost, and had to cede even more territory than the Kremlin demanded prior to the war’s outbreak.

Helsinki, drawing on the legacy of Sibelius’ Finlandia, likes to portray itself as the underdog. It is true that Finland is dwarfed by its more militarily powerful neighbour to the East. However, even a chihuahua can bite, and it is easy to be an underdog when you have powerful German friends backing you.

There is no doubt that the Finnish ruling circles actively courted and allied themselves with Nazi Germany. This was done not out of anxieties about Moscow’s policies, but a deliberate strategy of building alliances with other aggressive capitalist European states.

Though Mannerheim insisted that Finland was not an ally of Nazi Germany, his government did everything it could to assist the Wehrmacht in its invasion of the USSR. Finland mined the waters in the USSR’s maritime territory, and allowed German forces to be deployed for an eventual attack on Leningrad.

Every war is not a purely defensive reaction to Kremlin conspiracies. Blaming Moscow for all of their problems, and recycling the victimhood narrative, is starting to wear thin. The Winter War, and the 1918-22 attempted annexation of Karelia, were not just defensive reactions, but aggressive manoeuvres intended to expand Finnish territory. Finland did wage an existential struggle for independence; that much is admirable.

I realise that diehard Finnish nationalists will strenuously object to my views, and that is fine. I cannot convince them of my viewpoint, but I think the wider readership will understand my perspective.

Not every military alliance and predatory endeavour can be cloaked in the mantle of national self-determination.

It is not often that a Nobel prize is regifted, and features on the corporate media news cycle. But there are exceptions to this rule. Nobel peace prize winner for 2025, Maria Corina Machado, regifted her prize to US President Donald Trump. A farcical ceremony, Trump the egomaniac craved the recognition of that prize, and Machado the faithful Venezuelan MAGA servant, overinflated his already swollen ego.

Fragile egomaniac that he is, the mango Mussolini in the White House craves legitimacy. International awards are one way of gaining that much desired recognition. Machado’s regifting of the Nobel peace prize is not the first time such an event has occurred. Norwegian Nobel prize for literature winner (1920) Knut Hamsun, regifted his award to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1943.

An influential novelist, Hamsun’s work inspired generations of writers, including figures such as Hemingway, Maxim Gorky and Stefan Zweig. He was also a Nazi sympathiser, expressing the view that Hitler was a warrior fighting for the survival and dignity of the white Christian civilisation.

In 1920, Hamsun was considered one of the most important writers in the world. By 1945, he was universally reviled. Hamsun, hailed by Isaac Bashevis Singer as originator of modern narrative in the 20th century, became a propagandist for white supremacy and Nazism.

Trump’s undeserved Nobel follows up on another equally farcical and ridiculous award; the manufactured FIFA prize given to Trump by the football chief Gianni Infantino. The ceremony, fawning and disgraceful in equal measure, was actually quite telling. Failing the Nobel prize, the sports body invented an award, providing Trump with a symbolic victory for personal favouritism.

Were there other nominees for this award? What were the criteria for success? None of these questions have been answered. The links between the actions and practices of FIFA and ethical values have been tenuous at best.

When you bestow an award on a person or organisation, you are not only providing the recipient with legitimacy and recognition. You are also stating to the world the kind of behaviour you find acceptable. You are attaching your name and reputation to the behaviour of the recipient, giving them your seal of approval.

December last year was the 135th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Nearly 300 unarmed Lakota men, women and children were killed by US soldiers, specifically from the US 7th Cavalry. The indigenous people were surrendering when the massacre occurred. The incident took place in South Dakota.

This particular killing has been a sore point in relations between the US authorities and indigenous communities. Why am I relating this incident? 19 soldiers who partook in this specific massacre were awarded Medals of Honour. 31 troops in all were awarded for their service in the campaign against the Lakota people.

Prior to this incident, the editor of the Saturday Pioneer, a South Dakota newspaper, L. Frank Baum, expressed his opinion that the ‘red Indians’ need to be exterminated to secure the safety and tranquility of the white race. After the Wounded Knee Massacre, Baum wrote in yet another column that of course we have wronged the Indians, but now, let’s finish the job and wipe out this untameable race, for the security of the white civilisation.

You will be familiar with Baum, not for his work as a propagandist for white supremacy and genocidal violence, but for his authorship of the children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the basis of the internationally successful 1939 movie.

Baum never fired a gun in anger; he never murdered anyone. Through his regular writings, he made genocidal violence committed against the indigenous people normal, distasteful perhaps, but nevertheless necessary. A propagandist for white supremacy, I sometimes wonder what the difference is between Baum, and the German propagandist Julius Streicher.

There has been a longstanding campaign by military veterans, indigenous advocacy groups and human rights organisations to have the Wounded Knee medals of honour revoked. Pete Hegseth, the current secretary of defence (who likes to think of himself as war secretary), firmly rejected any moves towards revocation.

Hegseth’s decision protects the murderers, and their reputations. He is helping to preserve a lie; that Wounded Knee was a valiant, praiseworthy battle. Revoking the medals of honour will not eliminate racism or solve all the problems of the indigenous communities in one stroke.

It will be a first step towards reconciliation. Expressing remorse for criminal actions reveals the conscience motivating the person. Maintaining those medals of honour for the Wounded Knee Massacre, Hegseth is indicating the type of conduct he finds acceptable.

Did we not prosecute and hang Nazi German civilian and military leaders at the conclusion of the 1945 Nuremberg trials for similar criminal conduct?

Dr Josef Mengele (1911 – 1979), Nazi officer and doctor, became the epitome of medical evil. A member of the SS, Dr Mengele conducted grotesque experiments on concentration camp inmates. Deploying his medical knowledge in the service of eugenics, Mengele was dubbed the ‘angel of death.’

I will not describe his experiments in this article. If you are interested in the details, you may find descriptions of Nazi human experimentation here.

How could a doctor, who had taken the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, become such a medically harmful person?

Mengele was exceptionally cruel, and his medical practices gruesome, but he was no outlier.

Earlier, we mentioned eugenics. Let’s keep that in mind, because that particular pseudoscience will form an important part of our story.

Eugenics, the false belief that the human stock can be improved by the selective breeding of those with desirable heritable characteristics, was applied as a racial doctrine and supported by anthropologists from the United States. The society to which the Nazi hierarchy looked for inspiration in applying eugenicist legislation and doctrines, was the United States. After all, the US had a long history of implementing racially oppressive laws.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1944, Mengele fled Europe, escaping to Argentina thanks to a clandestine network of former SS officers. He avoided having to stand trial as a war criminal in the subsequent Nuremberg trials.

Dying of natural causes in 1979, I remember his case. No, not him personally, I am referring to the case of forensically identifying his remains. They were located by investigators in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Teams of investigators from West Germany, Israel and the United States launched a coordinated effort to find and identify Mengele. There had been numerous rumours and gossip surrounding his whereabouts over the decades. His remains were examined, and confirmed to be those of Mengele, in 1992.

Mengele, motivated by fanatical racial hatred, used concentration camp detainees as guinea pigs, because he regarded nonwhite people as inferior races. He was not alone in this belief; more than half of German doctors at the time joined the Nazi party. Mengele was not just a ‘bad apple’, there was institutional complicity and cruelty.

The forced euthanasia programme, forcible sterilisations, the implementation of Nazi racial laws into medical practice – these were all possible because legions of desk murderers, facilitated the machinery of institutionalised medical murder. Numerous care staff, concentration camp personnel and nurses assisted Mengele and other Nazi doctors carry out his nauseating medical procedures.

What explains this ethical collapse of an entire profession, and indeed the wider society? It is easy to simply shift the blame onto a few rotten individuals. If Mengele was evil, then how did he rise through the medical profession and Nazi party hierarchy?

I think there is an explanation which avoids simplistic ‘people are evil’ arguments. The ideology of eugenics was dominant and widespread not only in Germany, but throughout Europe and especially in the United States.

Aleš Hrdlička, the bone and brain collector

We all know about Mengele, but how many of us know about Aleš Hrdlička (1869 – 1943)?

A Czech-born American anthropologist, Hrdlička (pronounced hurd-lich-kah) was a prominent intellectual in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. He was a proponent of eugenics, and regarded nonwhite races as biologically inferior. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, his counsel was sought by none other than the president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) himself.

The first curator of physical anthropology for the Smithsonian museum, he traveled to remote indigenous communities in search of bones and skulls. He disinterred the remains of indigenous peoples so he could examine their brains, and bone structure. Medical schools across the country would send him the bones of indigenous corpses, the trephined skulls of the native peoples in other parts of the Americas, all for him to collect and study.

Regarding the indigenous as one of the inferior races to be examined, his reputation as an expert only increased. He became known as the bone collector, and the Smithsonian natural history museum still retains his extensive collection of bones. The indigenous people regarded him as a ghoul, taking advantage of their dead and using them as materials for his pseudoscientific theories.

No, he never conducted medical experiments on people. But he did, for instance, cut the heads off the bodies of indigenous people killed by Mexican soldiers. In Peru, he collected 2000 skulls for his collection. In 1904, at the St Louis World Fair, where exhibiting indigenous people as exotic artefacts was commonplace, he made plans to acquire the brains of the detained indigenous people once they were dead.

Indeed, in 1942, as the FDR administration was turning away Jewish refugees from Europe, Aleš Hrdlička was tapped by FDR to head up M project. What was that? The Migration Project, FDR wanted to ensure that only immigrants of good stock, white and Northern European immigrants, would be settled in the United States.

FDR did not want large numbers of Jewish refugees settling in the United States, and Aleš Hrdlička provided the eugenicist ideology to support that view. FDR and Hrdlička conducted a voluminous correspondence, the latter explaining his views that Japanese had less developed brains than white Europeans, which made them more childlike but good at warfare.

The fleeing European Jewish population would be spread thin and far throughout the world. Proposals were explored to settle Jews in Argentina, northern Australia, Madagascar and regions of sub-Saharan Africa. The president publicly lamented that had the US adopted this kind of racial screening of immigration in 1925, the nation would not currently have the large populations of inferior immigrants bedevilling the country.

As Europe’s Jews were being slaughtered, the FDR administration did its utmost to ensure that Jewish people fleeing Nazi persecution would be turned away.

Mengele was an extreme example of the eugenicist policies being vigorously implemented in the United States. The malignancy of Mengele was not an individual aberration, but arose as a result of widespread pseudoscientific theories about race and racial hierarchies. Nazi Germany’s case, while horrifying, was not original.

As I wrote a few years ago, the United States provided an inspirational template for Nazi legislators and medical professionals to follow in the field of eugenics.

Algorithmic precision is great, but it is not great writing.

Over the years, we have witnessed the rise of generative AI tools, ChatGPT and so on, which have made the creation of essays and marketing content fast, easy and accessible. Writers have been impacted by the ubiquity of these tools; anyone with access to a laptop or mobile device can almost instantaneously create blocks of web copy.

However, there is a catch – people are cottoning on to AI-generated content. It sounds robotic, stilted and emotionally flat. Humans have emotions, nuance, subtleties and passions. These are a necessary part of writing. AI detection tools are proliferating, and sometimes, human-created content is being flagged as AI-written.

Humans pour their heart and soul into a good piece of writing, only to have it tagged as AI-generated. Must be frustrating to see that. No, it is not that AI is malicious, it just does not care. It has no ethical basis.

The boundaries between human-written content and AI-generated communication are becoming blurred. Widespread scepticism among readers and audiences is the reaction. Did a person really write this, or an AI-word machine? There is so much AI slop out there, it is drowning out the human voices.

AI can and does hallucinate sources, and fabricate information – fake news, to use the favoured term of Trump and his supporters.

How do you as a writer standout from the AI slop?

I am by no means a successful writer; I do not have ten bazillion followers on X/Twitter or Instagram. But I think I know a thing or two about writing with credibility. Here is my suggestion: read lots of books, and you will find your own voice to stand out from the AI tsunami.

You may find numerous webpage articles advising you on how to avoid sounding like ChatGPT by modifying your writing. That is all commendable advice, and I do not wish to contradict any of that.

Reading lots of books across different genres gives you an insight into varying styles of writing, a way to approach difficult subject matter, and inspiration for creating your own unique content.

If that sounds a bit airy-fairy, think again. Let’s explore this line of thinking. The following are prominent examples of persons who, each in their own way, made a remarkable contribution to the world of literature without the use of AI.

In 2016, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Wait a minute, a musician wins a prestigious prize for literature? Dylan is not a novelist, he writes song lyrics. Yes, that is true. Dylan is primarily a lyricist. His lyrics, over the decades, are so powerful and unique, they have made an indelible impact on literature.

The Nobel committee did not make a category mistake, as multiple critics suggested at the time. They recognised that Dylan crafted his own distinctive voice as a poet-lyricist. His win, in 2016, was during the first election campaign of Donald Trump. Giving a prize to an antiwar lyricist, a musician whose lyricism encouraged the hippie-flower-power 1960s generation, was a subtle rebuff to the MAGA republican side.

In fact, Dylan is not the first poet-lyricist to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1913, the first non-European and literary giant Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941) won the prize for his remarkable poetic and lyrical talents.

Born in Bengal, Tagore’s poetry formed the basis for the national anthems of three nations – India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. His output was prodigious, writing plays, short stories, novels and lyrics. His content continues to be adapted for films, songs and plays. A true Renaissance man, he was largely self-taught – all without the aid of the internet, podcasts or AI.

Later in life, Tagore ventured into the world of physics. No, he never became a physicist, nor did he ever work in a laboratory. He kept up a fruitful correspondence with Albert Einstein, both men being interested in the philosophy of physics. They met face to face in 1930.

Why would Tagore meet up with a physicist? Tagore was expanding his philosophy, and finding his unique voice. While he never gave philosophy or science lectures at a university, he understood the importance of these topics for creativity in literature. His work was unmistakable, and he only increased his audience outreach, and stature as a writer, by bravely exploring new territories.

Am I suggesting that every writer should go out and win a Nobel prize? No I am not. If you win that prize, then congratulations, more power to you. If you do not, that is perfectly okay; do not lose any sleep over it.

I am suggesting that literary creativity is a skill which is increased by reading a wide variety and range of books. If you use AI to organise your notes, brainstorm ideas, or generate that boilerplate email which needs to be sent to one hundred recipients, that is fine. If it saves you time and expense, good luck to you.

Creative writing involves more than just correct grammar and sentence structure. Those things are incredibly important to be sure. Finding your own voice will take time and effort. It will take mental friction and problem solving. You will go down many roads, only to find they are cul-de-sacs. That is okay; these journeys give you valuable experience and insights.

With increasing reliance on social media for our daily fix of information about the world, the ability to read a book thoroughly has undergone a decline. Let’s revive that ancient skill. By reading widely, we will sharpen our literary creativity.

The right of nations to self-determination is a basic democratic principle. Every nation has the right to decide its own future. In April last year, I wrote about the emerging state of Somaliland, located in the Horn of Africa. It is on the coastline of the Red Sea. Well, it seems I am not the only person contemplating the rights of Somalilanders.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also been cogitating on this question. More than that, he has taken action, declaring formal recognition of Somaliland on Boxing Day, 2025. Surely this is a momentous undertaking. Should not we be cheering for Somalilanders, congratulating West Jerusalem on enforcing a basic democratic principle?

Somaliland has been an autonomous statelet since 1991. Israel is the only country in the world to formally recognise its independence. Is not this a brave move?

Let’s not pop open the champagne bottles just yet.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland is not driven by altruistic, humanitarian considerations, but by cynical, strategic motivations of foreign policy. Disguising its decision as a humane gesture, there are definitive economic and political considerations underlying such a manoeuvre.

As we will see, this is not the first or only time the Israeli government has used the rhetoric of national self-determination to hide manipulative socioeconomic calculations.

Let’s start with a map. This shows Somaliland, located in northwestern Somalia, in the Horn of Africa:

Since the 19th century, the Horn of Africa has been the site of inter-colonialist competition. Britain seized the northwest portion of Somalia in the late 19th and early 20th century. Italy took control of the rest of the country. Control of maritime traffic to and from the Red Sea was of crucial importance.

The Bab-el-Mandeb strait leads out of the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Britain established a colony in Yemen, directly opposite to Somaliland, across the way from the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. Somaliland became a foothold for Britain in the Horn of Africa, and its importance for control of a strategic waterway was clearly understood by the authorities in Whitehall.

I think we can see the big geopolitical picture here.

The nation unified in 1960, after the British finally withdrew. Somalia has had a chequered history since then, and the Somaliland secessionist cause never went away. Former Somali strongman, General Siad Barre, waged a protracted bombing campaign against secessionist movements in Somaliland throughout the 1970s and 80s.

With the collapse of central authority in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, in 1991, Somaliland secessionists took advantage of the chaos and declared independence. Since then, the enclave operated as a semiautonomous unit, with its own government, currency and foreign policies.

What has all this got to do with Israel?

The Israeli government has, at least since the 1950s, pursued allies outside of the Arab world, namely in sub-Saharan Africa. The newly independent nations of black Africa found a new purported friend in Israel. The latter, the friend who calls only when they want something, sought to outflank the Arab states which surround and confront West Jerusalem. Actually the seat of the Israeli government at the time was Tel Aviv, but you get the picture.

Israel’s African outreach was articulated in the policy documentation and private diaries of its political establishment. Sub-Saharan African nations have traditionally supported the struggle of the Palestinians. Undercutting the international community’s support for the Palestinians only strengthens the Israeli government’s hand.

Daniel Malan, apartheid South African prime minister, visited Tel Aviv and met with David Ben Gurion in 1953. That was just the beginning of a mutually beneficial partnership. Apartheid South Africa received crucial military, economic and diplomatic support from Israel.

Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Levi Eshkol and other Israeli leaders never made a secret of their tactics in cultivating strategic relationships. In 1954, Tel Aviv intended to support a new state in Lebanon – one only for the Maronite Christian minority. Exacerbating sectarian tensions, Ben Gurion made clear that he wanted such a state in South Lebanon. Why? To sign a ‘peace treaty’ with that nation, and gain access to the Litani river as the northern border.

A partitioned Lebanon, with a Maronite Christian secessionist state, would break down the bonds of Arab nationalism, form a friendly buffer, and provide Tel Aviv with economic opportunities.

It is no secret that Israeli leaders have deliberately cultivated relations with, and cynically supported, the independence ambitions of the Kurds, particularly inside Iraq. A non-Arab minority, the Kurds have found a vociferous advocate of their national self-determination in Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Somaliland’s capability as a forward base against the Houthis in Yemen is not lost on the Israeli government. The Houthis, actually they should be called the Ansar Allah movement, and Israeli forces have exchanged fire in the past.

There is another potential benefit in recognising Somaliland; the latter can form a potential dumping ground to relocate displaced Palestinians. While officially denied, the proposal to simply remove Palestinian refugees to a faraway reserve is not without plausibility.

If Prime Minister Netanyahu was serious about the right of national self-determination, he could start by stopping the Israeli military’s assault on Gaza, and recognise the existence of an independent Palestinian state. Then maybe his alliances with non-Arab nationalities not reek of hypocrisy.

Being a child of Armenians from Egypt has led to many conversations about ethnic identity with my fellow Australians. They struggle to understand how it can be that my parents, who are ethnically Armenian, were born in Egypt and are Egyptians by birth. A person can have a multicultural background and still be Australian. You can be one, and also be both. Ethnic identity is not a zero sum game.

Perhaps the following will help the readers understand. Meet Isabel Bayrakdarian, a Lebanese-born Canadian operatic soprano. Born in Lebanon to Armenian parents, the family moved to Canada when she was a teenager. A graduate in biomedical engineering, she has dedicated her life to music. An operatic soprano, she has performed in numerous concerts. She currently lives and works in the United States.

She has a multicultural background, and has never repudiated neither her Armenian heritage, nor her Lebanese childhood. Her Canadian adolescence did not stop her from becoming a citizen of the United States.

In Lebanon, Armenians have lived, worked, contributed to the nation, and have intermarried with Lebanese people. They sought sanctuary from genocide, war and famine in the early 1900s. The Lebanese, which was actually part of Syria at the time, welcomed the Armenian refugees, even though Lebanon was experiencing food shortages itself.

They were never told to ‘fit in or fuck off’, or ‘go back to where you come from’ as I have been told on multiple occasions by my less-educated and uninformed fellow Australians.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published an evaluation with which I agree: don’t underestimate Lebanon’s Armenians.

I have been considering this topic of ethnic identity in the diaspora for decades, but its relevance has resurfaced in recent months with the revelations regarding Ghislaine Maxwell. As you are all undoubtedly aware, she was an enabler of the pedophile Epstein. This saga, while consuming vast amounts of attention and media coverage, is not my concern.

Yes of course, I can see that justice for Epstein’s victims is important. But the Epstein network is not of any importance to me, but rather Ghislaine’s father, the late Robert Maxwell.

I became familiar with Maxwell senior, the media mogul, businessman and migrant success story in the 1980s. He died in 1991, apparently of suicide. Whether that is true or not, I do not know. What I do know, and remember distinctly, is his funeral. Why? Maxwell is buried in Israel, and his coffin was draped with the Israeli flag.

His burial spot is important, because it is the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. This is a biblically significant place, and is the spot where Jesus ascended to heaven, if you want to believe that story. Maxwell’s funeral was a singularly lavish ceremony, attended by former Israeli prime ministers, Mossad intelligence officers, and dignitaries from the Israeli political establishment.

But wait a minute, Robert Maxwell was a posh-speaking, English educated entrepreneur and friend to British political figures. Buying up huge media corporations, his power and influence would be equaled only by Rupert Murdoch. A former soldier in the British army, his meteoric rise, political connections and economic influence in Britain was legendary. Why is he buried in a sacred place in Israel?

Born in 1923, Maxwell began his life as Czechoslovak-born Jew Jan Ludvig Hyman Binyamin Hoch. Escaping the Nazi occupation of his homeland Czechoslovakia, he joined the British-aligned Czech and Slovak Army. Proving his courage and resourcefulness as a soldier, Hoch began his career, and his multicultural identity, as a British officer and Allied agent.

Maxwell reinvented himself as an upper crust, educated entrepreneur in Britain, speaking with the smooth intonation of a BBC newsreader. He began his financial career as a publisher of scientific papers and journals. Prior to his stewardship, scientific publication was in the doldrums. Heading Pergamon Press, Maxwell transformed the publication of scientific papers into an ultra-lucrative business.

In fact, today’s publish-or-perish culture in scientific journals began as a business model under Maxwell. His imprint however, was not confined to academic publishing. Branching out into media ownership, he became the owner-operator of Britain’s leading newspapers. The late Australian journalist John Pilger, having worked in a Maxwell-owned publication, detailed the inner workings and dictatorial methods of the British-assimilated Maxwell.

Nobody questioned Maxwell’s ethnic identity. No-one demanded that he assign percentages to each of his ethnic components. Are you fifty percent Czech Jewish, fifty percent British? How about one-third for each component? Maybe 70 percent Jewish, 15 percent Czech, 15 percent British? If you regard that exercise as ridiculous, of course it is.

Whatever else he was, it is clear that he was one thing – a crook. He swindled millions of pounds from the pension funds of the 350 or so companies he owned. He was arguably the worst embezzler in Britain’s corporate history.

There is an episode from Maxwell’s life which sheds light on his national loyalties. In 1948, as an intermediary for the Zionist movement in Israel, Maxwell facilitated the transfer of military aircraft from the new Czechoslovak government to Tel Aviv. The Israelis were attacked by Arab armies in 1948, and aircraft from Maxwell’s native Czechoslovakia provided the fledgling Zionist state with decisive military air power.

The Czechoslovak authorities provided equipment and training for the new pilots from the Yishuv, the pre-1948 Israeli population and emerging statelet in Palestine. The first pilots trained by the Czechoslovak military arrived in Tel Aviv prior to the May 1948 eruption of the Arab-Israeli war. David Ben-Gurion, speaking in 1968, stated that without Czechoslovak aircraft and armaments, the state of Israel would not have survived.

Maxwell’s identity and loyalties were never questioned by the London authorities. He moved from one ethnic community to another without any interruption.

Ethnic identity is not something that is made up of percentages or proportions. There is no recipe, like baking a cake, with particular ingredients each in its own required portion to contribute in making up the totality. Ethnic identity emerges in practice, with multiple influences and variations.

Yes, we all come from somewhere. It is good to know a person’s ethnic origins. But our identity is not something static, fixed forever in statuesque rigidity. Ethnic identity can change over time, and the ways we express it change as well.

Every so often, a particular Facebook meme is recycled and recirculated about an important sociopolitical issue that it is worth discussing. To be certain, I ignore the vast majority of Facebook memes. They can be created by anybody calling themselves a digital creator and with a mobile device. Do they all deserve equal attention, let alone a response?

The best way to respond to all of that is denying it attention. Starved of oxygen, memes will normally wither on the vine. However, one meme (actually a series of memes) harping on a particular theme is worth reviewing.

What am I talking about? The recurring meme of women in Iran from the 1960s and 70s wearing westernised dress, bikinis at the beach, and generally sporting the clothing and fashions they liked. The point of such posts is to highlight the contrast between women under the Shah, when they could wear whatever they liked, and today, after the 1979 revolution.

The post-1979 Tehran government forces women to wear the headscarf, or hijab, in public. We are invited to lament; look how bad things are for Iranian women today, as opposed to back then.

You may find examples of such vintage photos here. They are very interesting as historical artefacts. They demonstrate what clothing was predominant in the 1960s in Iran. Please do not use these pictures in a cynical manner to portray the Shah’s time as a golden age of women’s freedom, in contrast to the current Islamic theocratic fashion totalitarianism.

The Murdoch media, which comprises a huge chunk of the dominant corporate media, has a particular hobby horse of enjoining its readers to ‘look how bad things are for women in Muslim societies’. They take a grain of truth, wrap it up in distortions, half-truths and stereotypes. Sadly, millions of readers absorb these contents, which have the same impact on the mind as ultra-processed fast food on our physical health.

Women in Iran have bravely resisted the forcible imposition of the hijab. They have demonstrated tremendous courage in defying the social conservatism of the authorities. No, the wearing of the hijab should not be compulsory, but a matter of personal choice. None of the monotheistic, Abrahamic cousins (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) should be the sole organising principle of an entire society.

Here is something else about Iran that we would do well to understand; currently, 70 percent of graduates in science, mathematics, engineering and technology in Iran are women. Under the western-supported Shah of Iran, female literacy stood at 42%. Today, thanks to the efforts of the revolutionary authorities, that figure stands at 98%.

Does the crime of femicide (female homicide) occur in Iran? Sadly, yes it does. The intentional murder rate of women in Iran stands at 0.59 per 100 000 women. A terrible figure, and each death is an individual tragedy, to be certain. Let us consider the femicide rate in the United States, which is at 2.1 per 100 000 women, and the figure for black and indigenous women murdered is even higher.

Let’s stop with the statistics, because they can get overwhelming, and return to images. I am going to share an image (not created by me), which will highlight a crucial dimension ignored by the Murdoch media; international solidarity.

The following is a photograph, taken in 1972, of Somali women in Mogadishu, protesting for the release of African American scholar and activist, Angela Davis:

In this photo, you will see numerous Somali women wearing the headscarf. Somalia was a politically unified nation in 1972, when this picture was taken. Somalia is a Muslim majority nation – and these women in the capital city, Mogadishu, were protesting for the release of black American activist Angela Davis.

But wait a minute, is not Davis a Marxist and feminist, strongly opposed to all forms of religious obscurantism and gender discrimination? What are these women, the majority of whom are Muslim, doing protesting for the freedom of a black Marxist located thousands of miles away? Would not Davis be shouting and screaming for the abolition of the hijab, to liberate these poor, unfortunate oppressed Somali women?

Somali women, back in the 1970s, understood black solidarity and racism. They understood the nature of US imperialism, and the legacy of European colonialism in Africa. They protested not only for the release of Davis, but also in support of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

They knew about the struggle for civil rights in the United States, Rosa Parks and Medger Evers. They understood that black Americans fought for the US military in both world wars, only to be rejected and cast aside by their racially segregated society when they returned home.

So please, stop emotionally manipulating the ‘concern’ about Muslim women as a cynical exercise in inciting public opinion for a regime change war in Iran?

Angela Davis did receive international support for her cause, even from old white men. There was one old, white German speaking head of state who lent his support for Davis; Erich Honecker, the last head of the now-dissolved German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany.

Here they are:

When sharing memes on social media, let’s be aware that what we are doing is making thoughtful connections. The imperialist empire already has its megaphone, shouting its propaganda into our households everyday. How about we use our social media presence not for recycling the empire’s mindset, but for building links of solidarity between communities.

Let’s stop being mouthpieces for the Murdoch media conglomerate. When we examine Iran, or any Muslim majority nation, let’s do so with an open mind, and not the Daily Telegraph-fuelled ‘look how they treat their women’ obnoxious ignorance, backed up by copious amounts of alcohol consumption.