Minoo Jalali was among those who resisted Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran. In the early months of 1979, she joined a mass women’s protest against the compulsory wearing of the hijab in public. “That revolution was inevitable”, Jalali recounted 40 years later in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Nobody could have really stopped the force of it. We hoped that we could steer it [but] we were wrong. And the clergy hijacked it ... and deceived many people.”
The leaders of Australia’s union movement attended the federal government’s Jobs and Skills Summit with the wrong priorities, seeking to befriend the wrong people. The conference outcomes provide little in the way of real changes for workers, but much cause for concern is the Australian Council of Trade Union’s slavish desire to have “a seat at the table” above all else.
Marx, in his groundbreaking economic treatise Capital, wrote that capitalism emerged “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. He was observing the brutality of racism during capitalism’s ascendancy. The expansion of European empires exported capitalism around the world, bringing with it genocides and the dispossession and disenfranchisement of millions. Colonised peoples were cast as less than human, legitimately dominated by foreign powers and undeserving of dignity and rights.
In the last few days, Queensland has recorded more COVID-19 cases than in the previous two years because the state is opening too fast, too soon and without adequate preparation of the health system.
The spread of COVID-19 into western New South Wales is taking a terrible toll on the large Indigenous population in the area. More than 100 years ago, the Spanish flu wrought similar suffering on Indigenous communities in Queensland, where disease found fertile soil in neglected and woefully under-resourced settlements.
For the first three days of June, thousands of engineers, public servants and business moguls involved in the global arms trade packed the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre for the Land Forces 2021 exhibition.