Esperanto and Politics don't mix: a lesson from the 1920s

There's a famous quote by Ormond E Burton which gets mentioned many times by Anzac commentaries: ‘somewhere between the landing at Anzac and the end of the battle of the Somme New Zealand very definitely became a nation.’ . Just what this means exactly, and just how much of our so called 'national identity' derives from our inheritance of WW1 battle experience is a subject I will leave to the various newspaper and magazine editors. I'm much more interested in the man Ormond E Burton, and how this conservative trope squares – or fails to square – with his subsequent statements about nationhood and his militant pacifism.

Sue Bradford's talk 'The Left in Aoteroa' – a few thoughts

I joined a group of around forty people last friday here in Dunedin to listen to Sue Bradford's talk “The Left in Aoteroa: Some Lessons from Syriza and Podemos”. It wasn't nearly as big a crowd as the one she attracted late last year when she talked about her thesis about a left wing think tank, but this probably had something to do with the timing of the lecture in the middle of the afternoon and a last minute venue change. There seems to be an appetite on the left for the sort of discussion which Sue is initiating, and I include myself wholeheartedly in this curiosity and desire for debate.