Personality clash

Nelson Grey Power has ruined itself through a perverse overreaction to a normal personality clash.

Normal, because all leaders fall out with someone in their organisation; the leader who is unanimously and unreservedly approved will never exist as long as humanity survives. But something that is abnormal was revealed at Friday’s meeting. The ‘‘rebels’’ were said to have been encouraged by Neville Male’s predecessor who is now vicepresident of the Grey Power Federation, which accordingly has backed them. That is perhaps the saddest part of the whole affair. The fraught history of the area guarantees that the answer is much more complex.

Secondly, the cheap oil which Kelso implies is America’s only motivation does not appear to have been cheap at all; as she herself suggests, recent wars have cost the US more than a trillion dollars.

It must be galling for Washington’s imperialists that Iraqi oil contracts have been awarded to foreign companies which played no part in what Kelso calls America’s ‘‘great game’’, such as Norway’s Statoil. Even worse, the biggest buyer of Iraqi oil is now America’s great rival, China. American soldiers have therefore died to guarantee China’s oil supply.

Was US intervention in places with little or no oil, such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti and Grenada, also part of this ‘‘great game’’? Then no game has ever brought so little benefit to its main player. and cultural views enabling this crime.

This documentary was made for International Women’s Day – March 8 – but its screening was brought forward, prompted by the Indian Government’s ban. Watch this documentary online.

Horrified and outraged as we might be by its content, we can’t sit smug and superior in the West. The country with the worst sexual assault statistics in the world is America, where a woman is sexually assaulted every two minutes.

New Zealand does not rate much better. In 2014, British medical journal The Lancet published a report indicating the sexual assault rate in New Zealand is placed third highest in the world, alongside Australia.

To balance the awareness raised by this documentary of problems in India, we need to expose the global war of terror against women by men, fuelled by patriarchal culture and its primary tool misogynist pornography.

It is the abuse, torture and degradation of women in pornography that need to be banned, not documentaries that expose its effects.