The PR Blog

This feature length production is an astounding effort from creator political commentator, filmmaker, and human rights activist Topher Field. It seeks to tell the story of human rights activists, protest organisers, business owners, workers, and ordinary everyday people who have taken extraordinary risks in the fight for freedom.

As Gandhi said “ Disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless & corrupt”

Please watch this honest and sometimes heartbreaking documentary on something that is of global concern

“Totalitarian leaders often create ‘enemies of the state’ to blame for things that go wrong. Frequently these enemies are members of religious or ethnic groups. Often these groups are easily identified and are subjected to campaigns of terror and violence. They may be forced to live in certain areas or are subjected to rules that apply only to them”

Creating an enemy of the state requires othering: a process of dehumanizing through marginalizing a group of humans as something different, less than, and other. Such othered groups become an easy target to scapegoat, unfairly bearing the blame for a society’s ills.

When I’ve talked in the past about the patchwork tyranny post Covid-9/11, I had more mundane things in mind than the fate of a major tennis star.

Novak Djokovic was deported from Australia on Sunday after his appeal to reinstate his visa failed. And it failed not for health reasons but for political ones.

To me, the kinds of terrible rules put in place for ‘public safety’ always conjure up images of casual oppression. Endless videos of pathetic public servants intimidating priests in churches or police arresting pub owners for serving willing patrons.

I sit here today, typing an obituary to Australia. The country I have loved for most of my life. 

I see her lying in a bed, alone, gasping for air and trying so desperately to stay alive. Alas. I feel that she is gone. I can hear her sad attempts to keep alive and stay with us. But her mask is stifling her. 

It is sad to see her dying. She has been a good mother and grandmother. 

She lies immobile and unable to speak because she is silenced by the hospital staff who have gagged her and choked her in order to keep her " safe."

I am the first to admit I know somewhere between nothing and less than nothing about bitcoin. It is up there with my knowledge of volcanic eruptions. When you put the two together and come up with bitcoin mining from volcanoes, my head starts to spin and I reach for my too hard basket. 

However, I have had to try and get my head around these two things working in unison when I add a dose of Tonga and El Salvador to the mix. And a bit of Kazakhstan.

So come with me on a journey that makes for an interesting ride.

The Kingdom of Tonga doesn’t often attract global attention, but a violent eruption of an underwater volcano on January 15 has spread shock waves, quite literally, around half the world.