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Papua Merdeka
Koteka Wenda on Resisting Occupation in Exile
Since the onset of the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, we have witnessed a global rise in awareness of the pervasive violence of colonialism and how necessary it is for life on this planet to dismantle it. This momentum has also led to the emergence of new forms of organizing in solidarity with oppressed peoples worldwide.
West Papua, unjustly annexed by the Indonesian state beginning in 1961, is the site of one of many Indigenous freedom struggles fighting against settler violence today: an estimated 500,000 West Papuans have been killed by Indonesian occupation forces over the last sixty years.
In this interview, Koteka Wenda—a West Papuan storyteller and cultural performer living in exile with her family in the United Kingdom—speaks with maya finoh about the ongoing occupation of West Papua at the hands of Indonesia; the current state of the Free West Papua/Papua Merdeka Movement, which resists genocide, ecocide, and forced cultural assimilation; solidarity with other liberation fights; and what it means to her to be an artist-activist fighting for the autonomy of the West Papuan people in diaspora.





maya finoh: I’m grateful to you for raising my awareness of the West Papuan struggle. It made me think about the solidarity between Black Atlantic and Black Pacific liberation struggles. I’d love to know what your personal connection to West Papua is.
Koteka Wenda: My birth was political, because I was born in what was basically a refugee camp on the border of Papua New Guinea and West Papua. This is a border that was envisioned by white Western men sitting around a table, cutting our island as if it were a cake. I think of how difficult it was for my mother to have to leave her village, her family home, to cross the border and give birth in a settlement or in a town far away from her ancestral lands. And how Indonesian colonialism rips apart families. It displaces people and takes away the safety of community.
That being said, when I was born, I was surrounded by a lot of strangers, who sooner or later, became family. I can’t go back to my homeland. I’m 23 going on 24 and it’s been more than 20 years since I freely roamed my ancestral lands. West Papua is home to wildlife and imagination. We are a Pacific Island nation. Our people are melanated. We have curly hair. We are ethnically, linguistically, culturally, Melanesian. We are distinct from the population of our colonizers, who are Southeast Asian, Javanese. I’ve always felt proud to be West Papuan despite living in exile overseas. I’ve been raised to love my heritage, and I think it’s this love for my land that is the foundation for my activism. I give credit to my parents, who have had to raise West Papuan children away from their lands.
I say we live in exile because my father, Benny Wenda, was and is a well-respected West Papuan liberation leader in the Free West Papua movement. He was arrested in the early 2000s for mobilizing the people of West Papua to speak up about the injustices. And for that, he was arrested and charged with 25 years. Next year would be his “release date.” My early childhood memories are quite traumatic. I remember some of my family photo albums of me visiting my father behind prison bars. My mother and I would visit every now and then and my mother would smuggle food to my father because there were rumors of him being poisoned.
The West Papuan colonial history is textbook colonialism. West Papua, alongside Papua New Guinea, are the custodians of the world’s third largest rainforest. It’s pure, virgin rainforest, and so naturally it was and is ripe for colonial exploitation. We are still experiencing colonialism and imperialism in the modern century. During the ‘60s, our brothers and sisters in the African continent experienced decolonization and many nations were birthed. West Papua was meant to be amongst the nations that benefitted from the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. We were a nation in waiting, ready to be born. But Indonesia stole that from us. The western half the Island, New Guinea, attracted many European powers. The Germans came along at one point, the Australians took administrative control of the island. Then we had the Japanese invasion. And then the Dutch prior to Indonesia.
Indonesia, who are our current colonizers, have gone through their own independence story and their own struggles. They were colonized and oppressed by the Dutch. But in 1945 they were able to liberate themselves, and they are now the independent nation we know today. But during that period of transition, the Dutch had their own Empire, which extended from Indonesia to the Southeast Asian islands all the way to the western half of the island of West Papua. Once Indonesia declared independence, the Dutch recognized that Indonesia was not going to give them West Papua because they saw them as ethnically, linguistically, and culturally distinct, therefore they were going to keep them separate and aid them in their journey toward independence and sovereignty. I think that’s important to recognize. We fought for Indonesian independence. The Dutch were adamant that we had our own self-governing territory. The first West Papuan Congress was in 1961. This was when our national flag, the Morning Star flag, was created and when our national anthem came to be… and then the carving up of our territory happened.
Papuans recognize the 1st of December as our should-have-been Independence Day. This National Day was attended by Dutch and other European observers, but it was literally a few weeks later that the Indonesian military invaded our land using paratroopers. Indonesia dropped hundreds of paratroopers onto West Papuan soil, and that’s when we essentially got into a short war with the Dutch and the Indonesians. The result of this was various agreements, the most significant agreement being the New York agreement of 1962 which, by the way, no West Papuans were consulted about. This agreement was signed by Indonesia and the Netherlands in a conference in New York. The agreement was that West Papua wouldn’t give away our sovereignty, but we would be under temporary administrative control by Indonesia. In the transitioning from the Dutch to Indonesia, a promise was made that there would be a referendum which would give the people of West Papua the right to self-determination, in other words, one man, one vote.
It was during that same time that multinational companies like Freeport Sulfur, a US company, came along and were given licenses to begin mining operations in West Papua. In 1969, during the so-called Act of Free Choice, the people of West Papua were denied the freedom to truly decide the fate of their land. Indonesia, instead of using the one man, one vote referendum procedure, adopted their own version called the Mushawarat system, which is completely different from what was decided in the New York agreement. Essentially, they hand-picked over 1000 elders and community leaders and forced them at gunpoint to agree to sell their land and integrate with Indonesia. Many of them were threatened and told that they would have their tongues cut out, or that they’d be killed if they voted against integration with Indonesia. I mention this because the sham referendum was witnessed by the United Nations, and by many Western observers, and yet they all turned a blind eye. Indonesia’s claiming of West Papua is completely illegal. It was essentially the theft of our land, of our sovereignty.
I do want to highlight the fact that it was during this whole colonial transfer that the licenses for the mines were given to US and British companies like British Petroleum.
It was never really about the people of West Papua getting their rights of determination. The main reason for our land being given to Indonesia was so that multinational companies could profit by exploiting our beautiful, beautiful land.
maya: This is incredibly heavy. I was really struck emotionally when you said that West Papua was supposed to be among the nations to be decolonized and liberated during the 1960s African liberation movement.
Koteka: Many of the newly born African nations, including Ghana, were very vocal about this. They were the ones who were pushing West Papua to be next. They brought West Papua up at UN meetings. I also want to speak to institutionalized racism and the mindset of Papuans. I think of how West Papuans weren’t even allowed in these big meetings, the New York agreement meetings or the round table conferences in the Netherlands, or any these big meetings that were deciding the fate of our land. Papuans were never consulted or invited into the rooms. It was because of racist ideologies around Black Melanesians, that we couldn’t be trusted to govern our own affairs, we needed Western intervention. I think as a young West Papuan descendant, I found myself having to prove my intellect, to prove my capabilities in in in the world. There is still a narrative that we West Papuans are primitive, living in the Stone Age.
maya: Could you speak to some of the historical and ongoing ways in which Indonesia continues to infringe upon West Papuans freedom and sovereignty. As you said, your father was a political prisoner. But I wonder if you could speak to some of the other tools and strategies they use against Papuans.
Koteka: I can use my name as an example. Koteka was a name that was gifted to me by my father. And when most Papuans hear my name, they’re shocked, because my name means penis gourd; it’s a traditional covering worn by the men from the highlands, which is where I’m from. It’s a covering for the male private parts, mostly worn as an ornamental piece. It’s aggressively anti-European, anti-Western. It’s aggressively indigenous. In looking into the history of my name, and Indonesia’s relationship with this piece of clothing, I came across a campaign that was led by colonial powers in the 1960s called Operation Koteka, or Operasi Koteka.
Indonesian forces would come into the highlands and force the men in our villages to swap their kotekas for Western European clothing. Operasi koteka, which was enforced in the ‘60s, is like a metaphor for what is still ongoing today. We’re now living in a modern Operasi Koteka era, where we can only wear traditional clothes during festivals, which are mostly sponsored by BP and mining groups. They basically only want us to wear our clothes when it suits their agenda. Or it paints a picture of a peaceful, happy West Papua, which is why it’s beautiful as an act of resistance. West Papuan men, when they protest in the capital Jayapura, will wear kotekas. They will go into the streets wearing penis gourds, and traditional headdresses. They paint their bodies and bring their bows and arrows. I’ve seen it, and I think it’s beautiful.
Bear in mind, I did get bullied and teased at school for having this name, but I’ve learned to love and embrace it, and it just shows that West Papuan people are not only facing genocide, ecocide, but also ethnicide. With the sudden influx of Japanese migrants through the Indonesian Asian transmigration program, we’re becoming a minority in our own land. This raises other issues such as cultural appropriation. Our culture being seen as more beautiful when it’s on the bodies of Japanese Indonesian migrants.
maya: Could you speak to the current state of the ongoing Free West Papuan movement.
Koteka: With the new Indonesian President Prabowo, who is guilty of crimes against humanity, there’s a big fear that with his new rule 1000s of hectares of our land is going to be sold to companies to make way for palm oil plantations, to make way for deforestation, to make way for sugar cane plantations. It’s heartbreaking because a lot of our people have a deep ancestral connection to their land. And a lot of our stories, our songs are connected to our land. When you displace and remove indigenous people from the land; you destroy that sacred relationship.
That’s why we have a boycott campaign, and that’s why we have the Green State Vision. My father came up with the Green State Vision to challenge the world to look to indigenous leaders for ideas about climate justice. When we’re fighting for climate justice, we also have to include indigenous liberation struggles, because once you liberate the people, you liberate new ideas and new visions, like the Green State Vision. When West Papua is an independent nation, we hope to become the world’s first green state, which will make ecocide a crime.
Our nation will be built based around Indigenous ideas and knowledge and Melanesian philosophies, which the world hasn’t seen before. When we liberate indigenous people, we liberate new visions of how to make the world a better, more sustainable place.
More than 500,000 men, women and children have been killed by the Indonesian state since the initial invasion. It’s been more than 60 years now, and nothing’s changed. Our people are still dying. Our children are still being murdered and kidnapped. Our women are still being raped and buried alive. The dramatic stories we heard our grandparents tell are still the headlines of papers today in West Papua. Media is still banned, and journalists are still banned from reporting freely. And what’s even worse is that the United Nations Human Rights Office cannot enter freely and do a thorough investigation into the human rights abuses. The stories we hear from inside West Papua are so valuable and so important, but they don’t have mainstream attention, and that’s why I think my platform is really important, because it does. It packages the struggle to wider audiences, modern audiences, in a more digestible, holistic way. I talk about my struggle through storytelling, visuals, music, songs, and dance.
maya: What does it mean to be an artist in the face of your people’s ongoing occupation at the hands of Indonesia?
Koteka: I think growing up, I thought stories were primitive mediums of activism. I thought that I had to use big, fancy words and be able to give a one-hour PowerPoint presentation with graphs and statistics to convince audiences to listen to the Message. Those are obviously useful and important in the struggle. But I felt really worried about young people not feeling empowered. I didn’t want them to feel apathetic and then just leave the freedom fight to the elders. I realized that storytelling could be a good tool… and music, dance and art could be useful tools to encourage my brothers and sisters to not feel intimidated to enter into this space when I sit down and play freedom songs.
My mother is a phenomenal songwriter. I was literally sung freedom songs from a very early age in my mother tongue, thanks to my mum. My father has a belief that music contains the human spirit. That’s why I often share these songs on social media. I do series or clips, and a lot of our old people are surprised. ‘How does she know our old songs? How can she can sing in our language?’ I love it because my accent disappears when I’m singing in my language, and people can’t tell that I’m living in the belly of colonial abuse. My sisters and I are dancers as well. We have performed at cultural festivals, music festivals, our school’s international evening, people’s weddings, and people’s birthday parties. It’s healing for us. It’s the best feeling when you can turn something traumatic into something beautiful. Music is a universal language. Even though some people can’t understand the freedom songs I sing, they can feel it.
maya: Like you said, I think that the cultural aspect of revolution, of our movement, is also how we build an identity outside of what our colonizers, our occupiers have said we are. I’m so mindful of the necessity of uplifting this ongoing freedom movement. During this time, we’re also seeing this genocidal campaign against Gaza and Palestinians. Israel is employing some of these same strategies that Indonesia is employing, like ecocide, cultural genocide, as well as the genociding of life.
Koteka: Gaza is the world’s most well documented genocide. And West Papua is the least well documented genocide. It’s really concerning when we see the world turning a blind eye to the suffering of our Palestinian brothers. It’s concerning… but it’s actually really beautiful to see the world and the West stand up for oppressed and colonized people, despite the leaders turning a blind eye.
maya: I don’t see a world in which we can have solidarity or liberation for just one colonized people. It’s necessary for us to see our liberation, our lives, as intertwined with one another.
Koteka: That’s why I also want to take time to acknowledge other liberation struggles in the Pacific. Besides West Papua, there’s the French, who obviously have their foot in the Pacific. We had our first ever protest outside the French Embassy in solidarity with our Kanaki brothers and sisters. The territory is called New Caledonia, and the indigenous people are fighting for a referendum for their own liberation. We have other territories in the Pacific, like Rapa Nui, which is currently a territory of Chile. And then we also have Bougainville, which is a Papua Guinean province. They are hoping to get their referendum soon. The Pacific has some really cool Black liberation struggles, movements that need more attention. West Papua deserves attention, but then we have these other minority struggles in the region. We do have a cross-solidarity relationship with our other island brothers and sisters. Black liberation struggles matter in the Pacific as much as they do in the in the rest of the world.
Keep reading:
Music is Political:
Sounds that Move Movements
Emel Mathlouthi, Collis Browne
Emel Mathlouthi
{
"article":
{
"title" : "Papua Merdeka: Koteka Wenda on Resisting Occupation in Exile",
"author" : "Koteka Wenda, maya finoh",
"category" : "interviews",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/papua-merdeka-koteka-wenda-resisting-occupation-in-exile",
"date" : "2025-06-17 14:26:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/IMG_3867.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Since the onset of the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, we have witnessed a global rise in awareness of the pervasive violence of colonialism and how necessary it is for life on this planet to dismantle it. This momentum has also led to the emergence of new forms of organizing in solidarity with oppressed peoples worldwide.",
"content" : "Since the onset of the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, we have witnessed a global rise in awareness of the pervasive violence of colonialism and how necessary it is for life on this planet to dismantle it. This momentum has also led to the emergence of new forms of organizing in solidarity with oppressed peoples worldwide.West Papua, unjustly annexed by the Indonesian state beginning in 1961, is the site of one of many Indigenous freedom struggles fighting against settler violence today: an estimated 500,000 West Papuans have been killed by Indonesian occupation forces over the last sixty years.In this interview, Koteka Wenda—a West Papuan storyteller and cultural performer living in exile with her family in the United Kingdom—speaks with maya finoh about the ongoing occupation of West Papua at the hands of Indonesia; the current state of the Free West Papua/Papua Merdeka Movement, which resists genocide, ecocide, and forced cultural assimilation; solidarity with other liberation fights; and what it means to her to be an artist-activist fighting for the autonomy of the West Papuan people in diaspora.maya finoh: I’m grateful to you for raising my awareness of the West Papuan struggle. It made me think about the solidarity between Black Atlantic and Black Pacific liberation struggles. I’d love to know what your personal connection to West Papua is.Koteka Wenda: My birth was political, because I was born in what was basically a refugee camp on the border of Papua New Guinea and West Papua. This is a border that was envisioned by white Western men sitting around a table, cutting our island as if it were a cake. I think of how difficult it was for my mother to have to leave her village, her family home, to cross the border and give birth in a settlement or in a town far away from her ancestral lands. And how Indonesian colonialism rips apart families. It displaces people and takes away the safety of community.That being said, when I was born, I was surrounded by a lot of strangers, who sooner or later, became family. I can’t go back to my homeland. I’m 23 going on 24 and it’s been more than 20 years since I freely roamed my ancestral lands. West Papua is home to wildlife and imagination. We are a Pacific Island nation. Our people are melanated. We have curly hair. We are ethnically, linguistically, culturally, Melanesian. We are distinct from the population of our colonizers, who are Southeast Asian, Javanese. I’ve always felt proud to be West Papuan despite living in exile overseas. I’ve been raised to love my heritage, and I think it’s this love for my land that is the foundation for my activism. I give credit to my parents, who have had to raise West Papuan children away from their lands.I say we live in exile because my father, Benny Wenda, was and is a well-respected West Papuan liberation leader in the Free West Papua movement. He was arrested in the early 2000s for mobilizing the people of West Papua to speak up about the injustices. And for that, he was arrested and charged with 25 years. Next year would be his “release date.” My early childhood memories are quite traumatic. I remember some of my family photo albums of me visiting my father behind prison bars. My mother and I would visit every now and then and my mother would smuggle food to my father because there were rumors of him being poisoned.The West Papuan colonial history is textbook colonialism. West Papua, alongside Papua New Guinea, are the custodians of the world’s third largest rainforest. It’s pure, virgin rainforest, and so naturally it was and is ripe for colonial exploitation. We are still experiencing colonialism and imperialism in the modern century. During the ‘60s, our brothers and sisters in the African continent experienced decolonization and many nations were birthed. West Papua was meant to be amongst the nations that benefitted from the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. We were a nation in waiting, ready to be born. But Indonesia stole that from us. The western half the Island, New Guinea, attracted many European powers. The Germans came along at one point, the Australians took administrative control of the island. Then we had the Japanese invasion. And then the Dutch prior to Indonesia.Indonesia, who are our current colonizers, have gone through their own independence story and their own struggles. They were colonized and oppressed by the Dutch. But in 1945 they were able to liberate themselves, and they are now the independent nation we know today. But during that period of transition, the Dutch had their own Empire, which extended from Indonesia to the Southeast Asian islands all the way to the western half of the island of West Papua. Once Indonesia declared independence, the Dutch recognized that Indonesia was not going to give them West Papua because they saw them as ethnically, linguistically, and culturally distinct, therefore they were going to keep them separate and aid them in their journey toward independence and sovereignty. I think that’s important to recognize. We fought for Indonesian independence. The Dutch were adamant that we had our own self-governing territory. The first West Papuan Congress was in 1961. This was when our national flag, the Morning Star flag, was created and when our national anthem came to be… and then the carving up of our territory happened.Papuans recognize the 1st of December as our should-have-been Independence Day. This National Day was attended by Dutch and other European observers, but it was literally a few weeks later that the Indonesian military invaded our land using paratroopers. Indonesia dropped hundreds of paratroopers onto West Papuan soil, and that’s when we essentially got into a short war with the Dutch and the Indonesians. The result of this was various agreements, the most significant agreement being the New York agreement of 1962 which, by the way, no West Papuans were consulted about. This agreement was signed by Indonesia and the Netherlands in a conference in New York. The agreement was that West Papua wouldn’t give away our sovereignty, but we would be under temporary administrative control by Indonesia. In the transitioning from the Dutch to Indonesia, a promise was made that there would be a referendum which would give the people of West Papua the right to self-determination, in other words, one man, one vote.It was during that same time that multinational companies like Freeport Sulfur, a US company, came along and were given licenses to begin mining operations in West Papua. In 1969, during the so-called Act of Free Choice, the people of West Papua were denied the freedom to truly decide the fate of their land. Indonesia, instead of using the one man, one vote referendum procedure, adopted their own version called the Mushawarat system, which is completely different from what was decided in the New York agreement. Essentially, they hand-picked over 1000 elders and community leaders and forced them at gunpoint to agree to sell their land and integrate with Indonesia. Many of them were threatened and told that they would have their tongues cut out, or that they’d be killed if they voted against integration with Indonesia. I mention this because the sham referendum was witnessed by the United Nations, and by many Western observers, and yet they all turned a blind eye. Indonesia’s claiming of West Papua is completely illegal. It was essentially the theft of our land, of our sovereignty.I do want to highlight the fact that it was during this whole colonial transfer that the licenses for the mines were given to US and British companies like British Petroleum. It was never really about the people of West Papua getting their rights of determination. The main reason for our land being given to Indonesia was so that multinational companies could profit by exploiting our beautiful, beautiful land.maya: This is incredibly heavy. I was really struck emotionally when you said that West Papua was supposed to be among the nations to be decolonized and liberated during the 1960s African liberation movement.Koteka: Many of the newly born African nations, including Ghana, were very vocal about this. They were the ones who were pushing West Papua to be next. They brought West Papua up at UN meetings. I also want to speak to institutionalized racism and the mindset of Papuans. I think of how West Papuans weren’t even allowed in these big meetings, the New York agreement meetings or the round table conferences in the Netherlands, or any these big meetings that were deciding the fate of our land. Papuans were never consulted or invited into the rooms. It was because of racist ideologies around Black Melanesians, that we couldn’t be trusted to govern our own affairs, we needed Western intervention. I think as a young West Papuan descendant, I found myself having to prove my intellect, to prove my capabilities in in in the world. There is still a narrative that we West Papuans are primitive, living in the Stone Age.maya: Could you speak to some of the historical and ongoing ways in which Indonesia continues to infringe upon West Papuans freedom and sovereignty. As you said, your father was a political prisoner. But I wonder if you could speak to some of the other tools and strategies they use against Papuans.Koteka: I can use my name as an example. Koteka was a name that was gifted to me by my father. And when most Papuans hear my name, they’re shocked, because my name means penis gourd; it’s a traditional covering worn by the men from the highlands, which is where I’m from. It’s a covering for the male private parts, mostly worn as an ornamental piece. It’s aggressively anti-European, anti-Western. It’s aggressively indigenous. In looking into the history of my name, and Indonesia’s relationship with this piece of clothing, I came across a campaign that was led by colonial powers in the 1960s called Operation Koteka, or Operasi Koteka.Indonesian forces would come into the highlands and force the men in our villages to swap their kotekas for Western European clothing. Operasi koteka, which was enforced in the ‘60s, is like a metaphor for what is still ongoing today. We’re now living in a modern Operasi Koteka era, where we can only wear traditional clothes during festivals, which are mostly sponsored by BP and mining groups. They basically only want us to wear our clothes when it suits their agenda. Or it paints a picture of a peaceful, happy West Papua, which is why it’s beautiful as an act of resistance. West Papuan men, when they protest in the capital Jayapura, will wear kotekas. They will go into the streets wearing penis gourds, and traditional headdresses. They paint their bodies and bring their bows and arrows. I’ve seen it, and I think it’s beautiful.Bear in mind, I did get bullied and teased at school for having this name, but I’ve learned to love and embrace it, and it just shows that West Papuan people are not only facing genocide, ecocide, but also ethnicide. With the sudden influx of Japanese migrants through the Indonesian Asian transmigration program, we’re becoming a minority in our own land. This raises other issues such as cultural appropriation. Our culture being seen as more beautiful when it’s on the bodies of Japanese Indonesian migrants.maya: Could you speak to the current state of the ongoing Free West Papuan movement.Koteka: With the new Indonesian President Prabowo, who is guilty of crimes against humanity, there’s a big fear that with his new rule 1000s of hectares of our land is going to be sold to companies to make way for palm oil plantations, to make way for deforestation, to make way for sugar cane plantations. It’s heartbreaking because a lot of our people have a deep ancestral connection to their land. And a lot of our stories, our songs are connected to our land. When you displace and remove indigenous people from the land; you destroy that sacred relationship.That’s why we have a boycott campaign, and that’s why we have the Green State Vision. My father came up with the Green State Vision to challenge the world to look to indigenous leaders for ideas about climate justice. When we’re fighting for climate justice, we also have to include indigenous liberation struggles, because once you liberate the people, you liberate new ideas and new visions, like the Green State Vision. When West Papua is an independent nation, we hope to become the world’s first green state, which will make ecocide a crime. Our nation will be built based around Indigenous ideas and knowledge and Melanesian philosophies, which the world hasn’t seen before. When we liberate indigenous people, we liberate new visions of how to make the world a better, more sustainable place.More than 500,000 men, women and children have been killed by the Indonesian state since the initial invasion. It’s been more than 60 years now, and nothing’s changed. Our people are still dying. Our children are still being murdered and kidnapped. Our women are still being raped and buried alive. The dramatic stories we heard our grandparents tell are still the headlines of papers today in West Papua. Media is still banned, and journalists are still banned from reporting freely. And what’s even worse is that the United Nations Human Rights Office cannot enter freely and do a thorough investigation into the human rights abuses. The stories we hear from inside West Papua are so valuable and so important, but they don’t have mainstream attention, and that’s why I think my platform is really important, because it does. It packages the struggle to wider audiences, modern audiences, in a more digestible, holistic way. I talk about my struggle through storytelling, visuals, music, songs, and dance.maya: What does it mean to be an artist in the face of your people’s ongoing occupation at the hands of Indonesia?Koteka: I think growing up, I thought stories were primitive mediums of activism. I thought that I had to use big, fancy words and be able to give a one-hour PowerPoint presentation with graphs and statistics to convince audiences to listen to the Message. Those are obviously useful and important in the struggle. But I felt really worried about young people not feeling empowered. I didn’t want them to feel apathetic and then just leave the freedom fight to the elders. I realized that storytelling could be a good tool… and music, dance and art could be useful tools to encourage my brothers and sisters to not feel intimidated to enter into this space when I sit down and play freedom songs.My mother is a phenomenal songwriter. I was literally sung freedom songs from a very early age in my mother tongue, thanks to my mum. My father has a belief that music contains the human spirit. That’s why I often share these songs on social media. I do series or clips, and a lot of our old people are surprised. ‘How does she know our old songs? How can she can sing in our language?’ I love it because my accent disappears when I’m singing in my language, and people can’t tell that I’m living in the belly of colonial abuse. My sisters and I are dancers as well. We have performed at cultural festivals, music festivals, our school’s international evening, people’s weddings, and people’s birthday parties. It’s healing for us. It’s the best feeling when you can turn something traumatic into something beautiful. Music is a universal language. Even though some people can’t understand the freedom songs I sing, they can feel it.maya: Like you said, I think that the cultural aspect of revolution, of our movement, is also how we build an identity outside of what our colonizers, our occupiers have said we are. I’m so mindful of the necessity of uplifting this ongoing freedom movement. During this time, we’re also seeing this genocidal campaign against Gaza and Palestinians. Israel is employing some of these same strategies that Indonesia is employing, like ecocide, cultural genocide, as well as the genociding of life.Koteka: Gaza is the world’s most well documented genocide. And West Papua is the least well documented genocide. It’s really concerning when we see the world turning a blind eye to the suffering of our Palestinian brothers. It’s concerning… but it’s actually really beautiful to see the world and the West stand up for oppressed and colonized people, despite the leaders turning a blind eye.maya: I don’t see a world in which we can have solidarity or liberation for just one colonized people. It’s necessary for us to see our liberation, our lives, as intertwined with one another.Koteka: That’s why I also want to take time to acknowledge other liberation struggles in the Pacific. Besides West Papua, there’s the French, who obviously have their foot in the Pacific. We had our first ever protest outside the French Embassy in solidarity with our Kanaki brothers and sisters. The territory is called New Caledonia, and the indigenous people are fighting for a referendum for their own liberation. We have other territories in the Pacific, like Rapa Nui, which is currently a territory of Chile. And then we also have Bougainville, which is a Papua Guinean province. They are hoping to get their referendum soon. The Pacific has some really cool Black liberation struggles, movements that need more attention. West Papua deserves attention, but then we have these other minority struggles in the region. We do have a cross-solidarity relationship with our other island brothers and sisters. Black liberation struggles matter in the Pacific as much as they do in the in the rest of the world."
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Culture Must Be the Moral Compass That Geopolitics and Economics Will Never Be",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "essays",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/culture-must-be-the-moral-compass-that-geopolitics-and-economics-will-never-be",
"date" : "2025-07-15 16:14:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_Opposing_Nazism_1.png",
"excerpt" : "The widespread cultural rejection of Nazism in the West did not emerge spontaneously from humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong. It was not simply that people around the world, and especially in the West, were naturally alert and to the moral horror of fascism.",
"content" : "The widespread cultural rejection of Nazism in the West did not emerge spontaneously from humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong. It was not simply that people around the world, and especially in the West, were naturally alert and to the moral horror of fascism.Rather, the transformation of Nazism from a nationalist ideology admired by many Western elites into the universal symbol of evil was a story of narrative engineering and the deliberate construction of collective memory. It is a story that reveals a larger truth: culture has always been the moral compass that geopolitics and economics cannot, and will not, provide on their own.And at this moment, it is crucial to understand and use the power of culture to shift geopolitics, and not the other way around.Understanding this history matters today more than ever. Because if it was possible to turn Nazism into the ultimate taboo, it is equally possible to reposition other violent ideologies and state projects—such as Israel’s ongoing system of apartheid and settler colonialism—as morally indefensible. But to do so requires acknowledging that cultural reckonings don’t simply arrive; they are made.Pre-War Ambivalence: When Fascism Was FashionableContrary to the comforting myth that the world naturally recoiled from Nazism, in the 1920s and 1930s many influential Americans and Europeans viewed Hitler’s Germany with admiration. American industrialists like Henry Ford openly praised Hitler’s economic management and fierce opposition to communism. Ford even funded antisemitic propaganda through his publication, The Dearborn Independent. British aristocrats, including the Duke of Windsor, flirted with Nazi sympathies, seeing Germany as a model of discipline and order.It was only when Hitler’s ambitions clashed with the strategic interests of other nations that fascism became intolerable. And even then, many major US and UK companies maintained their business interests with the Nazis, including Ford, IBM, GM (Opel), Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil), Chase Bank, and of course Coca-Cola, who famously created the brand Fanta so that it could break the boycott and do business with Nazi Germany.This distinction is critical: condemnation of Nazism began not as a moral imperative, but as a political necessity. Germany’s aggression threatened the European balance of power, British imperial security, and eventually, American economic and military interests. The moral narrative would only come later, after the fighting was over.It is important to learn from the past and see that only culture can shift perception, and to use culture to shift the economic realities that would otherwise wait to be shaped by politics.Wartime Shifts: From Enemy State to Symbol of EvilWorld War II did not instantly transform public opinion. For many Americans, the war in Europe remained remote until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Even then, the decision to fight Nazi Germany was entangled with power politics: Hitler declared war on the United States first, effectively forcing Roosevelt’s hand.Nevertheless, the war provided fertile ground for a reframing of Nazism. Wartime propaganda efforts by the Allies recast the Nazi regime as a brutal, alien threat to civilization itself. Hollywood joined in: The Great Dictator (1940) ridiculed Hitler’s delusions of grandeur, while Casablanca (1942) romanticized resistance. Images of goose-stepping soldiers, swastika flags, and shattered cities circulated widely.As the Allies advanced, they encountered the first concrete evidence of the Holocaust: ghettos, mass graves, and emaciated survivors. Yet even then, much of this evidence remained unknown to the general public. It was only after liberation that the full horror became impossible to ignore.Post-War Revelation: The Holocaust and the Cultural BreakThe turning point came in 1945, with the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trials. The images and testimonies from Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen revealed the industrial scale of genocide. Millions murdered with chilling efficiency. A systematic attempt to erase an entire people. For the first time, the abstract notion of “Nazi evil” was grounded in visceral, visual evidence.Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes this phenomenon as the cultural construction of trauma. Atrocities do not automatically generate collective memory; they must be narrated, documented, and ritualized until they become an inescapable moral reference point. The Nuremberg Trials played this role by broadcasting confessions and evidence to a global audience. Schools, museums, and the press reinforced the narrative: Nazism was not simply defeated; it was unmasked as pure, irredeemable evil.Cold War Myth-Making: The Free World Versus FascismThe Cold War further cemented this narrative. To build legitimacy against the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies positioned themselves as the moral victors of World War II, the saviors of Europe from fascism. In reality, many of the same powers—Britain, France, and the United States—continued their own brutal colonial projects and enforced systems of racial hierarchy at home.But the cultural story was powerful: the West stood for freedom; the Nazis had embodied totalitarian darkness. School textbooks, popular films, and Holocaust memorialization institutionalized this story, forging a shared moral identity that could be contrasted against communist “evil.”This process was neither accidental nor purely altruistic. It was a strategic use of culture to consolidate power, project moral authority, and deflect scrutiny of the West’s own violence. The lesson is clear: collective memory is not a neutral mirror of reality. It is built, contested, and leveraged.The Sociological Core: Why Public Opinion ShiftsTo understand how an ideology once admired by many became the universal emblem of inhumanity, we must look beyond military defeat. Several mechanisms combined:Symbolic Association: Nazism transformed from a nationalist experiment into a symbol of mechanized genocide and racial supremacy.Cultural Trauma: The Holocaust became a shared wound that redefined moral frameworks across the West.Visual Storytelling: Images and films, rather than mere text, anchored the horror in the public imagination.State Rebranding: The Allies used anti-Nazism to build a postwar myth of moral superiority, even as they pursued imperial ambitions elsewhere.These insights are not simply historical trivia. They are a roadmap for how cultural shifts happen—and how they can be deliberately engineered.Israel, Palestine, and the Next Cultural ReckoningToday, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—systematic dispossession, apartheid laws, and repeated military assaults—remains largely protected in Western discourse. Politicians insist on Israel’s right to defend itself. Media narratives default to framing the violence as a “conflict” rather than an occupation. Solidarity with Palestinians is often smeared as antisemitism.Yet history shows that moral consensus is not fixed. With enough sustained exposure, narrative work, and cultural pressure, the global imagination can be reshaped. Just as Nazism’s legitimacy eroded, so too can the idea of Israel as an unassailable “victim-state.”This is not a call to equate the Holocaust with the Nakba—each is historically distinct. It is, however, an argument that the techniques which made Nazism morally intolerable—trauma visualization, reframing language, relentless storytelling—are tools available to any liberation movement.Here is how such a transformation could unfold:1. Narrative InversionIsrael’s founding story must be contextualized: a state born from the trauma of European antisemitism that, in turn, created the dispossession of another people. Exposing this contradiction—survivors becoming occupiers—breaks the simplistic binary of oppressor and victim.2. Visual Culture and TestimonyJust as photographs of emaciated bodies in camps forced an awakening, so too can images of bombed Gazan neighborhoods, amputee children, and anguished families. Digital archives and survivor testimonies can anchor these experiences in collective memory.3. Linguistic ReframingTerms like “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” and “ethnic cleansing” shift perception from tragic conflict to structural violence. Legal frameworks—UN reports, ICC filings—can fortify these terms with institutional legitimacy.4. Media SaturationBypassing corporate media gatekeepers requires a multi-platform strategy: TikTok clips, Substack essays, livestreamed trials of Israeli policy, viral documentaries. Saturation is what makes denial unsustainable.5. Global RealignmentPositioning Palestine within global struggles—Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, anti-colonial movements—expands solidarity. When the Global South embraces Palestinian liberation as part of its own decolonization, moral isolation will deepen.6. Cultural Institutions and EducationJust as Holocaust education became standard in Western curricula, Nakba education can be mainstreamed. Museums, memorials, and fellowships can institutionalize remembrance and scholarship.7. Policy Pressure and Legal ActionPublic consensus is the soil in which policy change grows. Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, coupled with legal prosecutions of war crimes, transform moral clarity into material consequences.8. Making Occupation a LiabilityWhen supporting Israel becomes politically and financially risky—akin to defending apartheid South Africa—corporate and governmental alliances will fracture. Reputational risk can be a powerful motivator.Conclusion: Cultural Reckonings Are EngineeredIt was not “natural” for the West to reject Nazism. It took defeat, trauma exposure, and decades of cultural labor to enshrine anti-Nazism as a foundational moral principle. Similarly, it is not inevitable that the world will recognize Israel’s oppression of Palestinians as an urgent moral crisis. It will require strategic, sustained, and courageous cultural work.Culture—more than geopolitics or economics—sets the terms of what is morally acceptable. It is the compass that can point humanity toward justice. But only if we are willing to pick it up and use it."
}
,
{
"title" : "Neptune Frost",
"author" : "Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman",
"category" : "screenings",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/eip-screening-neptune-frost",
"date" : "2025-07-12 16:00:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/netune-frost-movie-poster.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Thank you for all who joined the special screening of Neptune Frost, with exclusive introduction from writer/director Saul Williams. Stay tuned and become a member for our next edition of our EIP monthly screening series.",
"content" : "Thank you for all who joined the special screening of Neptune Frost, with exclusive introduction from writer/director Saul Williams. Stay tuned and become a member for our next edition of our EIP monthly screening series.Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region’s natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends."
}
,
{
"title" : "Uranus & The Cycle of Liberation",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/uranus-and-the-cycle-of-liberation",
"date" : "2025-07-11 16:25:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_Uranus.jpg",
"excerpt" : "I’m definitely not an astrologer. I don’t even know where Uranus is in my chart. But I do know how to read systems and translate them to the public. What I’ve learned, through years of designing for social and environmental justice, is that history doesn’t just unfold. It cycles upwards. And if we learn to pay attention to those cycles, we can prepare—not just to resist collapse, but to shape what comes after.",
"content" : "I’m definitely not an astrologer. I don’t even know where Uranus is in my chart. But I do know how to read systems and translate them to the public. What I’ve learned, through years of designing for social and environmental justice, is that history doesn’t just unfold. It cycles upwards. And if we learn to pay attention to those cycles, we can prepare—not just to resist collapse, but to shape what comes after.Even if you don’t care about astrology, the timing of these celestial movements provides us a way to examine macro trends that we can learn from. History may not exactly repeat itself, but it does echo.Uranus—the planet astrologers associated with upheaval, rebellion, and technological transformation—entered Aries in May 2010 and stayed there until 2018. That cycle coincided with a surge in political uprisings, many of which redefined our understanding of mass resistance in the 21st century.The Arab Spring began in late 2010, starting in Tunisia and erupting across the Middle East. It wasn’t just about corrupt regimes—it was about reclaiming voice, land, and dignity after decades of foreign interference, neoliberal decay, and post-colonial repression. From Tahrir Square to Pearl Roundabout, these movements were leaderless, fast, and media-savvy.Occupy Wall Street followed in 2011, challenging the violent inequality embedded in late capitalism. In 2013, Black Lives Matter emerged after the murder of Trayvon Martin, later exploding into a global uprising in 2014 and again in 2020. Standing Rock (2016) reminded the world that Indigenous resistance was not only alive but visionary. #MeToo (2017) became an international reckoning with patriarchy and sexual violence, a reminder that personal testimony is political terrain.Across these years, protests were decentralized, digitized, and visual. Social media moved from a personal tool to a frontline of collective witnessing. Livestreams replaced press conferences. Memes became political language. Design itself became a protest, and Slow Factory built the visual language for it.This was not coincidental but archetypal, because Uranus in Aries, even symbolically, tells the story of radical ignition, collective fire, visionary unrest.And yet, none of it was sustained. What followed was a backlash: fascist resurgence, climate denial, propaganda wars, and intensified state surveillance. We saw mass demobilization, media fatigue, and widespread disinformation. Many of the movements that sparked global hope were either crushed, co-opted, or burned out.So now, as Uranus moves through Taurus (2018–2026), the terrain has shifted. Taurus is about materiality, land, value, and stability. It demands we not only rise up, which is crucial, but to build. We are asked to not only critique systems, but replace them. Not just “burn it all down”, but radically imagine what’s next.This is the political and spiritual context I hold as I continue my work.At Slow Factory, we spent the past decade offering free education, cultural strategy, and ecological design rooted in climate justice and human rights. And with Everything is Political, we’re building an independent media platform not beholden to corporate donors or foundation filters—a place where movement memory, critical analysis, and cultural clarity live. If we don’t design the next phase of liberation, someone else will design it for us.This work isn’t about virality. It’s about continuity. We are here to hold political memory. To protect the intellectual commons. To ensure that the next generation doesn’t forget who stood for truth—and who profited from silence.The ask is to build the very systems we are all looking for, and for that we deserve the time, energy and support to imagine, design and co-create as a community. We can’t delegate our liberation to politicians, and we certainly won’t see startups capitalizing on the changes our society needs. Perhaps we will witness the hyper privatization of every single service our communities need, but we must strategize for during and after collapse. Funding structures will have to be challenged, as they are designed to sustain themselves and uphold status quo. However, we are witnessing the collapse of every industry: media, education, banking, all industries we rely on, will be challenged. We are going to need to rely on our creative skills and our ability to build true solidarity across our communities towards a common goal outside of dogma and division. It’s a cultural moment, and we are here for it.Resistance isn’t just about protest. It’s about imagination. And imagination requires discipline, community, and space.We are creating that space right here. And together we can co-create together if everybody puts in effort and care. For now, we are imagining what systems of mitigation amidst systems collapse will look like. Will we outsource our infrastructure to highly funded Silicon Valley funded platforms feeding off of public data feeding ads markets and Ai learning in real time from our work? Or are we truly invested in building sovereign media? I personally invest in the latter, and hope you all join us. Because we are the majority, and truly if we align we are unstoppable."
}
]
}