Guardian:

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has said it made “an error” in cancelling the performance of an acclaimed pianist who dedicated a piece to slain journalists in Gaza.

Jayson Gillham was scheduled to perform Mozart and Brahms at the Melbourne Town Hall on Thursday with the MSO, but was removed from the event after the orchestra said he made “a series of introductory remarks” that were “beyond the remit of his contract” at a previous performance.

…

“Over the last 10 months, Israel has killed more than one hundred Palestinian journalists,” Gillham told the crowd on Sunday, according to his management.

“A number of these have been targeted assassinations of prominent journalists as they were travelling in marked press vehicles or wearing their press jackets. The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.

“In addition to the role of journalists who bear witness, the word witness in Arabic is shaheed, which also means martyr.”

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history, with the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists recording at least 113 killings of Palestinian journalists and media workers in the war in Gaza.

That concentration camps were ultimately provided for the same groups in all countries, even though there were considerable differences in the treatment of their inmates, was all the more characteristic as the selection of the groups was left exclusively to the initiative of the totalitarian regimes: if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put him in an internment camp. Thus, long before the outbreak of the war the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of ’national security,‘ had on their own initiative established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU, so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police. This police-directed foreign policy functioned quite independently of the official governments; the relations between the Gestapo and the French police were never more cordial than at the time of Léon Blum’s popular-front government, which was guided by a decidedly anti-German policy. Contrary to the governments, the various police organizations were never overburdened with ‚prejudices‘ against any totalitarian regime; the information and denunciations received from GPU agents were just as welcome to them as those from Fascist or Gestapo agents. They knew about the eminent role of the police apparatus in all totalitarian regimes, they knew about its elevated social status and political importance, and they never bothered to conceal their sympathies. That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to organize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police forces, was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless and refugees.

Ω Ω Ω

For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Great Britain: Penguin, 2017), 377-379.

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