Promiscuous Empathy: Chris Trotter Replies To His Critics.

Inspirational: The Family of Man is a glorious hymn to human equality, but, more than that, it is a clarion call to human freedom. Because equality, unleavened by liberty, is a broken piano, an unstrung harp; upon which the songs of fraternity will never be played. 

“Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” – Franz Kafka. The Trial. 1925.

NOW, those who object to Chris Trotter comparing his troubles to those of Joseph K. undoubtedly have a point. The Police aren’t knocking on my door – not yet. Nevertheless, there is something just a little bit Kafkaesque about finding yourself being misrepresented all over the Internet by people you have never met. Especially when their misrepresentation consists of disputing the veracity of Chris Trotter’s long-standing identification as a person of the Left.

Now, there will be plenty of people who, having read that last sentence, will demand to know why being drummed-out of the ranks of the Left is being presented as a bad thing. Given the truly awful place where the Left of the 2020s has ended up, they would argue that my expulsion from its ranks could only be taken as proof that I still possess a respectable intellect and a functioning moral compass. Their advice would be: “Crack open a bottle of Champagne! Celebrate! You’ve had a lucky escape!”

But, no matter how tempting that sounds, I’m not quite ready to say “good-bye to all that”. Principally because my online critics are not only challenging my bona fides as a person of the Left, but are also insisting that I have become a person of the Right. While no longer bearing the imprimatur of the Left may not be all that grim a prospect, I’m not quite ready – not yet – to be branded a “crypto-fascist”.

My secret fascist mission, apparently, is to do all within my power to secure two objectives. First, to prevent the establishment of a bi-cultural, Tiriti-centric Aotearoa. Second, to assist the Zionist entity in its genocidal war against the Palestinians.

These charges reveal a great deal about the individuals levelling them. Clearly, their expectation is that a leftist-in-good-standing will refrain from interrogating the propositions put forward by … well, that’s one of the most serious problems with the contemporary Left, isn’t it? One is never entirely sure who is setting the Party Line.

In the case of Te Tiriti, exactly who are the leftists-in-good-standing supposed to follow? The late Moana Jackson? The very much alive Margaret Mutu? The team who drafted the He Puapua Report? Linda Tuhiwai Smith – author of Decolonising Methodologies? The Greens? Labour? Willie Jackson? All of the above?

The answer, of course, is that, as an ageing Cis Pakeha Male, it is deeply racist of me to suppose that I have any say at all in matters pertaining to Te Tiriti, or the final shape of any society which might emerge from its fulfilment. My only role is to back te iwi Māori unreservedly and without question. My personal opinions are irrelevant. So, check your privilege, Mr Trotter, and shut the fuck up.

But, what sort of leftist could possibly surrender their right to question, challenge, and join any and every attempt to revolutionise their society? The idea that some people, on account of their ancestry, age, ethnicity, gender – or any other criterion beyond their personal control – should be denied the right to participate intellectually, culturally and/or politically in their nation’s affairs owes nothing whatsoever to the traditions of the Left.

Neither does the threat to unleash violence against anyone who proposes a thorough re-examination of the principles of Te Tiriti. Not unless one’s idea of the Left is drawn from the rigid orthodoxies of the Stalinist and Maoist communist parties, and the murderous totalitarian regimes they constructed to enforce them.

But that has never been my Left. As a democratic, dammit, as a libertarian socialist, my unwavering conviction has always been that it is only when people are free to receive and communicate information; free to discuss and debate all manner of ideas and policies; free to participate; that there can be any enduring hope for the human emancipation which has always been the true leftist’s desideratum.

All very fine, Mr Trotter, but what about your support for Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza?

That’s easy – there is no such support.

This is what I wrote, just weeks after the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023, about the best possible response Israel could make to the horror. This was the picture I painted:

Drones and reconnaissance aircraft would be sent aloft, circling like eagles above the jackals’ lair. But not one bullet would be fired at, and not one bomb would be dropped upon, the crowded streets of Gaza. Across that whole benighted enclave only the whoosh of Hamas’s missiles and the pop of Israel’s interceptors would break the pregnant silence […..] Only then would the Hamas commanders realise what had happened. Rather than the global media focusing upon Israel’s hideous retaliation, and nightly displaying the broken bodies of women and children. Rather than the streets of the world’s capitals being filled with pro-Palestinian demonstrators calling for the death of the Jews. Rather than remaining safely hidden behind a curtain of civilian blood, Hamas would realise, with a deathly chill, that the whole world was staring in horror and disgust, not at Israel – but at them.

My curse as a political writer – if curse it be – is an ability to view the constantly unfolding human drama from multiple perspectives; to be able to stand, as it were, on both sides of the wire. Where did it come from, this dangerous faculty for promiscuous empathy? I’ve thought long and hard about this and decided, predictably, that it came from a book.

No, not the Bible, but from a book of extraordinary photographs and wonderful quotations from writers and peoples from all over the world. Published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, The Family of Man made me a leftist. Not by persuading me of the correctness of an ideology or religion, but by revealing to me the sad and beautiful continuities of the human species – the human family. The book also made me the enemy of all those who would smash those continuities by setting one part of the human family against another. An addiction to which the extreme Left has fallen prey with a fervour more than equal to that of the extreme Right. Indeed, political extremism, like the mythical serpent, Ouroboros, seems driven, ineluctably, to devour itself.

The Family of Man is a glorious hymn to human equality, but, more than that, it is a clarion call to human freedom. Because equality, unleavened by liberty, is a broken piano, an unstrung harp; upon which the songs of fraternity will never be played.

And that’s it. The best I can offer to those who have been telling lies about Christopher T.

I very much doubt that it will be sufficient to get the people’s commissars off my case.

If it is a crime to want to build the nation of Aotearoa-New Zealand out of the dreams of all its people, then I must plead guilty. Likewise, if it was wrong to recoil from the horrors of 7 October as forcefully as we daily recoil from the crucifixion of Gaza, then I was wrong. If it is a crime to understand the Jews’ need to build a home of their own since, as History has amply demonstrated, they are not safe in anybody else’s, then convict me. Convict me, too, if it is “antisemitic” to understand the longing of the Palestinian to, at last, insert the key in the lock of his family’s bullet-scarred front door, and return home.

To my faceless, Kafkaesque judges, I offer these words. They were written by the English jurist, writer, and radical politician, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, and are to be found among the many other wise words included in The Family of Man:

Fill the seats of justice

With good men, not so absolute in goodness

As to forget what human frailty is.

This essay is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blog.