For the Self-Loathing Left, Charity Definitely Does NOT Begin At Home.

The Ill Wind’s Beneficiary: George Galloway’s Rochdale by-election victory will make not one whit of difference to the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza. He will be despised by virtually the whole of the British Establishment, including the overwhelming majority of his parliamentary colleagues. Aside from making speeches in front of evermore bloodthirsty assemblies of Israel’s enemies, Galloway will have little to offer the people of his constituency, or the broader labour movement. 

GEORGE GALLOWAY’S STUNNING VICTORY in Rochdale has provoked a sharp response from leftists whose primary analytical focus remains socio-economic. Galloway turned the by-election into a referendum on the two main British political parties’ stance on the war in Gaza. Successfully exploiting the fact that 30 percent of the Rochdale electorate (located on the periphery of Greater Manchester) is Muslim, Galloway secured 40 percent of the votes cast.

A minority of leftist commentators lamented the fact that the immediate needs of the working-class people of Rochdale had been superseded by the needs of the Palestinians. Galloway’s win has, however, been hailed as a triumph by the sort of leftist who no longer sees white workers as a progressive force. For those who do, Rochdale isn’t worth the fuss all these “progressives” are making of it.

Too harsh? Not at all. Galloway’s victory will make not one whit of difference to the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza. He will be despised by virtually the whole of the British Establishment, including the overwhelming majority of his parliamentary colleagues. Aside from making speeches in front of evermore bloodthirsty assemblies of Israel’s enemies, Galloway will have little to offer the people of his constituency, or the broader labour movement. There are precious few red flags to be found amongst the thousands of Palestinian flags being brandished by anti-Israel demonstrators. And those that do appear are not announcing an English revolution.

Not that New Zealand has any need of a George Galloway to defend the Palestinian cause in its Parliament – not with the Green Party of Aotearoa so willing to do the job. New Zealand’s Labour Party, in sharp contrast to its British counterpart, is only marginally less supportive of Palestine than the Greens. Meanwhile, Te Pāti Māori has been quick to link the Palestinians’ fight against “racism” and “colonialism” with their own.

That a majority of New Zealanders stand with Israel in its war against Hamas, daunts not one of this country’s “left-wing” parties. On this issue, as on so many others dear to the hearts of “progressive” Kiwis, there is no room for dissidence; no possibility of debate.

How did the New Zealand Left come to abandon the politics of class, in favour of expressing unquestioning solidarity with emphatically non-progressive religious/political movements in far-off lands – and why? The following comparison may help to clarify at least some of the issues in play.

The Destiny Church is a fundamentalist Christian organisation pursuing a radical right-wing political agenda. It recruits most of its followers from the indigenous poor, to whom it offers practical, as well as spiritual, assistance. Its religious doctrine is theologically conservative, militantly patriarchal and virulently homophobic. Brian Tamaki, the Destiny Church’s charismatic leader, is constantly striving to win political power. His objective is to acquire the means to enforce what he believes to be the will of God upon a nation of unrepentant atheists, apostates and sinners.

Destiny’s pursuit of political power has been singularly unsuccessful. His parties’ share of the Party Vote in successive elections has hovered around 1 percent. Tamaki’s uncompromising religious fanaticism does not sit well with New Zealand’s largely secular electorate. Certainly, no one describing themselves as a leftist would ever consider voting for Tamaki’s religious/political enterprises.

Why, then, are so many leftists coming out on the streets in support of a Palestinian religious/political regime drawn from a movement bearing a more than passing resemblance to Brian Tamaki’s? Hamas is theologically conservative in its interpretation and application of the Muslim faith. It, too, is militantly patriarchal and virulently homophobic in its socio-cultural attitudes. It has also pursued political power relentlessly to restore spiritual order and punish the unfaithful. The fundamental difference between these two movements is that Destiny remains politically powerless, while Hamas has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007.

All those “progressives” spluttering and guffawing at this comparison, should consider this follow-up question. If New Zealand was occupied by what its people considered an alien nation, a nation which New Zealand’s secular resistance movement, in spite of plentiful military and financial support, had consistently failed to defeat, how confident could they be that the passionate certainties of a body like the Destiny Church would continue to be rejected by a majority of voters?

Not confident at all, is the honest answer. Except Western “progressives” would never submit to the rule of such a government. Their innate sense of superiority, and their lofty disdain for the credulous and the ignorant, would prevent them supporting such a movement – unless, of course, it was a movement located in a country far enough away for them not to have to worry too much about the manner in which its people are governed.

The truth is that it’s not the people, or the nature of their government, or even the fact that they are suffering, that engages the western progressive, it’s the identity of the nation, or nations, inflicting the suffering. If the nation inflicting pain and suffering on the Palestinians was an Arab nation, a Muslim nation, would hundreds-of-thousands of westerners be marching in protest? After all, while tens-of-thousands of Gazans are dying at the hands of the IDF, similar numbers of Sudanese Christians are being shot and starved by their fellow citizens. Who is chanting and waving flags for them? 

Not many, if any. Because, it isn’t death and suffering that western progressives are concerned about, it’s who’s to blame. If the pain isn’t being inflicted by human-beings like themselves, upon human-beings emphatically unlike themselves, then really, they’re not that interested.

Where is the international movement against the oppression of women in Afghanistan to equal the international movement that emerged to fight the oppression of Blacks in South Africa? There is no such movement. Why, because those responsible for oppressing Afghan women and girls are defiantly misogynistic, murderously homophobic, Islamist fanatics. If only they were Americans or Europeans! Then it would be a very different story!

Can it really be that simple? Is it simply a matter of the Western Left’s overwhelming self-loathing? Having failed to change their own societies – doubtless because “their” workers were too fat and happy to bother, or, more likely, too culturally conservative to see revolution as anything other than a mortal danger to all but the most unpleasant kinds of human-being – did the Western Left simply decide to stop cheering for the “genocidal” cowboys, and start rooting for the “colonised” Native Americans?

Or, in George Galloway’s case – the Palestinians.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 4 March 2024.

The Man In The Black Hat.

Hatless On The Steps Of Parliament: Brian Tamaki is proof that not all Maori fall on the radical, left-wing, progressive side of politics. Just as many are to be found on the Right. That is as true today as it was eighteen years ago when Tamaki led his first march on Parliament.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I came across this column quite by accident while searching for information on another matter altogether. It was written about a certain evangelical gentleman of sinister mien, whose antics are still discombobulating liberals an astonishing eighteen years after these words were written. I didn’t know whether to laugh, or cry, at how very little has changed since late-August 2004.

MY OLD MATE PETE left high school before I did and got himself a job at the General Motors warehouse in Upper Hutt. This was thirty-odd years ago, when New Zealand had a real labour shortage, and well-paid labouring jobs were everywhere.

Pete would regale me with all kinds of stories about the people who worked alongside him in the sprawling GM complex, but there’s only one that has withstood the vicissitudes of thirty years. The sight of the Destiny Church marching through Wellington streets brought it all back: the story of Pete’s workmate - Lance.

Lance was a big Māori guy who claimed to be a Vietnam vet. Pete was never quite sure if Lance was telling him the truth, but he liked listening to his war stories anyway. The other thing Lance liked to talk about – apart from Vietnam and the army – was politics. Not “normal” politics – he had no time for National or Labour or even Social Credit. No, Lance was into a weird, far-right mixture of politics and religion. The book he swore by was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth.

An incipient lefty, like me, Pete was spellbound by Lance’s radical right-wing riffs. One in particular made a lasting impression. “When we come to power,” Pete remembered Lance declaring, “we’re going to liberate the police, and police the liberals.”

People talk about “Māori radicals”, tino rangatiratanga and the Treaty of Waitangi, and it sets off all kinds of political depth charges in New Zealand’s collective memory. We think of Syd Jackson and Nga Tamatoa, of Hana Te Hemara’s “kill a Pakeha and die a hero” speech, and of the tense stand-offs between Police and protesters at Waitangi throughout the early eighties. We remember, too, that since the 1930s Māori have voted for the Labour Party. Mention Māori politics, and most people think left-wing.

But it ain’t necessarily so. Māori, like so many of the Polynesian peoples whose traditional religions were more or less destroyed through their contact with Christian missionaries in the 19th Century, adopted the conservative moral strictures of the new religion with extraordinary fervour. Christian sexual morality, in particular, fastened heavy chains of guilt around what had been the carefree and sexually polymorphous Polynesian spirit. To this day, the Samoan, Tongan and Fijian churches preside over some of the most sexually intolerant societies on Earth. And the recent comments of New Zealand’s Anglican Archbishop on the subject of homosexuality, suggest that Māori Christians are no less intolerant than their Pacific Island co-religionists.

More worrying still are the affinities many Māori leaders have indicated for the rigidly hierarchical and undemocratic social structures of their Pacific Island neighbours. Chiefly power is entrenched in both the Fijian and the Tongan constitutions – to the ultimate disadvantage of Tongan “commoners” and Fijian Indians. The Fijian Methodist Church openly endorses and supports the political claims of this indigenous Fijian aristocracy, and, to its eternal disgrace, failed to condemn either of the Fiji coups.

Add this strong affinity for aristocratic political organisation to a deeply conservative Māori Christianity, and then mix in the powerful historical legacy of a social system in which warriors wielded enormous cultural power, and the resulting socio-political profile is anything but “progressive”. Indeed, conservative Christian Māoridom is a place where men like Lance – not to mention Brian Tamaki – can strut their stuff with far more self-assurance than any Māori radical.

So, when I saw the footage of thousands of Destiny Church members marching down Lambton Quay on Monday afternoon, I couldn’t help recalling Lance’s promise to “police the liberals”, nor the strange millenarian fantasies drawn from his Late Great Planet Earth. I wondered if he was there, somewhere in the midst of it all, and whether this tightly disciplined movement, with its supremely confident and charismatic leader, represented everything he – and thousands of conservative working-class Māori like him - had been waiting for since 1973.

Some people – dear, brave Georgina Beyer among them – heard in Monday’s noisy display of fierce racial pride, aggressive political intolerance and fanatical religious belief, frightening echoes of Nuremberg.

But what Brian Tamaki reminded me of was a poem - written by Sam Hunt, and published about the same time that my old mate Pete and I were kicking round the Upper Hutt car plants.

It’s called Beware The Man, and three decades on, I can still recall some of the lines:

Beware the man who tries to fit you out

In his idea of a hat

Dictating the size and colour of it …

… Beware! He’s fitting you

for more than that.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post of Friday, 27 August 2004.

Queen's Pawns Take Bishop.

Suppose They Declared An Apocalypse And Nobody Came: There is much more evidence of Christian faith, hope and charity in Jacinda’s “Team of Five Million”, than there is in any number of false prophets, “Gotcha!” journalists, and “Let the Devil take the hindmost!” business leaders.
  

BRIAN TAMAKI’s feelings of disappointment must have been overwhelming. Looking down from the steps of the Auckland Museum at the 800-1,000 people who turned up to his anti-lockdown rally, the would-be national messiah’s most vivid impression could only have been one of empty space. Where were they? The tens-of-thousands of angry Auckland citizens he had felt quite certain would answer his call? Where was the great sea of human-beings whose roars of support he’d imagined washing over him like the love of God? What had gone wrong?

It is important to remember when dealing with Tamaki that his political instincts are, like his Destiny Church, strong, few and poor. This is, after all, the same man who, in the run-up to the 2005 General Election, was absolutely convinced that his newly-founded Destiny NZ Party would receive hundreds-of-thousands of votes. In vain did more seasoned observers of politics warn him that anything over 1 percent of the Party Vote would be a small miracle. He was having none of it. God was on his side. What God gave him, however, was 0.62 of the Party Vote.

Most people would have drawn the obvious lesson from such a debacle – and quit while they were behind. But Brian Tamaki is not most people. After fifteen years, he and his wife, Hannah, were ready to try again. Predictably, to everyone except Mr and Mrs Tamaki, Vision NZ fared even worse than Destiny NZ at the ballot box. Its share of the Party Vote was just 0.15 percent. Across the entire country fewer than 5,000 people were willing to give Hannah and her visionaries the tick. God’s messages are nothing if not clear!

And still “Bishop” Tamaki perseveres. Still, the visions come of the masses answering his clarion call to rise in rebellion against the manifest sins of this fallen, godless world. (Of course, if the world truly is fallen and godless, then expecting a big turnout against its sinfulness is straining Christian hopefulness to its limits!)

It has yet to dawn on Tamaki that his eschatology is all wrong. If the gospels make anything at all clear, it is that, on the highway to Hell, the traffic is always bumper-to-bumper. In Christian theology, however, the off-road track to salvation has always required a spiritual four-wheel-drive – “and few there be that find it”. Rather than inspiring him, Tamaki’s dreams of huge crowds shouting his name should terrify him. Theologically, they are likely to hail (heil?) from a location well to the south of the Pearly Gates!

Ironically, it is precisely this Christian conviction that “many are called, but few are chosen” that salves the consciences of religiously-inspired anti-vaxxers.

As anyone familiar with the Book of Revelation knows, the imminence of Christ’s second coming is attested to by the rise and rise of an all-powerful totalitarian regime presided over by the Antichrist. More and more will be demanded of the Antichrist’s hapless victims – until they are wholly corrupted and damned. Only a tiny handful of believers will find the moral courage to resist Satan’s lies. Persecuted and martyred for their faith, they will be God’s chosen few. His soul survivors.

So, you see, it really isn’t that big a jump from the Book of Revelation to Facebook. From defying the Antichrist, to refusing to submit to Jacinda’s jabs. Especially when being a member of a tiny, irksome minority is not seen as proof of ethical imbecility, but of moral superiority. If only more people would “do their own research” then they, too, could be saved.

For those who prefer to stay out of rabbit-holes, however, Tamaki and his ilk pose some particularly thorny problems.

A great many Aucklanders watched their television screens with mounting fury on Saturday evening (2/10/21). Why were these people being allowed to break the Covid regulations with seeming impunity? What was the point of following the rules, and being a decent, conscientious citizen, when these fools were flouting the law under the very noses of the Police – and getting away with it? Why were people being allowed to protest in a time of Covid?

The simple answer to that question may well be that, in a time of Covid, the Police are too thinly-stretched to shut down a large protest. Faced with the prospect of mass illegality, the usual Police practice is to bolster local numbers with officers drawn from other parts of the country. In a time of Covid, however, moving large numbers of people around the country is fraught with considerable epidemiological risk. With regional borders closed, the call on Police resources is further amplified by the need to maintain effective check-points. The Auckland Police were also required to maintain their presence at the city’s MIQ facilities.

Police Commissioner Andy Coster may have had no choice except to “negotiate” with Tamaki. Rather than open confrontation, he may have opted for shrewd calculation. If he could extract promises from Tamaki (such as maintaining social distancing and wearing face-masks) which his ill-disciplined followers subsequently failed to honour, it would play out much better for the Police than supplying protest organisers with disturbing images of Police officers forcibly detaining Tamaki, and others, which the “Bishop” and his backers could later exploit for propaganda purposes. After all, the public’s initial shock and dismay at Police inaction could easily be assuaged if, as soon as Tamaki’s followers were safely dispersed, the man himself was very publicly arrested and charged.

That barely 24 hours after his first, Tamaki was publicly promising to hold more rallies, strongly suggests that he and his advisers were, indeed, thoroughly disappointed with the outcome of Saturday’s effort. The low turnout (remove Tamaki’s loyal congregation, and the number of non-Destiny protesters plummets to around the 200 mark) indicates a population which, in spite of his own, and the Right’s, best efforts to stir-up mass dissatisfaction with the Government’s handling of the pandemic, remains steadfast in its determination to keep the Covid faith.

Bruised and battered by events though Aucklanders (and now the people of the Waikato) may be. Frightened by the Delta variant’s stubborn refusal to lie down and die, though the rest of the country has become, there is much more evidence of Christian faith, hope and charity in Jacinda’s “Team of Five Million”, than there is in any number of false prophets, “Gotcha!” journalists, and “Let the Devil take the hindmost!” business leaders.

In the end, Tamaki’s disappointing rally was, curiously reassuring. Let’s not forget that the last time the Auckland Domain hosted a mass political gathering, it saw 20,000 Aucklanders turn out to reaffirm their Prime Minister’s “They Are Us” defence of New Zealand’s devastated Muslim community. While the latest Census figures confirm that New Zealand is no longer a Christian nation, its citizens’ refusal to be moved by sly political sophistry and cheap religious theatrics proves that they have not forgotten its founder’s redemptive message.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 4 October 2021.

The Tamakis Quest For Dominion: More “Handmaid’s Tale”, Less “Modern Family”.

Second Time Lucky? Perhaps it was the abject failure of his Destiny NZ Party (2003-2007) which lay behind Brian’s clumsy attempt to relaunch his “brand” by having "Coalition NZ" reach out to those he had so trenchantly attacked in the past. If so, then his strategy is fatally flawed. A leopard is a leopard: red in tooth and claw; so any attempt to pass it off as a pussy-cat is doomed to fail.

WHAT ARE THE TAMAKIS trying to do? Is the “Coalition Party” a serious political project? Or, is it merely another example of the flim-flam for which religious hucksters the world over are notorious? Certainly, Brian and Hannah Tamaki would not be the first evangelical religious pairing to enlist the aid of politics when too many of the seats in their expensive megachurches remain unoccupied.

Even the new party’s name – The Coalition Party – has a flim-flammy ring to it. Coalition of what? Coalition with whom? Nothing we have heard from Brian or Hannah has been helpful in this respect. All we have been told is that the people of New Zealand have had enough. That the political status quo is no longer to their liking. That they are ready for someone to acknowledge their gutsfullness and offer them a heapin’ helpin’ of politics the way they want it.

But what do they want? That’s the question that the Coalition Party has yet to answer.

For a couple of days it looked as though Hannah Tamaki was preparing to place herself at the head of the movement against abortion law reform. Given the deeply conservative social character of Brian Tamaki’s “Dominionist” theology, opposing the Coalition Government’s moves towards decriminalising and (hopefully) liberalising New Zealand’s abortion laws would make perfect sense. And yet, in spite of Hannah’s early reference to “they” wanting to legalise “late-term” abortions, the issue was allowed to slip quietly off the Coalition Party’s agenda.

What about LGBTQI+ rights? For many years, Brian Tamaki has been an outspoken critic of rainbow politics – even, on one memorable occasion, characterising the Christchurch Earthquake as the earth “groaning” under the weight of the LGBTQI+ community’s unrepentant sinfulness. Here, surely, was a constellation of social issues ripe for the Coalition Party’s political exploitation?

But that was when everything turned decidedly strange. Rather than renew his condemnations of LGBTQI+ sinfulness, Brian reached out to the rainbow community. They were invited to join him and the other members of the Destiny Church in a service of mutual forgiveness and reconciliation.

Understandably, a great many members of the rainbow community were unconvinced. Some, suspecting they were being roped into a political stunt, urged a boycott. Could a preacher as historically hostile to non-cis lifestyles as Brian Tamaki: a veritable leopard in the long grass of social intolerance; really change his spots? Most of those gathered under the rainbow’s arc thought not. Even after the Brylcreemed Bishop delivered what sounded like an apology for his previous anti-LGBTQI+ outbursts, their scepticism remained strong. The handful of rainbow activists who had accepted Tamaki’s invitation were subjected to fierce criticism. The fruits of Brian’s outreach appeared to be rancour and division across the rainbow community.

Perhaps that was its purpose?

Whatever Brian was trying to achieve, his wife, Hannah, as leader pro-tempore of the Coalition Party, was still no nearer to defining its mission. This lack of clarity; absence of purpose; cannot continue for too much longer. To launch a new political party is no easy matter. If it is to have the slightest chance of success, such a party must impress upon the nation’s consciousness a very clear idea of what it stands for, and what it proposes to do. Failure to make this impression can only result in even potentially supportive voters turning away in confusion and disappointment. Hannah should know that time is running out.

Her task is made no easier by the signal failure of the Coalition Party’s predecessor, Destiny NZ. Founded by Brian Tamaki in 2003, the party left nothing more than the tiniest of ripples on the surface of New Zealand’s electoral pond. It received just 14,210 votes (0.62 percent) in the 2005 General Election. This lack of voter interest must have come as a crushing blow to Tamaki who, right up until election day, believed that the Lord would deliver dominion into his hand. He disbanded the party in 2007.

Perhaps it was this experience that lay behind Brian’s clumsy attempt to relaunch his “brand” by reaching out to those he had so trenchantly attacked in the past. If so, then his strategy is fatally flawed. A leopard is a leopard: red in tooth and claw; so any attempt to pass it off as a pussy-cat is doomed to fail.

A much more effective strategy would be for the Tamakis to make a virtue of their leopardness. To declare unequivocally that a leopard, red in tooth and claw, is exactly what this country desperately needs to vanquish the regime of sin that is fast driving New Zealand to destruction.

In other words, Brian and Hannah should go full “Handmaid’s Tale”, and forget all about trying to be “Modern Family”.

Such a stance would at least reflect the Tamakis’ authentic theological convictions. They are believers in Dominionism, which Wikipedia defines as: “[A] group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their personal understandings of biblical law. Extents of rule and ways of achieving governing authority are varied.”

Unvarying, however, is the Dominionists’ utter rejection of the longstanding secular principle that matters of religion and politics should be kept separate. As in Gilead, Brian and Hannah would seek to establish a righteous nation, ruled by the godly, whose first duties must be the extirpation of sin and the redemption of sinners.

Achieving that “governing authority” by means of the ballot-box – which is clearly the Tamakis’ preference – requires a political platform with more to offer than covered heads and modest attire. As Poland’s “Law & Justice Party”, and Hungary’s “Fidesz” (both frighteningly successful electoral vehicles) have demonstrated, social conservatism, garnished with fundamentalist Christianity, is not enough. Populist Christian conservatism only succeeds when it is associated with an unwavering commitment to the institutions of the welfare state and unwavering support for the values and living-standards of a beleaguered working-class.

Are Brian and Hannah Tamaki up for that? If they are, then they’d better get their skates on.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 6 June 2019.