“No Debate!” Means No Democracy.

To The Lamp-Post With Them! Revolutionaries, along with the counter-revolutionaries they inevitably call into existence, are not disposed to engage in rational political discussion with their opponents. Their objective is not to change minds, but to crush bodies. Tragically, those who rule out the possibility of debate, almost always end up ruling out the possibility of democracy as well.

WHAT DOES A POLICY of “No Debate!” produce? What is the nature of the politics that emerges from such a context? When at least one side of a contentious issue acknowledges absolutely nothing in the arguments of its opponents that is worthy of any other response but vituperation and violence – what happens?

As is so often the case, the Weimar Republic offers us some grim lessons. Its very name tells a story. Born in 1918 amidst the chaos that followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the recently proclaimed republic drew up its new constitution in the ancient Thuringian city of Weimar. Why? Because in the German capital, Berlin, running street battles between the Left and the Right made it an unsuitable locale for rational debate.

Extremism also stalked the streets of Bavaria’s largest city, Munich. Students of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich will recognise Munich as the “home” of National Socialism: the city where the Nazi Party’s “Brownshirts” brawled in the beerhalls and roughed up socialists in the streets. Less understood, however, are the political dynamics that made the formation of the Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers) necessary.

Before it became a bastion of the extreme German Right, Munich had, briefly, been in the hands of the extreme German Left. The city was polarised in ways most New Zealanders living in the twenty-first century would struggle to imagine. Those of us old enough to remember the tensions of the 1981 Springbok Tour might have some inkling but, given that no one was killed in those disturbances, not enough. In short, Munich was a city in which “No Debate!” was the rule – on both sides of the barricades.

It was in response to the standard communist tactic of breaking-up the meetings of their ideological opponents that Hitler and his right-hand man, Ernst Rohm (a former soldier and military adventurer with close ties to the upper echelons of the German Army) took steps to recruit young war veterans to guard Nazi venues and beat-off left-wing attackers. (Their trade-mark brown shirts were purchased as a job-lot by Rohm when Germany, having lost its African colonies, found itself in possession of a warehouse full of useless colonial uniforms.)

As the Nazi Party grew in strength, and the Stormtroopers in number, the tables were turned on Munich’s left-wing extremists. Now it was the Brownshirts who were breaking-up the meetings of communists and social-democrats, or gathering outside left-wing venues to menace and harass anyone foolhardy enough to attempt entry. The extreme Left, which had pioneered the “No Debate!” tactic against “reactionaries”, now found their earlier disruptions repaid, with interest, by the pistol-packing bully-boys of the extreme Right.

Weimar’s judgement on the extremist policy of permitting “No Debate!” with ideological opponents is a harsh one. It drives political groups further and further apart, and makes any kind of resolution of political differences impossible. Deployed against one side, it will be taken up with vengeful alacrity by the other. Political polarisation deepens, and the civil political discourse upon which democracy depends retreats ever further from the public square. Moreover, as the fate of the Weimar Republic makes tragically clear: what the Left starts, the Right is happy to finish.

And the point of this history lesson is – what?

Simply, that the current policy of trans-gender activists to countenance “No Debate!” with feminists apprehensive about how the proposed amendments to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act might impact on the rights of women and girls, has generated an astonishing level of political vituperation – up to and including repeated efforts to deny their opponents both the freedom of expression and the freedom to assemble peacefully.

Just how vicious this “No Debate” fight has become was illustrated when the Otago Daily Times published an advertisement submitted by the Stand Up For Women group. By agreeing to carry SUFW’s message – the dictionary definition of “woman” – the newspaper exposed itself to bitter and sustained attack from trans-gender activists on social media. By allowing their enemies (for that is how “trans-exclusionary” feminists are perceived) to define the meaning of woman, the ODT was accused of taking up position on the wrong side of history.

By upholding freedom of speech and facilitating civil democratic debate, however, the ODT has shown its understanding of history’s “wrong side” to be both deeper and stronger than its critics’.

This essay was originally published in the Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 September 2021.

Making Plans

In Stormy Seas: Green Party co-leader, Russel Norman addresses the EPMU's "Jobs Crisis Summit" on Friday, 12 October 2012. The joint decision of NZ First, the Greens and Labour to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the condition of the manufacturing sector was one of the few hopeful outcomes of the union-organised gathering.

THEY CAME TOGETHER in an atmosphere of near panic. Factories were closing their gates and thousands of laid-off workers were joining the ranks of the unemployed.  In the face of global financial catastrophe the political party ostensibly devoted to protecting the interests of working people was in the grip of a peculiar immobilism – unable or unwilling to take resolute action.

 

A special “Crisis Congress” was convened by the largest of the country’s trade unions to debate a recovery plan devised by three of the labour movement’s leading economists. Entitled “Restructuring the Economy” it called for direct and massive government intervention to mobilise idle resources and get the nation back to work.

 

To the utter dismay of the trade unions the leading economic spokesperson of the largest left-wing party refused to back the plan.

 

A few months later that same party suffered a crushing electoral defeat.

 

This could be a description of recent political developments in just about any country of the developed world. But the story isn’t recent. It happened over eighty years ago in Weimar Germany. The metalworkers’ union’s “Crisis Congress”, at which its radical restructuring plan was presented, took  place in April 1931. Two years later Adolf Hitler’s National-Socialists were in power. By 1938 the Nazi’s own (very similar) programme of “massive government intervention” had practically eliminated unemployment and confirmed Hitler as Germany’s saviour.
 

 

LAST FRIDAY, Trevor Bolderson, a coal-miner from the West Coast, rose to his feet and asked: “What are you going to do for my little town of Greymouth?” His question was directed at Winston Peters from NZ First, Russel Norman from The Greens and Labour’s finance spokesperson, David Parker. The venue was the “Jobs Crisis Summit” organised by Mr Bolderson’s trade union, the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU). Like the German workers of eighty years ago, he too was looking for salvation.

 

All he got were evasions and promises.

 

The assembled politicians would only tell him what he and his workmates already knew. That the lay-offs of Solid Energy’s administrative and mining employees must be understood in the context of the Government’s plans to partially privatise the state-owned energy sector.

 

No one was willing to give Mr Bolderson an unequivocal commitment to re-opening the Spring Creek Mine. No one spoke of state ownership offering employees and their unions a greater role in managing New Zealand’s energy resources. No one denounced the madness of mothballing a highly productive coal mine and laying-off its highly skilled workers when international demand for its top-grade product is certain to recover as China’s stock-piles dwindle.

 

That the Greens might be wary of promoting coal-mining is understandable (although someone should ask them if they’re also happy to do without the high-grade steel Spring Creek’s coal makes possible). NZ First could also be forgiven for not being the loudest promoter of state-ownership. But Labour, the party to which Mr Bolderson’s EPMU is affiliated, should have been able to offer something more hopeful than Mr Parker’s declaration that he “could not promise that every mine could be kept open”.

 

Returning to the West Coast, Mr Bolderson will be able to tell his EPMU brothers and sisters that the three parties represented at the Jobs Crisis Summit have undertaken to conduct a parliamentary inquiry into the manufacturing sector’s problems.

 

“The crisis in manufacturing is hammering communities from South Auckland to Bluff, from Kawerau to Greymouth”, Labour’s leader, David Shearer, stated in a media release distributed after the Summit. “The future of our country depends on a modern manufacturing sector that creates better jobs and higher wages to keep Kiwis in New Zealand.” This could only be achieved, he suggested, if political parties worked together.

 

Certainly, the sight of the leaders of the three major Opposition parties all lined up behind the same table is a hopeful sign for New Zealand’s beleaguered working- and middle-class voters. Mr Bolderson, along with the men and women who used to do the forty thousand jobs that the manufacturing sector has shed since 2008, can only benefit from more political co-operation among the National-led Governments’ opponents.

 

Not so hopeful, however, are the extraordinarily modest demands being advanced by the EPMU. The Union’s national secretary, Bill Newson, listed these as: action to bring down the high New Zealand dollar; a government procurement policy which favours domestic producers; and direct Government support for manufacturing enterprises facing imminent down-sizing or closure. As an experienced union negotiator, Mr Newson must know that modest demands elicit modest responses.

 

If New Zealand’s labour movement is to fare better than its German counterpart of eighty years ago, then not only must it formulate an equally radical plan for “massive state intervention” and democratic restructuring of our economy, but also ensure that Labour, the peoples party, commits itself, body and soul, to making it happen.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 16 October 2012.

Dismissing Democracy

Grim Precedent: In this 1933 Punch cartoon, Adolf Hitler is carried to power on the shoulders of President Paul von Hindenburg (Left) and Chancellor Franz von Papen (Right). By dismissing Prussia's social-democratic state government in July 1932, Papen struck a fatal blow against the beleaguered Weimar Republic. Couldn't happen here? Think again.

DIE STRASSE FREI, dem braunen batallionen! Die strasse frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann! Clear the streets for the brown battalions! Clear the streets for the Stormtroopers!

The brutal lyrics of the National Socialist anthem, the Horst Wessel Leid, echoed off the walls of the tenements, warehouses and deserted factories of "Red Altona".

Perched on the rooftops of Hamburg’s most staunchly left-wing working-class suburb, communist sharpshooters took aim at the front ranks of the vast, 6,000-strong column of brown-shirted marchers.

It was Sunday, July 17th 1932 and the National Socialist German Workers Party was making good on its promise to march into the German Communist Party’s electoral heartland. Lying on the western outskirts of the city, along the banks of the River Elbe, Altona fell under the jurisdiction of the German State of Prussia.

Its residents, most of them connected in some way to the docks of the great port city, had vowed to keep the Nazis out. The waterside unions, the Communist Party and its paramilitary organisation the Rotfront (Red Front), and even the moderate Social-Democratic Party, poured their supporters onto the streets in an attempt to create a human stop-bank against the brown tide flowing through Hamburg and towards their poverty-stricken neighborhood.

Between them stood the Prussian Police – as divided in their way as the rest of Germany. Their officers, like the Nazis, despised the democratic Weimar Republic; but the ordinary cops on the beat identified more closely with the working-class neighbourhoods they’d sworn to protect.

No one knew who fired first (both the Stormtroopers and the Red Front were armed) but once the bullets started flying all hell broke loose. By nightfall two Stormtroopers and 16 residents of Altona lay dead and the city’s hospitals were overflowing with hundreds of wounded. The morning papers called it Altonaer Blutsonntag – Altona’s Bloody Sunday.

The civil strife in Altona was exactly what Germany’s right-wing Chancellor, Franz Von Papen, had been waiting for.

Prussia, the largest and most populous state in Germany’s federal republic was under the control of the left-wing social-democrats. Recent elections had weakened the Left’s grip on the state (and its 90,000-strong police force) nevertheless, it still constituted the single biggest obstacle to Papen’s plan to replace Germany’s democratic system with an authoritarian regime dominated by the nationalist Right. So long as Prussia and its blue-coated Schupos stood firm for the beleaguered Weimar Republic, it had a chance.

Papen went to see the aged German President, Paul von Hindenburg. The German Federal Government, he declared, had lost all confidence in the Prussian State Government. For the safety of the German people, he advised, the ineffectual Prussian Administration must be sacked and replaced with a government-appointed commissioner.

The President, using his emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, dutifully signed a decree dismissing Prussia’s social-democratic ministers. Martial Law was declared and Prussia’s police were placed under federal command.

It was a blow from which the Weimar Republic never recovered. Six months later President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor.

Couldn’t happen here? It already had.

Throughout the "Angry Autumn" of 1932, massive civil disorder had convulsed New Zealand’s major cities. The right-wing coalition government of the day responded with the Public Safety Conservation Act – a draconian piece of legislation which essentially empowered the New Zealand Governor-General to suspend democratic government until such time as the Prime Minister advised him to restore it.

Fearful that the passions aroused by the Dunedin, Auckland and Wellington riots would spill-over into the General Election scheduled for 1934, the right-wing government of George Forbes and Gordon Coates arbitrarily extended the life of the 24th Parliament by 12 months.

Nineteen years later, the Coalition’s successor, the National Government of Sid Holland, used Emergency Regulations issued under the Public Safety Conservation Act to crush the Waterside Workers Union. Basic civil liberties such as freedom of the press and freedom of association were suspended throughout New Zealand for 151 days.

Couldn’t happen again?

On Tuesday, 30 March 2010 the Canterbury Regional Council was dismissed by John Key’s National-led Government and replaced by a commissioner. The council elections scheduled for October 2010 were cancelled.

"Across the board," declared Dr Nick Smith, "there has been a collapse of confidence in Environment Canterbury that has brought about the necessity of this government intervention."

Franz von Papen could not have put it better.

This essay was first published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 16 April 2010.