The Politics Of Transformation - Warning: TERF Triggering.

The Excluder Excluded: What does it say about the state of identity politics in New Zealand and around the world that if Germaine Greer, the Matriarch of Second Wave Feminism, announced she was intending to participate in the Auckland Pride Parade, then Labour's Manurewa MP, Louisa Wall, would do everything in her power to exclude her?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN that Labour’s Louisa Wall would ban Germaine Greer from the Auckland Pride Parade? What offence could the Matriarch of Second Wave Feminism possibly have committed to merit Wall’s exclusion?

Greer’s “crime” is deceptively innocuous. She refuses to abandon her opinion that human-beings come into this world as either women or men, and that simply declaring oneself to be a man or a woman is insufficient from an evidentiary perspective. Greer believes that gender is a matter of straightforward human biology. That it cannot be an act of will – or surgery.

When BBC Newsnight’s Kirsty Walk challenged her with the question: “If a man has his gender reassigned and outwardly – and he feels, inwardly – he is a woman. In your view can he be a woman or not?” Greer responded, with typical Australian bluntness: “No.” And when Walk observed that, to some people, her reaction might be considered insulting, the 76-year-old scholar replied: “I don’t care. People get insulted all the time. Australians get insulted every day of the week!”

That October 2015 interview contributed hugely to the steadily worsening ideological stand-off responsible for introducing the abbreviation “TERF” – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist – to the vocabulary of progressives around the world. Including, we now know, Louisa Wall, who was secretly recorded telling participants at a recent Pride Parade hui: “My whole thing is that I don’t want any f...ing TERFs at the Pride Parade!”

Wall’s position would appear to be that in the name of inclusion it is necessary to exclude the excluders. The Pride Parade, she says, must never be anything less than a celebration of the whole Rainbow Community. To challenge the right of trans individuals to define their own gender identity constitutes a hateful denial of their human rights. In Wall’s opinion it is vital that TERFs be prevented from disputing those rights.

Greer’s objection to the celebration of Male-to-Female transformers is classic Second Wave Feminist. When BBC Newsnight’s Walk confronted Greer with the example of Caitlyn Jenner, the former football hero and medal-winning Olympic decathlete who later became a glamorous participant in Keeping Up With The Kardashians, she replied: “I think it’s misogynist. I think misogyny plays a really big part in all of this. That a man who goes to these lengths will be a better woman than someone who was just born a woman.”

Greer’s charge of misogyny goes to the heart of the conflict. Here is the author of The Female Eunuch, whose determination that women should embrace their femaleness fully and fearlessly made her a feminist icon for the whole Baby Boom Generation, rebelling angrily against the notion that gender is a fickle, fluid concept. Greer simply will not accept that womanhood is no less a cultural creation than a Versace gown – and just as easily knocked-off.

But, if gender is, indeed, a cultural artefact, then maleness is every bit as artificial as femaleness. What’s more, in a world dominated by aggressive and intolerant upholders of patriarchal values, the covering which males are expected to fasten over and around their bodies resembles much more a suit of medieval armour than it does a Versace gown.

What, therefore, could be more radical – more liberating – than the idea that all those human-beings who feel uncomfortable, confined, oppressed in their suit of armour can simply strip it off and throw it away? Or, conversely, that all those human-beings who long for the reassurance of iron and steel have every right to seek redemption in the armourer’s forge?

“Reject all binary choices!”, declare the singers of this new freedom song. “We can become the people our hearts have always told us we were.”

The Marxists would wearily interject that they have been here before. That human-beings become what the exigencies of existence require them to be. Hunters/gatherers, warriors/wives, workers/homemakers. The computers that define post-industrial societies may follow the logic of zeroes and ones, but the civilisation they are rapidly bringing into existence will have less to do with either/or dichotomies than any of the civilisations which preceded it. Hitherto, the chief preoccupation of human communities has been with survival. The new age which beckons to us from beyond the great test of climate change may be preoccupied with becoming.

The conservative clings to what was and what works. The radical reaches for what s/he yet may be.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 November 2018.

From A Table By The Window - A Short Story About The Huawei Decision.

“Ever the idealist, dear boy. You surely didn’t expect this government to tell all those lovely people from British Intelligence and the FBI, who just happened to be in town this week, that, in spite of their oh-so-discretely conveyed objections, Spark’s deal with Huawei would be going ahead.”

HOW MANY YEARS has it been, I asked myself, since I climbed these stairs? That the little Wellington café was still in business after more than 40 years struck me as a miracle. And where better to meet the man who could still remember the events of 40 years ago – not least because he was there, in the thick of them?

He was waiting for me at the table window, his fingers moving slowly over the smooth face of his device. Two full glasses of red wine glowed dully in the wet afternoon light. The muted transactions of Willis Street provided a sibilant soundtrack.

“There you are”, he said, sweeping the information from his screen and placing the device carefully on the table. “Sit down, dear boy, sit down. I took the liberty of ordering a very nice Pinot Noir.”

“Perfect,” I replied, draping my damp jacket over the back of my chair. “I suppose that phone of yours hasn’t stopped ringing since the announcement?”

He smiled wanly. “Ringing, dear boy, ringing? Nothing rings anymore. Our devices beep, or chirrup, or play a bar or two of something, but they do not ring – much too indiscrete.”

“Discretion being the word-of-the-day”, I replied. “As in ‘discretion’ being the better part of valour – a quality of which this government appears to be in short supply.”

“Ever the idealist, dear boy. You surely didn’t expect this government to tell all those lovely people from British Intelligence and the FBI, who just happened to be in town this week, that, in spite of their oh-so-discretely conveyed objections, Spark’s deal with Huawei would be going ahead.”

“Forgive me, but I was under the impression that it was the Government of New Zealand’s job to define the parameters of its ‘national security’ – not the FBI’s. Does the continuing economic strength and welfare of the country not fall under the heading of ‘national security’? Or, making sure that the goodwill of the country’s largest trading partner is retained, and maybe even enhanced? I thought that might also be a matter of ‘national security’? Clearly, I was wrong.”

“If that was what you thought, dear boy, then, yes, you were wrong. Very wrong. The idea that one of the Five Eyes might sign up to a deal that could put all the other eyes at risk has absolutely no feathers, dear boy, none at all. It is never going to fly.”

“Ah, yes, the Five Eyes. A vast electronic eavesdropping network dedicated to plucking all manner of classified information out of the air and sending it on, sight unseen, to the United States of America. The Five Eyes. An operation whose sole purpose is to steal other people’s secrets. This is the outfit that’s demanding we jeopardise our economic and diplomatic relationship with the Chinese because the Chinese might use their state-of-the-art 5G technology to do what? Oh, yes, that’s right – to steal other people’s secrets!”

“The most important noun in those impassioned sentences, dear boy, was United States of America. You named the most powerful nation on the planet. Knowing when you did so that what the most powerful nation on the planet wants, the most powerful nation on the planet gets. And, right now, what it wants is to make sure the nation aiming to take its place is not in a position to weaponise ‘The Internet of Things’ against it.”

“You’ve been reading to many thrillers.”

“Actually, dear boy, it’s you who hasn’t been reading enough. Cyber-warfare is the greatest threat we face. Why? Because, in just a few years, the interconnectedness of the world and the breath-taking speed at which information travels will confer upon the technology organising its distribution the power to simply shut down the economic, social and political systems of its owner’s rivals. What would you do if you went to the nearest ATM and discovered that every one of your bank accounts had been deleted? That all your money had gone? Poof! Just disappeared? What if the same thing had happened to everybody else’s bank accounts? How does a government ‘fix’ a problem like that?”

“Okay – suppose I buy into this sci-fi scenario. It still boils down to Lenin’s fundamental question: ‘Who? Whom?’ Someone’s got to be in the omnipotent position you describe. So, what you’re actually telling me is that the omnipotent one cannot under any circumstances be China. Which is just another way of saying that it has to be the United States.”

“It’s not what I’m saying, dear boy, it’s what the United States is saying.”

“Regardless of the consequences for the economic and social welfare of New Zealanders? Do the Americans and their lickspittles in London and Canberra not understand that Beijing will exact a price for being treated so shabbily by Wellington?”

“Of course they do. They just don’t care. Why don’t they care? Because they know that anything Beijing decides to do will take time to manifest itself in a way that impacts upon the ordinary person in the street. Anything they decide to do to punish a maverick New Zealand government, by way of contrast, will take effect almost immediately. With the Australians acting as their proxies, the Americans can make our economy scream a lot faster than the Chinese. What’s more, in its upper echelons, New Zealand society is so stuffed with US “assets” that the political destabilisation of a recalcitrant government would be over in a matter of weeks, not months.”

“So we just have to sit back and take it – or the Yanks will rip our guts out?”

My companion looked out the window for a moment, taking in the hurrying Willis Street crowds, umbrellas raised against the wind-driven rain, and sipped his wine.

“Do you know, dear boy, that it wasn’t so very far from here that Bill Sutch was apprehended. All his life he had struggled to find a way for New Zealand to strike out on its own: to cut herself free from the apron strings of Mother England; to step out from Uncle Sam’s shadow. The problem he was never able to solve was, how? How does a tiny country escape the clutches of an imperial superpower? In the end, the best answer he could come up with was: by enlisting the help of another superpower. Do you remember, dear boy, how that story ended? The same delightful outfit that has been entertaining the boys and girls from MI6, and the FBI were on to poor old Bill in a flash. They put him on trial. Crushed his spirit. Within twelve months he was dead – and so was the government he had tried to help. Not a happy ending, dear boy. And not a course of action I’d recommend – especially not to a government as callow and inexperienced as this one.

Now it was my turn to stare out into the rain. To take in the purposeful haste of the capital city’s busy ants.

“More wine, dear boy, and a plate of the chef’s truly outstanding club sandwiches. In forty years they, at least, haven’t changed.

This short story was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Friday, 30 November 2018.

Winston Keeps His Pledge To The Small Businesses Of Small-Town New Zealand.

Class Warrior: Like his predecessors in the Social Credit Political League, the NZ First leader is acutely aware that the small rural towns and provincial cities of New Zealand are hotbeds of class conflict. Not simply the classic Marxist conflict of capitalist versus proletarian, but also the no less bitter conflict between large and small businesses. Indeed, it is possible to characterise life in provincial New Zealand as a constant struggle of the particular against the general: of individual agency against institutional power.

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that the most accomplished class warrior to emerge from the struggle to improve New Zealand’s labour laws would be Winston Peters? No one else with a dog in this fight saw the class issues at stake as clearly as Winston Peters and NZ First. Not the employers; not the unions; and certainly not the Labour, National or Green parties. Peters and his colleagues can walk away from this debate as the undisputed champions of small provincial business. The electoral consequences of NZ First’s decisive intervention should not be underestimated.

There is a strong temptation on the part of left-wing activists in the major metropolitan centres to write off the people of the provinces as a bunch of undifferentiated reactionaries. To your average Labour or Green activist, provincials are racist, sexist and homophobic “rednecks”. The sort of people who still see nothing wrong with sending a float filled with people in blackface down the main street of their little town. Hopeless and irredeemable, these voters are not worth wooing – unless you’re Stuart Nash. (And the less said about Stuart Nash the better!)

Winston Peters knows better. Like his predecessors in the Social Credit Political League, the NZ First leader is acutely aware that the small rural towns and provincial cities of New Zealand are hotbeds of class conflict. Not simply the classic Marxist conflict of capitalist versus proletarian, but also the no less bitter conflict between large and small businesses. Indeed, it is possible to characterise life in provincial New Zealand as a constant struggle of the particular against the general: of individual agency against institutional power.

People living in large cities have a bad habit of romanticising small towns. They like to think that in a place where everybody knows their neighbours life must be wonderful. The reality is almost the exact opposite. In a small community the social hierarchy is much more sharply exposed. Yes, everybody knows their neighbours – but they also know exactly where they sit in the social pecking-order. Fun, one imagines, if you are positioned at or near the top. Wretched, if you are located near the bottom.

The local lawyers and accountants, for example, are perfectly placed to know exactly how well, or how badly, their neighbour’s are doing. The town’s doctors and teachers are similarly well-positioned. If knowledge is power, then these provincial professionals have a lot to play with.

The senior managers of nationwide chains, salarymen who will not lose their houses if their executive decisions turn out badly, may look down their noses at the senior bureaucrats employed by local and central government but, in truth, their day-to-day jobs are distinguished by the same petty protocols; the same demands from above. Well remunerated, but subjected to unceasing “performance reviews”, many opt to take out their frustrations on those further down the totem pole.

Not that the owners of the town’s small businesses would include themselves among the pen-pushers’ inferiors. In their own eyes – and often in the eyes of their employees – they are town’s true heroes.

Independent of spirit, willing to have a crack, contemptuous of those whose only purpose in this world appears to be making the lives of people like themselves as difficult as possible, it is difficult not to admire these small businesspeople.

It is no mean feat to keep a business afloat in the provinces. Notoriously under-capitalised, they all-too-often keep their operations afloat by paying themselves less than their workers. They are no friend of the trade unions with their one-rule-fits-all approach, but neither are they friends of the banks who bleed them dry or the big firms who expect them to submit ridiculously low bids for the jobs they then take their own sweet time paying for.

But without these small business people the towns and cities of provincial New Zealand would die. Their absence is frighteningly easy to spot. Main streets are dead: their shopfronts boarded-up and the real estate agent’s “To Let” signs fading in the sun. The young people those shuttered businesses might have employed have either fled or broken bad. The only signs of life are around the local office of the MSD.

These are the towns NZ First is pledged to restore to economic health. Winston Peters and Shane Jones want those kids in jobs, earning money, dreaming of one day becoming their own boss – just like the man or the woman who took them on under the 90-day rule, to see whether they had what it took, and then employed them permanently when they proved themselves hard-working and trustworthy. The unions can knock on the boss’s door as often as they like – they will find few, if any, takers here.

Of course there are exceptions – but in small-town New Zealand it is more common to find the small employers and their workers united in solidarity against the people who live on the hill. It’s one thing to be paid by the taxpayers; to grow fat on the fees you charge; or draw the salary only a big corporation can afford to pay. It’s quite another to keep the town’s cars and trucks filled up and roadworthy; or to fill the bellies of its inhabitants with decent tucker. All those engaged in small businesses: both their owners and the people who work for them; have taken a bet on themselves. Very often that bet is lost. Fair enough. Making a small business pay has never been easy. All the players ask is that the game stays honest: that the deck isn’t stacked against them.

That is the pledge NZ First made to them – and that is the pledge it has kept. Wages are not always paid in cash. Sometimes they are paid in dreams. By honouring that currency, Winston Peters and NZ First have made the heroes of small-town New Zealand their own.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 29 November 2018.

Where Is The Mass Movement Against Climate Change?

The Way We Were: I was seated in the Auckland Town Hall when Jacinda promised to make climate change her generation’s nuclear-free moment. Like everybody else I roared my approval. But where is the nationwide movement demanding change that matches the extraordinary activism and reach of the Nuclear-Free New Zealand phenomenon.

WHEN JACINDA ANNOUNCED she was having a baby, I was thrilled. What better guarantee could we have of serious government action on the big issues than a prime minister with a tiny and vulnerable child’s future to protect? Well, Neve arrived safely, but the urgent action required to secure her future seems as far away as ever.

I was seated in the Auckland Town Hall when Jacinda promised to make climate change her generation’s nuclear-free moment. Like everybody else I roared my approval. But where is the nationwide movement demanding change that matches the extraordinary activism and reach of the Nuclear-Free New Zealand phenomenon. The latter had a lively presence not only in every major city, but also in every sizable town. The evidence was there for everyone to see as, one after the other, the councils of those towns and cities defiantly declared themselves nuclear-free. Many of those councilors were members of, or strongly supported, the Labour Party.

Just how embedded the nuclear-free movement was in the Labour Party is evidenced by the Fourth Labour Government’s unwillingness to stand in its way. No amount of internal resistance to Rogernomics was able to turn the Lange-Douglas Government from its course. But those same politicians were more willing to face the wrath of Ronald Reagan’s America than the New Zealand peace movement. All Labour’s President, Margaret Wilson, had to do was threaten to convene a Special Conference of the Party to reaffirm Labour’s “No Nukes” policy and the Cabinet rolled over.

But, on the calamitous issue of Climate Change, an issue with as much potential to lay waste human civilisation as an all-out nuclear war, there isn’t the slightest sign of a broad mass movement with the will and the power to force the Coalition Government’s hand. Nor is there the slightest evidence of a well-organised group within the Labour Party itself. No one’s willing to advance the cause of fighting Climate Change from either the stage or the floor of Labour’s annual conferences. In 2018, the members look to the top for inspiration and guidance. On Climate Change, however, they look in vain.

The other thing that’s missing is the sort of grass-roots anti-nuclear education effort that both complimented and drove forward the anti-nuclear movement. New Zealanders researched nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy both individually and in groups. Local libraries ordered in specialist literature. Activists organised public seminars. Voters learned about the futility of civil defence measures and shuddered at the threat of “nuclear winter”. The “experts” thrust forward by the government to justify the status-quo were answered by the peace movement’s own. Against an informed and active citizenry both the National and Labour parties found themselves politically helpless.

If Jacinda is truly determined to make Climate Change her generation’s nuclear-free moment there is plenty she could be doing. For a start, she could use the “bully pulpit” of the prime minister’s office to summon her generation to action. She could fund a nationwide series of “Climate Change Forums” preliminary to the establishment of locally-organised Climate Change action-groups. A “Day of Action” could be announced and every young New Zealander invited to add their body to a nationwide demonstration of their generation’s vital interest in fighting Climate Change.

Within the Labour Party itself the rank-and-file membership could be given official encouragement to debate the best means of addressing Climate Change legislatively. What sort of laws does New Zealand need and in what order should they be introduced? A Special Conference could be called to assess the results and the news media invited to attend every session. The relevant ministers could be required to make themselves available for Q+A sessions. The whole event could be broadcast live on the Internet.

A prime minister determined to make Climate Change her generation’s nuclear-free moment could be doing all of this – and more. By the same token, however, a nation determined to “do something” about Climate Change has no need for guidance from above. The threat of an all-out nuclear exchange between the USA and the Soviet Union, a catastrophe from which no human-being on Earth would emerge unscathed, was all it had taken for hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealanders to commit themselves to making their country nuclear-free. Why, then, hasn’t the threat of the planet becoming uninhabitable by human-beings been enough to mobilise New Zealand citizens in the same way?

Does the answer lie in a simple lack of faith in the ability of any one person – any single generation – to make any kind of difference? When a left-wing populist government declines to keep its promise to oppose the TPPA. When a Green Party Minister of Conservation refuses to protect her country’s pristine water resources. What realistic hope is there then that people’s voices, people’s votes, can make anything like the difference made by the nuclear-free movement of the early 1980s? Have we entered an age when words and gestures are as plentiful as sparrows, and deeds as rare as Hector’s Dolphins?

When, on some unbearably hot day in the future, Neve asks her mother what she had to say about Climate Change, Jacinda will be able to answer: “Heaps!”. But, when her daughter follows-up her first question with a second; when Neve says: “That’s good, Mum, because everyone loved the way you talked. But what I need to know now is – what did you do?” How will Jacinda respond?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 22 November 2018.

The Case Of The Problematic Professor.

Disturber Of Dragons: Were Professor Brady’s antagonists from any other nation but China the problem confronting Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters would not exist. Unfortunately the Peoples Republic of China is New Zealand’s largest trading partner after Australia. Pissing-off China could be extremely injurious to this nation’s economic health.

ANNE-MARIE BRADY presents this government with a rather large problem. Her alleged harassment by agents of Chinese national security has all the makings of a cause celebre. Were Professor Brady’s antagonists from any other nation but China the problem confronting Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters would not exist. One has only to recall Helen Clark’s response to the discovery of an active Israeli spy mission underway on New Zealand soil to appreciate the political capital to be made out of being seen to take the defence of New Zealand sovereignty seriously. Unfortunately for Ardern and Peters, however, the Peoples Republic of China is not Israel – it’s New Zealand’s largest trading partner after Australia. When Israel gets angry it cannot threaten to undermine the New Zealand economy. Pissing-off China, on the other hand, can be extremely injurious to this nation’s economic health.

The latest chapter in the Brady saga, a letter from a group of academics, journalists and activists demanding a more aggressive defence of academic freedom, can hardly have improved the PM’s mood. Her hopes of the whole matter quietly disappearing have been dashed. People want answers – not evasions.

But do “people” have any right to answers in a matter as delicate as this one? Is the public entitled to push aside all the geopolitical and economic factors impinging on their government as if they are of no importance?

Prattling on about being the “critic and conscience” of society is all very well, but when New Zealand’s universities are so dependent on the continuing inflow of international students, is it really all that wise to antagonise one of the largest contributors to this country’s educational export trade? It would be interesting to see how the nation’s vice-chancellors would react if equivalents of Anne-Marie Brady started popping up on their own campuses. Each academic activist launching equally uncompromising attacks against the Peoples Republic. How would all that criticising and conscientising affect their bottom-line I wonder?

And what about all that Chinese investment in New Zealand’s agricultural sector: all those massive milk treatment plants springing up around the provinces; how keen would the government be to see all that brought to an end? How would Shane Jones respond to the loss of so many well-paying jobs? And David Parker, how would he feel when New Zealand’s perishable exports started piling-up on China’s docks? How would Federated Farmers react to a Chinese freeze-out? Or the Dairy Workers Union, for that matter?

New Zealand lives by its agricultural exports - which is why the New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement was so important when the Global Financial Crisis struck. Without it, this country would have had significantly less to come and go on. Chinese consumers saved us from the sort of vicious austerity measures that afflicted the people of the United Kingdom and Greece. The nature of the Chinese system has not changed since 2008. If we were happy then to be given access to the huge Chinese market, are we not happy now? What’s changed?

We all know the answer to that question. What has changed is that the United States is no longer prepared to see China assert its “hard” (military and economic) and “soft” (cultural and propagandistic) power unchallenged. In concert with its principal regional allies, Japan and Australia, the US is pushing back against Chinese expansion into the Pacific – once an American lake but now the location of intense great power rivalry. Try as it might (and it tried very hard under John Key and his foreign minister, Murray McCully) New Zealand is finding it increasingly difficult, in the age of Donald Trump, to keep its distance from this looming fight between the Eagle and the Dragon.

Professor Brady is an acknowledged expert on the production and delivery of Chinese soft power – its “magic weapons”. The good professor is not, however, above advancing a little soft power on her own account. Is it no more than a coincidence that she has been called upon to present her ideas to the Australian parliament during the “China Panic”? Or that her academic articles and speeches are followed closely, and receive considerable approbation, in Washington DC? That the name of Anne-Marie Brady started appearing in our news media at exactly the same moment as the rivalry between the USA and China ratcheted-up several notches – was that nothing more than serendipity?

Much has been made of President Trump’s extraordinary statement concerning America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. What made it extraordinary was its brutal honesty. For once naked American self-interest was presented to the world shorn of its hypocritical vestments. “It’s about America first”, said the President, truthfully. He then informed the world that if putting America’s interests first means turning a blind eye to cold-blooded, state-sanctioned murder, then so be it – that’s what his administration (like all its predecessors) will do.

Jacinda can’t really say “It’s about New Zealand First” – that could be misinterpreted, but if she were to say something similar in defence of her continuing silence vis-à-vis Anne-Marie Brady, then she would earn the respect of Beijing and Washington alike. With considerable relief, the advisers to both President Xi and President Trump would be able to tell their bosses: “This New Zealand prime minister, at least she knows how the game of geopolitics is played.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 27 November 2018.

The Perils Of Inclusion.

Something To Be Proud Of: Inclusion is not without its downside. Once inside the fold, there is a strong temptation to silence dissenting voices. Calling out instances of ongoing discrimination and oppression smacks too much of biting the hand that no longer strikes you. Far better to welcome in all the institutions and businesses so eager, now, to be associated with the rainbow banner. The Pride Parade needs sponsors - not dissidents.

SHOULD WE BE SURPRISED that the rainbow community turned out to be so conservative? That the effort of the Pride Parade board to address the fear so easily triggered by police uniforms has provoked such a swift and devastating backlash? That so many gay and lesbian people appear to have forgotten what it feels like to be labelled, singled-out, trashed and excluded? That so many New Zealanders seem unaware that it is precisely those who dwell furthest away from the blessings of societal acceptance that have the strongest claim to our care and protection?

Something has shifted. In the years separating the Hero Parade from the Pride Parade the straight world’s perception of the rainbow community and the rainbow community’s perception of itself have undergone profound changes. What was once considered wild and transgressive has been made safe. The civic leaders who railed against the Hero Parade’s raunchiness have gone. Until this past fortnight, civic and corporate institutions have been lining up to tell the world how proud they are of Pride.

It raises an important question. Was the “gay lifestyle”, as mainstream New Zealand insisted on calling the non-normative expression of human sexuality; or “queer culture”, as it often described itself; the product of the dominant culture’s repression? Did the amelioration of that repression lead to the well-behaved heterosexuality of the straight world becoming the model for a rainbow community no longer obliged to make virtues out of the vices it had for centuries been accused of embodying?

And was the straight world’s growing acceptance of the rainbow community accelerated by the latter’s demand to be admitted to all of society’s core institutions? Gays and lesbians insisted that they had as much to offer the armed forces and the police as heterosexual citizens. Indeed, there was no occupational grouping, no profession, which would not benefit from opening its doors to the non-straight population. Likewise, the right to marry, raise children, form families and bequeath property should be extended to all citizens regardless of their sexual preferences. What was there to fear or dislike about a community so determined to sign-up to all the world’s conventions?

The watchword, for straights and non-straights alike, was “inclusion”. The revolutionary rhetoric of the years immediately following the Stonewall Riot in New York’s Greenwich Village had been vindicated. The years of watching friends and lovers die of AIDS while the straight world looked on and did nothing had, in the end, brought people of good will to the understanding that pain and grief is universal. That, ultimately, our common humanity trumps our diverse sexuality. It was something to celebrate. Something to be proud of.

Hence the Pride Parade. Hence the sense of elation when institutions like the Police and the Armed Forces signalled their willingness to mouth the watchword. Now, at last, the horrors of the bad old days could be forgotten. The hazing, the beatings, the murders. All the ritual humiliations, perfected over centuries to punish those who failed the tests of church and state. Why dwell upon the history when uniformed members of the rainbow community were willing to march in step with the people their predecessors had persecuted?

Inclusion is not without its downside, however. Once inside the fold, there is a strong temptation to silence dissenting voices. Calling out instances of ongoing discrimination and oppression smacks too much of biting the hand that no longer strikes you. Far better to welcome in all the institutions and businesses so eager, now, to be associated with the rainbow banner – especially when you’re expected to cough-up $150,000 for the privilege of walking down Ponsonby Road. The Pride Parade needs sponsors – not dissidents.

But does that need for the corporate dollar mean that the issues raised by the trans community should simply be ignored? Should the fate of young people locked up in police cells and prisons with, at best, only a grudging acceptance of their gender identification or, at worst, uncaring disregard, be set to one side? Is the treatment meted out to them while the responsibility of Police and Corrections personnel unworthy of consideration?  Do their stories, laced as they are with all the trauma of marginalisation and despair, not count?

The Pride Parade board decided that they did count and voted narrowly to give the word “inclusion” a radical inflection. It was a brave decision – and they are paying a very high price for it. Those who have attempted to defend the board’s decision have been abused and  spat upon by angry supporters of the status quo. In terms of sheer numbers, it would appear that the majority of the rainbow community favour a more conservative definition of inclusion.

How quickly people forget.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 23 November 2018.

If We'd Been Lucky.

The Big IFs: We are so unlucky that it has come to this. Especially when, had things worked out just a little differently we might have had a chance. If Florida’s voters had swung decisively behind Al Gore in the 2000 US Presidential Election. If the Baby Boom Generation hadn’t abandoned their idealism for cycling holidays in France and a renovated kitchen. If the Millennials possessed an attention span just a little bit longer than a goldfish’s. If the Internet hadn’t allowed us all to become so stupid.

NOBODY WANTS TO KNOW. That 150 academics have put their name to a letter urging the government to do something – anything – about  climate change: nobody wants to know. The letter itself is a response to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That report gives the world just 12 years to fundamentally refashion industrial civilisation or face runaway global warming. But, nobody wants to know.

We are so unlucky that it has come to this. Especially when, had things worked out just a little differently we might have had a chance. If Florida’s voters had swung decisively behind Al Gore in the 2000 US Presidential Election. If the Baby Boom Generation hadn’t abandoned their idealism for cycling holidays in France and a renovated kitchen. If the Millennials possessed an attention span just a little bit longer than a goldfish’s. If the Internet hadn’t allowed us all to become so stupid.

Al Gore would almost certainly have got Bin Laden before he got America. (The Democrats recognised Osama as a threat, the Republicans were more focussed on Iraq and Iran.) So, no 9/11. No War on Terror. No invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. A less crazed world. A real chance that the big global players: the USA, the UK, the EU, China, Japan and the Russian Federation might have trusted each other enough to come together around the science and take climate change seriously.

What would that have looked like? Well, if we’d been lucky, the Big Six would have pooled their resources and “internationalised” the fossil fuels industry. The slow and painful process of weaning the world off oil and coal could have begun – unimpeded by the oil industry’s denialist propaganda.

Encouraged by their success, the Big Six might then have embarked on an equally grand international effort dedicated to moving the world towards the adoption of renewable energy. Unburdened by ruinous levels of military spending, the leading economies would have been free to invest billions in the development of sustainable industrial processes.

The effect on the world’s peoples of all this global co-operation in the name of bequeathing a healthy planet to future generations is readily imagined. The audience for the promoters of jihad would have shrunk away to nothing – especially after the Big Six imposed a just territorial settlement on Israel and the Palestinians and then guaranteed the peace that followed. Rather than the disillusionment and despair that followed the world’s horror-filled descent into post-9/11 extremism, the example of the great powers working together would have engendered a global spring of hope.

Global finance would not have been happy but, in the new atmosphere of “can do” internationalism, the nostrums of neoliberalism would have lost much of their persuasive force. “Globalisation” would have acquired a new and extremely positive set of associations and the electorates of the world’s nation-states would have been quick to punish any political party which set its face against the humane and ecologically-informed values of the new era.

The United Nations, now lavishly funded by the Big Six, would not so much have assumed a greater role in global governance as had that role thrust upon it. At long last, the idea of a single world army was no longer being dismissed out-of-hand by the five permanent members of the Security Council. Indeed, driven by the Big Six, a new World Security Force, composed of contingents contributed by all of the UN’s member states, would soon be standing guard over the Pax Humanitas.

Not that there were very many enemies left to fight. With the production of weapons now a strictly controlled UN monopoly, the promotion and extension of human conflict was no longer a paying proposition. Indeed, because we had been lucky all those years before, the commemoration of World War I became the excuse for a very special international undertaking. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month 2018, the last nuclear weapon in the world was decommissioned.

Except, of course, we weren’t lucky. The world has not drawn closer together, it has grown farther apart. In the eighteen years since November 2000 the urgent remedial effort required to slow anthropogenic global warming has not taken place. The scientists see what’s coming. They’re begging us to, please, do something!

But nobody wants to know.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 November 2018.

Making It Through.

When All Else Fails: What if it is in our species’ seemingly indefatigable irrationality that its best hope of surviving climate change is to be found? What if the means of our salvation turns out to be a work of a madman?

CHRISTINE ROSE’s poignant post of 17 November, “Feeling Like A Stranger In A Familiar Land” requires a response more substantial than fatalistic resignation. Tempting though it is to bury oneself in the small delights of everyday life for as long as that avenue of escape remains open, it must be rejected. Something as big as the end of the world as we know it surely merits Dylan Thomas’s unforgettable commandment:

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light

The problem, of course, is science. Unlike the poet and the priest, the scientist who discerns only catastrophe in the data which is placed before him, must disclaim all right to hope. If the data points to the end of the world as we know it, then the only thing a scientist has a right to anticipate is the end of the world. Staring steadily into the dead eyes of the planet’s future is the only honourable scientific response.

For the poet and the priest, however, and all those possessing an artistic and/or religious turn of mind, there is something greater than catastrophe. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Lord of the Rings”, called it “eucatastrophe”.

Ruth Noel, in her book “The Mythology of Middle Earth” explains:

Eucatastrophe is Tolkien’s word for the anti-catastrophic ‘turn’ (strophe in Greek) that characterises fairy stories. The turning occurs when imminent evil is unexpectedly averted and great good succeeds. To Tolkien, tragedy was the purest form of drama, while eucatastrophe, the antithesis of tragedy, was the purest form of fairy story. In [Tolkien’s scholarly article] “On Fairy-Stories”, Tolkien gives the purpose and effect of eucatastrophe: “It does not deny the existence … of sorrow and failure … it denies universal final defeat … giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

In Tolkien’s great trilogy the eucatastrophe comes in the very heart of Mt Doom, where the One Ring is finally destroyed. Interestingly, it is not the hero, Frodo, who makes this happen. At the end of his quest, like so many of the others who have come into possession of the Ring of Power, it betrays him. Were it not for the intervention of Gollum, the Dark Lord would have recovered his ring and darkness would have swallowed Middle Earth forever. It is Gollum’s mad obsession: the recovery of his “Precious”; that saves the day.

If we must put our faith in fairy stories, I hear you say, then our chances of surviving global warming are slim indeed. And yet, if we put our faith in science, then Christine Rose’s bitter-sweet resignation; her “ecological grief” at the inevitable demise of so many living things; becomes the only rational response to the irrationality of humanity’s wilful self-destruction.

But what if it is in our species’ seemingly indefatigable irrationality that its best hope of survival is to be found? What if, like Gollum’s obsessive pursuit of The Precious, the means of our salvation turns out to be a work of a madman?

Just think of the number of novelists whose plots involve the deliberate creation and release of a virus which wipes out 95 percent of the human species. Now imagine the insane billionaire who turns fiction into fact. That would be a eucatastrophe entirely lacking in Tolkien’s compassion, but it is hard to argue that, from the perspective of all the non-human species facing extinction, it would be a eucatastrophe founded in justice.

Scientists would interject here that even were such an event to occur, the warming already unleashed in the planet’s oceans and atmosphere remains irreversible. Life would still be up against it.

They are right, of course, but life on Earth has been up against it before – and so have we. For thousands of years this planet lay in the grip of an Ice Age that saw sheets of frozen water 1,000 feet high, weighing billions of tons, grinding all the way to the edges of what we now call the temperate zones. Getting through the Ice Age was no easy matter – but, somehow, our far-distant ancestors managed it. There is every reason to suppose that the five percent of the human species which survives the mad billionaire’s eucatastrophic global pandemic (roughly 400 million people) will learn how to survive in a world without ice-caps.

Life on Earth has been up against it before - and so have we.

I would like to think that whatever remnant of that 400 million makes it through “The Heat” will arrive on the other side of the Anthropocene with a vastly improved attitude to Planet Earth and its fragile biosphere. There is every reason to believe that these new humans will have no great love of science. Indeed, like Tolkien’s Hobbits, they will likely be profoundly suspicious of  “machines more complicated than a forge bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom”. They will, however, have a great deal of love for poets and priests. And, most especially, for the tellers of fairy-stories.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 20 November 2018.

What Is "Rogerpolitics"?

Hand In Hand: "Rogerpolitics" is the term coined by the New Zealand political scientist, Richard Mulgan, to describe the form of politics required to make sure that Rogernomics “took” in a country which, on the face of it, should have rejected neoliberalism out of hand. Had Rogerpolitics not been so successfully embedded in the key organs of the New Zealand state, then Rogernomics would not have lasted.

“ROGERNOMICS” is political shorthand for the neoliberal economic policies introduced by Labour’s finance minister, Roger Douglas between 1984 and 1988. While most New Zealanders have heard of Rogernomics, nowhere near as many have heard of its inseparable companion, “Rogerpolitics”.

The term was coined by the New Zealand political scientist, Richard Mulgan, to describe the form of politics required to make sure that Rogernomics “took” in a country which, on the face of it, should have rejected neoliberalism out of hand. Had Rogerpolitics not been so successfully embedded in the key organs of the New Zealand state, then Rogernomics would not have lasted.

Critical to the success of Rogerpolitics was the widespread public disillusionment with the style of politics that preceded it. In New Zealand’s case, the principal target of the public’s hostility was the National Party Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, and his highly interventionist economic policies – “Muldoonism”. An additional factor in the public’s antipathy towards Muldoon was his facilitation of the extremely divisive Springbok Tour of 1981. In the eyes of younger New Zealanders, “The Tour” was proof of their elders’ unfitness to rule. The people referred to by the then prominent political journalist, Colin James, as the “RSA Generation” had, in the eyes of the “Vietnam Generation”, been confronted with a straightforward moral test – and they had failed.

Without Muldoon and Muldoonism; without the Springbok Tour; the hunger for a new way of managing the economy and running the country would not have been so acute. The proponents of neoliberalism, or “free market forces” (as the ideology was more commonly referred to thirty-five years ago) were pushing against an open door.

It was the same all over the advanced capitalist world. The interventionist economic policies that had played such a crucial role in generating the unparalleled prosperity of the post-war period had finally run up against the buffers of the capitalist system. Every attempt to reduce the rising levels of unemployment and inflation that were the primary manifestations of the system’s failure only ended up pushing them higher. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party captured the growing sense of unease with its 1979 slogan: “Labour isn’t working.” The following year, in the USA, the Republican candidate for President, Ronald Reagan, summed-up the popular mood when he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem.”

In its essence, this is what Rogerpolitics is all about: getting government out of the way. If politicians, by interfering in the economy, only made things worse, then the obvious solution is simply to prevent them from interfering.

Accordingly, the Economic Stabilisation Act, which had since the Second World War allowed the Cabinet to more-or-less run the New Zealand economy by decree, was repealed. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand was freed from political interference. The State Sector Act, by introducing market disciplines to government departments and agencies, fundamentally reshaped the structure and purpose of the New Zealand civil service. Whenever possible, state-owned enterprises were sold into private hands.

At both the national and the local level the effect of these economic and political reforms was to significantly disempower the country’s politicians. Regulation, where it couldn’t be avoided altogether, was to be “light-handed”. The day-to-day running of things was to be left to the market’s “invisible hand” or, in those places where “free market forces” had yet to make their presence felt, to the new order’s administrative proxies – the CEOs of the new government ministries and local government bureaucracies.

With remarkable alacrity, the ideological and practical political infrastructure required to support the new economic regime was cemented into place. In the nation’s schools and universities; in it’s publicly and privately owned news media; in its local and national institutions, Rogerpolitics became the new orthodoxy. For the next thirty years it would not only inspire the design of the mechanisms by which political power is exercised, but also the moral justifications for their use.

Those New Zealanders born after 1984 – New Zealand neoliberalism’s “Year Zero” – have absorbed the “free market” catechism practically without thinking.

The market organises human activity much more efficiently and effectively than the state.

The freer the market, the better the organisation.

Private ownership generates much better outcomes than public ownership.

Capitalism works best when Money, Goods and Labour are all permitted to move freely around the globe.

Free trade promotes peace, prosperity and global understanding.

Protectionism is an outgrowth of nationalism – both of which are very bad things.

Trade unions distort the signals of the labour market – which makes them very bad things also.

Capitalism celebrates individual freedom and embraces human diversity – racism, sexism and all other forms of discrimination have no place in a properly functioning capitalist society.

In summary, the only sort of politics which it is ethical (and advisable) to practice in the New Zealand created by Rogernomics is the politics which exerts the least influence over the smooth operation of the free markets it brought into being. Rogerpolitics both asserts and insists that the best politician any New Zealander can be is the politician whose actions produce the least effect on the operation of the nation’s economy. The very worst politician a New Zealander can be is the politician who mobilises the envy of the many who have failed in the marketplace against the few who have succeeded.

Rogerpolitics does not believe that democracy is a market friendly form of government, and all Rogerpoliticians are expected to act accordingly.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 November 2018.

Communication Breakdown.

"Leave It To Us." Over the course of the last 35 years, at both the national and local levels of government, there has been a steady – and quite deliberate – effort to sever the lines of communication which used to link the governors with the governed. Since the mid-1980s, the objective of those ideologues who regard democracy as both corrupting and inefficient has been to ensure that the day-to-day running of government is kept as far away from the people’s elected representatives as possible.

THE CHIEF OMBUDSMAN, Peter Boshier, clearly found it difficult to explain (or forgive) the actions of the Horowhenua District Council CEO. What on earth possessed this appointed local authority official to take it upon himself to decide which e-mail messages elected councillors should read and which they should not? What made him think putting active Horowhenua citizens’ names on a “blacklist” was a good idea? The Chief Ombudsman was plainly baffled.

With some reason. Boshier and I belong to the same generation of New Zealanders who grew up in local authorities managed by a Town Clerk. If our parents had a complaint about the effectiveness of the town’s drainage system, or the punctuality of its busses, they simply picked up the phone and called their local councillor. He or she would then call the City Engineer, or the Transport Manager, and pass on the complaint. Almost always action followed.

Why? Because the council officials understood that a councillor’s reputation was built upon his or her ability to get things done for the people who voted them into office. Repeated failure to fix their problems would very soon lead to gripes about Councillor So-and-So being “useless”. The slightest whisper that such an opinion was abroad in the electorate would have the impugned councillor knocking very loudly on the door of the Town Clerk, demanding to know what the hell was going on. That’s why action almost always followed.

Sadly, those days are long gone. Over the course of the last 35 years, at both the national and local levels of government, there has been a steady – and quite deliberate – effort to sever the lines of communication which used to link the governors with the governed. Since the mid-1980s, the objective of those ideologues who regard democracy as both corrupting and inefficient has been to ensure that the day-to-day running of government is kept as far away from the people’s elected representatives as possible. Councillors have found themselves restricted to determining “policy”. Giving effect to that policy is somebody else’s job – most commonly the private sector company’s which won the contract.

Any councillor who tried to pressure a private sector manager into making sure the local bus service kept to its printed timetable would be told, in no uncertain terms, to mind his own business. The matter would not end there. Almost certainly, the private bus company would complain to the contracting authority about the councillor’s attempted interference. The CEO of the local authority would pick up the phone to the city mayor, or the district council chairman, and suggest that the offending councillor be reminded of those “governance” boundaries which must not be crossed.

It gets worse. Over the last decade or so our local authorities’ legal advisers have attempted (often successfully) to persuade councillors who have run for office on promises to rescue this much needed municipal service from the accountant’s calculator, or that particularly beautiful park from the developer’s bulldozers, to refrain from participating in the debates and, most importantly, the votes, which would allow them to fulfil their promises. It would not be possible, say the lawyers, for these crusading councillors to act impartially. They must abstain.

You see where this is going, don’t you? The whole notion of local democracy is being called into question. If it is no longer possible to campaign forcefully for or against council policy, for fear of being denied the right to participate and vote in the subsequent debates, then the electors have no way of knowing which candidates are pledged to make something happen – or not happen. Councillors are reduced to a browbeaten collection of rubber-stampers: prey to private sector contractors, condescending legal advisers, and over-mighty CEOs. The final indignity being that, having signed up to the Councillors’ Code of Conduct, these poor souls are forbidden from speaking out angrily, or publicly, about their powerlessness.

Perhaps, therefore, we should be baffled at the Chief Ombudsman’s bafflement. Perhaps the truly remarkable thing is how few CEOs behave like the CEO of the Horowhenua District Council. After all, is it not cruel to encourage councillors to believe that they have the slightest ability to intervene on behalf of their constituents?

And the very idea of ordinary citizens having the right to a say in how their community is governed. Well, that’s just silly.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 November 2018.

Rating Reality Television.

Recognizing Ourselves: When, in the midst of a reality tv show, we observe people cheating, lying and generally behaving reprehensibly, we are reminded of the things we do every day to survive in our workplaces, our families, our most intimate relationships. Unfolding on our screens is something much more visceral and real than anything we’re likely to see on Shortland Street or The Brokenwood Mysteries.

HAVE YOU EVER wondered what the enormous popularity of reality television reveals about contemporary New Zealand culture? Understandably, the nation’s cultural elites do not consider this to be an important question. What the lower orders choose to pollute their minds with is hardly worthy of serious consideration. The only social significance attachable to reality television is the extent to which it uses up space and resources that could, much more profitably, be devoted to genuine cultural production.

And yet, reality television rates its little socks off. The hard-nosed men and women who invest in reality tv shows don’t do so out of a sense of cultural responsibility, they put their money in so they can take more money out. It’s a genre which, unlike so many of its high-tone cultural competitors, actually returns a profit to the production houses that churn it out. Netflix it ain’t – but then Netflix isn’t what it’s trying to be.

I used to think that reality tv was a neoliberal conspiracy. That the programmes were carefully designed to inculcate the values of aggressive individualism and ruthless competition. That the moral emptiness of the shows and the unrelenting narcissism of their participants was intended to faithfully replicate the values of the “real world”.

This was, of course, the purest drivel. The personalities and behaviour of the participants in reality tv are what shape each programme’s content. The producers do not set out with a pre-written script, they simply go with the flow. Yes, they set the tasks that must be accomplished, thereby constructing the rough framework upon which each episode is hung. But the fascination, the sheer drama and entertainment value of reality tv derives from the people who make up the “cast”.

That so many viewers become engrossed in the unfolding “drama” of reality television strongly suggests that they see themselves reflected in at least one member of the cast. This identification is rendered all the stronger by the knowledge that each character’s words and actions are their own and not the work of some script-writer or director. Yes, it’s true that the dramatic coherence of each episode is achieved primarily through careful editing. Even so, what moves the viewers is their firm belief that what they are seeing on their screens is “real”.

The educated elites may sneer at this, confident that it confirms the extreme gullibility of the masses. But what if the popularity of reality tv is derived from its radical difference from the “made up” stories that constitute so much of our televisual fare? After all, “normal” tv dramas feature characters who are impossibly clever, virtuous, beautiful and strong, caught up in plot-lines that are as moralistic as they are predictable. In other words, “mainstream” drama is nothing like reality. Perhaps the gullible masses have simply grown tired of being preached at by their betters?

Consider the greatest reality tv shows of all: live sporting fixtures. Certainly, the rules offer a shape and purpose to the game, but everything else rests upon the skill and fervour of the players. Most important of all, the outcome of the “show” is not known prior to screening. In contrast to the lives of most people living in industrialised society, there is in every live sporting fixture an inescapable measure of unpredictability. For the duration of the game the viewer remains uncertain of the outcome. Small wonder that sport rates through the roof!

Perhaps reality tv shows wouldn’t be so popular if those responsible for funding the production of New Zealand television commissioned programmes which did as much as the average reality tv series to show real New Zealanders doing real things. Programmes which refuse to juxtapose beautiful presenters against ugly punters. Dramas that don’t always end with the “goodies” overcoming the “baddies”. Shows which reflect the facts of life in twenty-first century New Zealand: a country where the rich stay rich and what trickles down into the lives of the poor carries the very strong smell of piss.

“The purpose of epic theatre”, wrote Bertolt Brecht, “is not to encourage an audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to force them to think introspectively about the particular moments that are occurring on stage and why they are happening a certain way.”

When, in the midst of a reality tv show, we observe people cheating, lying and generally behaving reprehensibly, we are reminded of the things we do every day to survive in our workplaces, our families, our most intimate relationships. Unfolding on our screens is something much more visceral and real than anything we’re likely to see on Shortland Street or The Brokenwood Mysteries. Great theatre – and great television drama – isn’t about good versus evil in the outside world, it’s about how the outside world sets good and evil against each other in our own souls.

Which arguably makes reality television the epic theatre of our age.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 November 2018.

A Diet Of Lies.

Imperial Beast: Very few New Zealanders ever grasped what the rest of the world saw when it looked upon the British Empire: a huge blood-smeared lion whose sharp teeth and vicious claws struck terror into the hearts of all those too weak to resist them.

WE HAVE JUST CONCLUDED four years of commemorating the First World War. What amazed me about all that official amplification of 100 year-old echoes is how little new information it contained. As is the case with Sir Peter Jackson’s stunning colourisation and all-round technical enhancement of First World War film footage, we have learned nothing that we did not know before. Our troops wore khaki uniforms. Their buttons were made of brass. They sang as they marched. In a strange way, by being stripped of their black-and-white historical dignity, they have been rendered ordinary: indistinguishable from the inhabitants of the here-and-now. They look and sound like extras in one of Sir Peter’s movies.

Perhaps it was always so with official attempts to appropriate the past? To dress contemporary problems in antique costumes and pack the past’s dialogue with all the lies our masters would like us to mistake for history.

It is a task which, tragically, is becoming easier with every passing decade. Reading some of the comments to Mike Treen’s latest post, I was astounded by the number of readers who had no idea of what was happening in 1918. They were clearly astonished by Mike’s snapshot of the dramatic events which drove the Allied and Central Powers to sign the Armistice of 11/11. But, then, why shouldn’t they be astonished? The “official” commemorative programme did not appear to regard the revolutionary wave washing across Europe in 1917-18 as in any way relevant to the War’s end.

Those same officials were even more determined to keep from New Zealanders living at 100 years remove from the First World War just how authoritarian the government of their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ was. Far better to simply go on insisting that the young men fighting and dying in far-off Gallipoli, Flanders and Palestine were engaged in advancing the cause of freedom, justice and democracy. Informing young Kiwis that their forebears were actually fighting to secure for Great Britain the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East might cause them to ask – given the number of wars (some quite recent) that have been fought for the same prize – whether it was worth the sacrifice of 18,000 young New Zealanders.

The historians’ problem is that they assume that everyone knows the story when, as Mike’s post makes clear, hardly anybody understands what actually happened 100 years ago. How the fighting ships of Great Britain, the world’s greatest naval power, had made the transition from coal (of which the British had plenty) to oil (of which the British had none). How the Brits key oil supplier, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, had suddenly become vulnerable to the intertwined military and economic ambitions of the German and Ottoman Empires. How the rapidly expanding German High Seas Fleet and the proposed Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway convinced the Foreign and Colonial Office that the Germans had to be stopped. How the British Government could have prevented the outbreak of war in 1914 – but chose not to. How the big losers of the First World War were, you guessed it, Germany and the Ottomans. How Great Britain’s new best friends in the Middle East all just happened to live on top of a sea of oil.

And it’s still going on. New Zealand, whose Governor-General, Lord Liverpool, declared war on Germany in 1914 without bothering to consult the NZ House of Representatives, remains a loyal member of the Anglo-Saxon “Club”. (John Key’s term for the “Five Eyes” security pact linking  Britain’s ‘white empire’: The UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; with that other great Anglo-Saxon power, the United States of America.)

The great disadvantage of being a member of the Anglo-Saxon Club is that it makes it practically impossible for most New Zealanders to see their country and its allies for what they are – imperialist bullies.

The present Coalition Government has made much of the “danger” China poses to the micro-states of the South Pacific. So much so that our Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, has declared the need for a “Pacific Re-set”. Exactly why the presence of China should pose a danger to the peoples of the South Pacific, while the ongoing presence of its former imperial and colonial powers does not, is never explained. It is simply assumed that “we” are the good-guys and the Chinese are the bad guys.

No one asks the question: Is it appropriate that Australia is essentially re-colonising Papua-New Guinea? Or wonders why the Australians have turned the tiny tropical state of Nauru into a sweltering island prison for Middle Eastern refugees, utterly destroying its democratic institutions in the process.

Most New Zealanders remain blissfully unaware that 100 years ago the New Zealand military occupation force of what had been German Samoa allowed a ship carrying the deadly influenza virus to dock in Apia. Or that, over the course of the next few weeks, that criminally negligent decision led to the death of fully one quarter of the inhabitants of the western half of Samoa. Or that, a few years later, New Zealand soldiers shot down unarmed Samoans demanding their country’s independence from New Zealand colonial rule.

We forget that both the British and the Americans, the good guys, held the Pacific peoples in such high regard that they turned their home islands into test sites for their atomic and hydrogen bombs. The radioactive fallout from these atmospheric tests poisoned the Pacific environment – along with the peoples who lived off its fruit, root vegetables and fish.

Such is the heritage of the Anglo-Saxon powers in the South Pacific. And yet “we” are not perceived to be a “danger” to its peoples. Rather it is the Chinese: a nation which has seized no colonies; created no pandemics; and exploded no nuclear devices in this part of the world who are considered “dangerous”. The country that kept New Zealand prosperous through the Global Financial Crisis is slowly but surely being transformed into our enemy, while the country that has imposed tariffs on our steel and which demands that we endanger our own health by dismantling Pharmac, is hailed as our “very, very, very good friend”.

One hundred years ago, New Zealand was a small but vigorous limb of the great heraldic beast known as the British Empire. Being so, we were able to see only the great heraldic beasts identified as our enemies: the German and Austrian eagles; the Ottoman’s crescent moon and star. Having laid them low, we hailed our victory as a good thing. Very few New Zealanders ever grasped what the rest of the world saw when it looked upon the British Empire: a huge blood-smeared lion whose sharp teeth and vicious claws struck terror into the hearts of all those too weak to resist them.

Perhaps it is time for New Zealanders to give up their diet of imperial lies and learn, at last, how to digest the truth?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 November 2018.

What We “Don’t Know And Can’t Know” – The Truth About World War I.

World War I: The Glorious Version: The Battle of Le Quesnoy was New Zealand's last engagement of World War I. The battle's most famous image, depicting Second Lieutenant Leslie Averill stepping out on to the ramparts, revolver in hand, perpetuates the notion that war is a noble and manly enterprise. The censors were happy to let the image pass. What the New Zealand public were not permitted to see, however, were images of the utter slaughter that was the Western Front.

ON THE ELEVENTH HOUR, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, 2018 – this Sunday – we will celebrate the centenary of the Armistice. It is Armistice with a capital “A” because this was the historic ceasefire, negotiated by representatives of both the Allied and the Central Powers, which caused the guns to fall silent. With the coming into effect of the Armistice at 11:00 hours, 11 November 1918, the world-shattering conflict that would come to be known as World War I finally ground to its end.

The past fortnight has been notable for the amount of media attention devoted to a relatively insignificant incident which took place during the final phase of the decisive allied offensive that knocked Germany out of the war.

The taking of Le Quesnoy, by elements of the New Zealand Division, on 4 November 1918, was unquestionably a moment of great gallantry and humanity. By scaling the fortified town’s massive walls, the New Zealanders obviated the need for the artillery bombardment by which the capture of so many other German-occupied towns and villages had been effected. Small wonder that the citizens of Le Quesnoy still fete the rescuers of their grandparents and great-grandparents. Small wonder that the Germans laid down their arms and surrendered to them. When, just a week later, the war ended, thousands of human-beings were still breathing who, in the normal course of that terrible conflict, would have been dead. It is a wonderful story and well worth remembering.

But what happened at Le Quesnoy is about as far from typical of the fighting in World War I as it is possible to get. For a start, the New Zealand Division was advancing: moving forward through the French countryside in a fashion which had become tactically impossible just a few weeks after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. For most of the war a vast defensive line, stretching all the way from the English Channel to the Swiss border, had been transformed into an obscene meat-grinder into which the flower of European manhood had been fed by commanders who had no idea how to wage industrialised warfare without shedding veritable lakes of human blood.

The most famous image of the Battle of Le Quesnoy: that of Second Lieutenant Leslie Averill stepping out on to the ramparts, revolver in hand, perpetuates the notion that war is a noble and manly enterprise. The censors were happy to let the image pass. What the New Zealand public were not permitted to see, however, were images of the utter slaughter that was Passchendaele. The bodies ripped to pieces by shrapnel; the grey-green corpses barely visible in the all-conquering mud. These obscenities, grimly typical of the rapacious imperialist conflict, are still considered unfit for general consumption.

World War I: The Reality 

In 1917, Britain’s wartime leader, David Lloyd George, told the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C.P Scott: “If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

The tragedy of the past four years is that, for the most part, the politicians and propagandists of 2014-2018 appear to share Lloyd George’s breath-taking cynicism. Whether it be Sir Peter Jackson’s larger than life heroes; or the fusillade of revisionist war histories unleashed by military writers determined to gun down the comic accuracy of the final Blackadder series; allowing the people to know the truth about World War I seems to be as impossible as ever.

Instead, New Zealanders are treated to the wicked conflation of the humanity and valour of the men who took Le Quesnoy with the purposes of the war itself. The conflict in which so many young New Zealanders perished was not conducted in the name of humanity, but in the name of the King-Emperor – whose representative, Lord Liverpool, announced this country’s participation from the steps of the General Assembly Library, without the slightest reference to the wishes of the people’s parliamentary representatives.

Moreover, as the butcher’s bill grew the supply of volunteers dried up and the gaping holes in New Zealand’s lines after Gallipoli, the Somme and Passchendaele were filled with conscripts. What could New Zealand have become if those 18,000 young men who died – had lived?

That is the truly obscene cost of World War I: its opportunity cost. The future that might have been.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 November 2018.