Ihumatao Watched By Unfriendly Eyes.

Zero Tolerance: For the moment, the raw racist response to the Ihumatao Occupation amounts to not much more than an infuriated buzz. Ten thousand voices, all speaking at once, are producing only an incoherent babble. It points to the current lack of organisation and direction in the Settler Nation’s political reaction to Ihumatao. The voice of a leader has yet to assert itself above the rising racist din. This anarchic phase will not last for long.

IHUMATAO’s intersectional celebrations, derisively dubbed “Wokestock” by right-wing commentator, Matthew Hooton, are being watched by unfriendly eyes. The Settler Nation has zero tolerance for the politics of radical decolonisation.

While progressive New Zealanders were raising their glasses to Jacinda’s belated intervention on Friday evening, those responsible for preserving the status quo were setting theirs down in icy disbelief. What did the woman think she was doing? Has she no idea how badly this could end for her party?

It was ever thus. The initial rapturous eruption of “people power”, followed by the Establishment’s remorseless re-imposition of control. First: the planting of trees and a police constable singing in harmony with the crowd. Then: the fear blowing in, cold and unforgiving; blighting all the bright colours; silencing the songs.

It is always dangerous to remind the colonisers of the world they have extinguished. To offer them a glimpse of that world is more perilous still. It proves that the culture they conquered and left for dead can be brought back to life. Ihumatao has smouldered for 156 years. The effect of the mass occupation of the past week has gifted it a sudden inrush of oxygen. Now there are flames amongst the fern.

Those flames glitter in the narrowed eyes of the watchers. From the ill-educated and ill-disciplined the responses are already forthcoming. Angry posts on Facebook and Twitter, filled with the raw racism of those for whom the possession of a white skin constitutes their sole claim to superiority. Reading these, it is difficult to decide who they hate the most: Maori, or the Pakeha who support them? Whichever it is, their animosity is palpable.

For the moment, however, this raw racist response amounts to not much more than an infuriated buzz. Ten thousand voices, all speaking at once, producing only an incoherent babble. It points to the current lack of organisation and direction in the Settler Nation’s political reaction to Ihumatao. The voice of a leader has yet to assert itself above the rising racist din.

This anarchic phase will not last for long.

It will be interesting to see whether it is the Right, or the Left, which first attempts to organise the reaction to Ihumatao. The Settler State’s response to the Foreshore and Seabed crisis was led, at least initially, by the Labour leader, Helen Clark. It was she who called the organisers of the Hikoi “haters and wreckers”, and it was her Attorney General who drew up the Foreshore and Seabed legislation. This taking of the initiative by Labour, though it cost the party dearly in the Maori seats, was, almost certainly, what allowed it to retain sufficient Pakeha support to hold-off the 2004-05 challenge from National’s Don Brash.

The force of the Right’s assault on Maoridom was formidable. Brash’s Orewa Speech mobilised the most conservative elements of New Zealand’s settler society in ways not seen for decades. Had National won the general election, it was pledged to remove all reference to the Treaty of Waitangi from legislation, wind up the Treaty Settlement Process and abolish the Maori Seats.

Such was the fury inspired by the prospect of Maori enforcing their customary rights on the nation’s beaches. Only two percentage points separated the Labour and National Party Vote in 2005. New Zealand escaped an “Iwi/Kiwi” war by the skin of its teeth.

Small wonder that Labour’s Maori caucus is so conflicted. The prospect of a large and voluble land occupation developing sufficient political momentum to void the legal status of Maori land confiscated unjustly by the Crown in 1863 has clearly sent shivers up and down its collective spine. If one victim of the raupatu of the 1860s can secure the restitution of their lost land, then why not all the victims? The absolute prohibition against the return of privately held property to its original owners is all that keeps the Treaty Settlement Process alive. Do away with that prohibition, and the Settler Nation will erupt in fury.

But, if Ihumatao is not returned, or at least transformed into a public space from which large scale development is excluded, then Labour’s Maori caucus’ grip on the Maori seats will be significantly – perhaps fatally – weakened.

The same may well apply to Labour’s strong support among progressive young New Zealanders. For Jacinda to gaze upon Ihumatao’s celebration of diversity and not be moved would raise all manner of doubts. It’s one thing to promise New Zealand “transformational” change, only to be thwarted by the nation’s decrepit bureaucratic machinery. Quite another, to look at the change her most fervent supporters are making – and turn away.

But, if she remains true to her vision of trailblazing a new politics of kindness, by rescuing Ihumatao, what then?

The Act Party has already put in its bid to lead the backlash. By 9 o’clock on Friday 26 July – barely two-and-a-half hours after Jacinda halted development at Ihumatao – David Seymour had released a statement to the media.

“The Prime Minister has cultivated a brand of a kinder more inclusive politics, but some things such as occupying private property are always wrong. The Prime Minister of New Zealand has just sent a message: ‘if you occupy private property, the Government will take your side instead of protecting property rights.’”

Seymour is but a scout for the main force of the Settler Nation. The National Party’s troopers will not take long to move up to the front lines if Labour is brave enough to make the next election a referendum on whether or not the fruits of colonisation remain firmly in the hands of Pakeha; or are shared out more equitably among the citizens of a new nation: The Bi-Cultural Republic of Aotearoa.

That would be an election worth voting in.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 30 July 2019.

Another War With Iran?

A Long, Vicious And Forgotten War: The country which unleashed the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) was Iraq. For the duration, Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was able to count on the strong support of the United States. The backing of Presidents Jimmy Carter’s and Ronald Reagan’s administrations never wavered, not even when, for the first time since World War One, the Iraqis deployed chemical weapons.

WILL THERE BE a war with Iran? Better to ask: will there be another war with Iran?

So many of us in the West have forgotten that the country, currently being fitted-up as the next Middle Eastern aggressor, endured eight years of extremely vicious fighting, at the cost of at least half-a-million lives, between 1980 and 1988.

The country which unleashed this war was Iraq. For the duration, Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was able to count on the strong support of the United States. The backing of Presidents Ronald Reagan’s and Jimmy Carter’s administrations never wavered, not even when, for the first time since World War One, the Iraqis deployed chemical weapons.

The date of the Iran-Iraq War’s outbreak, September 1980, is significant. Eleven months earlier, 52 American hostages had been seized in an attack on the US Embassy in Tehran. When his secret mission to rescue the hostages ended in disaster, President Jimmy Carter quietly appealed to Saddam, who, as a secular Baathist, was no friend of Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Islamic Revolution”, for help. His reward, providing his army could win them, would be Iran’s most productive oil fields.   

The hostages’ eventual liberation, pointedly timed to coincide with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, came in January 1981. When asked by a reporter if he would ever go back to Iran, one of the freed hostages replied: “Only in a B-52!” Thanks to Saddam’s illegal invasion, however, President Reagan was never required to unleash his strategic bombers on the Iranians. The Iraqi armed forces had become America’s proxy punishers. Iran had humiliated the United States, and for eight terrible years it was required to pay the price.

With another war on Iranian soil looming, it is interesting to register the size of the Iraqi invasion force. Saddam sent 100,000 troops and hundreds of battle tanks across the Iranian border in September 1980, while his air force flew hundreds of sorties against Iranian targets. The scale of Saddam’s invasion bears close comparison with the Anglo-Soviet invasion of neutral Iran in August 1941. That, too, was a massive affair, involving hundreds of thousands of British Empire and Soviet troops.

Remember, these were invasions of Iran – not by Iran. As strategic analyst, Dr Paul Buchanan, observes:

“[I]t should be remembered that modern Iran has not engaged in an unprovoked attack on another country. Although it supports and uses irregular military proxies, it is nowhere close to being the sponsor of terrorism that several Sunni Arab petroleum oligarchies are. In spite of its anti-Israel rhetoric (destined for domestic political consumption), it has not fired a shot in anger towards it.”

This is important. If war is unleashed against Iran, its 80 million citizens will find themselves engaged in a defensive war. Accordingly, the Iranians will enjoy the home-ground advantage. The Americans, and whoever is foolish enough to join them in such a mad endeavour, will find themselves, like the Iraqis, required to fight not only Iran’s people, but also its formidable geography. In addition to confronting human-beings, the United States will be battling snow-capped mountain ranges and waterless deserts.

The Americans are not daunted. When it comes to the Middle East (and its oil) the behaviour of the United States can only be described as unhinged. When Saddam dared to act independently of the US, the debt America owed his country, for its costly – and ultimately futile – war against its Iranian neighbour, was forgotten in a heartbeat.

And it wasn’t just Saddam who paid dearly for his failure to comprehend the full extent of America’s derangement. When US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, was asked by CBS’s Lesley Stahl: “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

Astonishingly, the same people who beat the war-drums for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, are beating them again in 2019. President Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, gives every impression of never having seen a square kilometre of Middle Eastern soil which could not be immeasurably improved by being pulverised with US ordnance.

It would be comforting to believe that wiser heads will prevail. Sadly, history suggests otherwise.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 July 2019.

Colonisation In Action.

People Power: This is where the Ihumatao protest now rests. On the ability of the protesters/protectors to muster sufficient support to make the government intervene. The story they have to tell, if related firmly and courageously, and without resort to violence, is utterly compelling. It is enough to ensure that, just for a moment, the colonisers are forced to gaze upon the world they have destroyed; and acknowledge the brutal injustices which that destruction entailed. To make this government understand that colonisation isn’t something that happened in the past, it’s something which is happening right now.

IHUMATAO is not about the law. The law is what makes the Ihumatao protest necessary. Ihumatao is not about colonisation. Ihumatao is colonisation in action.

What is happening right now at Ihumatao is about the New Zealand state not knowing how to deal with Maori. According to the State’s version of events Ihumatao is a done deal. It’s about private property and the rights of private property owners. It’s about all those institutions supposedly dedicated to protecting the rights of Maori saying: “It’s out of our hands. There’s nothing we can do. Everything that’s happening here is happening within the law.”

It’s always been this way. Go all the way back to 1863, when the Maori people who lived at Ihumatao were declared rebels and the colonial government sequestrated their land. That was within the law. And when their land was parcelled-up and distributed to Pakeha farmers? That, too, we are told, was within the law. And when their sacred mountain was quarried away until nothing was left of it but a hole in the ground? Also lawful. Because the law affirms that the Pakeha landowner had a perfect right to dispose of his property as he saw fit. Everything that has happened to the people of Ihumatao has happened in accordance with the laws of the New Zealand state. Except, of course, when a private business allowed thousands of litres of poisonous dye to flow into their sacred river. That, apparently, was not lawful. Not that declaring it illegal restored the river to health.

So what do you do? When the seizure of your lands, and the selling of them to strangers, and the destruction of your mountain, and the relentless impoverishment and marginalisation of your people, is all declared to be legal and above board? When there is nowhere to go, and no one to turn to, for protection. When even your elders have lost the will to go on fighting. What is there left for you to do?

This is how colonisation works. It changes your world. It changes the people in charge of your world. It affords you less and less space to move about freely in your world. It limits your right to make decisions affecting your world. And it goes on doing this until, bit by bit, year by year, your world disappears. That is the whole point of the colonising process. To replace one world: the world belonging to the people who were there first with another; the world belonging to the people who came later. This new world is the colonisers’ world, and it serves their needs – exclusively.

The most important thing to bear in mind when you’re thinking about colonisation is that it hasn’t stopped. It can’t stop. It has to keep operating in the present just as forcefully as it operated in the past. The legal title to Ihumatao, determined in the 1860s, cannot be restored to the land’s original occupiers except by securing the intervention of the very same legal system that sanctioned its confiscation. And, surprise, surprise, we discover that no legal mechanisms currently exist for the Ihumatao protesters to secure that intervention.

Which still leaves the fundamental question – “ What is to be done?” – unanswered. Clearly, the solution does not lie in a courtroom. But when has it ever for the victims of colonisation?

What is taking place at Ihumatao is occurring in a political space that is, essentially, outside the law. What’s unfolding there is a ritual of challenge and response. The protesters are saying: “This development must not proceed.” Demonstrating its power, the state has sent in a hundred or so police officers, saying, effectively: “Or you’ll what?” The only practical answer of the protesters is the one they have already given: “Or, we’ll surround this place with so many people that you’ll have to call in hundreds of police and soldiers (just like you did at Bastion Point) to move us on. And the political consequences of applying that level of force will be devastating for the government.

It is only in this political realm: a place of power where the law is irrelevant, that the issue can be decided in favour of the protesters. The government and, to a lesser extent, the Police must, accordingly, be compelled to calculate the political consequences of using the force needed to permanently clear the Ihumatao site. They must contemplate the way in which the legal system that big developers (in this case, Fletchers) rely upon to make and keep their profits is likely to be used by the protesters. Persons arrested must be brought to trial, and trials can easily be transformed into embarrassing political theatre.

That’s where it rests. On the ability of the defenders of Ihumatao to muster sufficient on-the-ground support to make the government intervene. The story they have to tell, if related firmly and courageously, and without resort to violence, is utterly compelling. It is enough to ensure that, just for a moment, the colonisers are forced to gaze upon the world they have destroyed; and acknowledge the brutal injustices which that destruction entailed. To make this government understand that colonisation isn’t something that happened in the past, it’s something which is happening right now. The Ihumatao story is powerful enough to turn the age-old question around. To make it no longer “What can we do?”, but “What are they going to do?”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 26 July 2019.

The Accents Of Power.

Not What Simon Says, But How He Says It: From those who decried the Greens' attack ad ridiculing Opposition Leader Simon Bridges' accent, the challenge was as brutal as it was simple: Would the Greens’ campaign team have produced an attack ad making fun of a National Party MP from China or India who spoke English with a pronounced accent?

“CLASSIST BULLSHIT!”, was the tweeted response of one Green Party supporter. It was a sentiment shared by enough of the Greens electoral base to convince James Shaw to act. Within hours of the Green Party’s anti-National attack ad going up, it was taken down. Mocking the Leader of the Opposition’s broad Kiwi accent was unacceptable – even in the cause of fighting Climate Change.

On the face of it, the reaction of the Greens’ support base is a welcome confirmation that it still believes the Greens should keep well away from “dirty politics”. Attack advertising, according to these principled folk, is a foul form of political communication, best left to the hack parties of the centre-left and right.

From those who decried the ad, the challenge is as brutal as it is simple: Would the Greens’ campaign team have produced an attack ad making fun of a National Party MP from China or India who spoke English with a pronounced accent?

We all know the answer to that. To even suggest releasing an ad built around such an obvious racial slur would be a sacking offence in the 2019 Green Party apparatus. But, if using race in your party’s propaganda is utterly verboten, why is it permissible to use class? What does it say about the people who produced and approved the offending Green Party ad, that the decision to satirise Simon Bridges’ working-class accent set off no alarm-bells?

Is it because making fun of the cultural markers of working-class people is still not seen as an act of unforgiveable prejudice? And, if that is true, then why is it true? Drawing attention to the cultural markers of non-white ethnicity – especially for the purposes of ridicule – was long ago, and quite correctly, deemed racist. Why aren’t the injuries of class similarly condemned?

Answering that question leads us straight down a very deep, and very strange, rabbit-hole.

Twenty-first century New Zealanders are constantly reassuring themselves that their society is a meritocracy. If they apply themselves and acquire the right skills, then there is nothing to prevent them from rising to the very top of the social totem pole. By the same token: if they refuse to work hard and improve themselves, then they cannot expect to rise very high at all. Indeed, laziness and a lack of self-discipline can cause a person to fall deeper and deeper into material and moral poverty. The logic of meritocracy is unforgiving. If you have risen high in society, it’s because you have merit. If you have failed to rise, or, worse still, fallen, it’s because you lack merit. In a meritocracy, success and failure are both self-inflicted conditions.

Small wonder that meritocracy and neoliberalism have become inseparable. If people’s misfortunes are self-inflicted, then the state’s only responsibility towards the poor and marginalised is to provide them with the minimum sustenance required to prevent them from disturbing the peace (and/or threatening the property) of their more diligent neighbours. That word “minimum” is important. If the state were to become excessively generous, then meritorious behaviour would cease to be its own reward, and meritocracy, as a system for rewarding human striving, would collapse.

Accent, as the playwright George Bernard Shaw pointed out, plays a crucial role in identifying merit. In the words of Professor Higgins in Pygmalion:

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants – and not all of them – have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.

In twenty-first century politics accent has become an indispensable marker of merit. Far more than was the case in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, how we speak confers upon us the right to speak. In the early decades of the democratic age, the humbug of meritocracy was not yet in evidence. (Although its religious progenitor, Protestantism, certainly played an analogous role in justifying the ways of the rich to the poor.) The poor, themselves, were in no doubt as to why they lived such harsh lives. It was because the rich forced them to. In the heroic phase of democracy, it was certainly no disgrace for a working-class politician to address his followers in the accents of their common condition.

In democracy’s decadent phase, however, these class markers serve a less positive function. A working-class person who has succeeded in the fields of entertainment, sport and (certain types of) business may retain his or her accent without incurring too much social disdain. But a politician who refuses to speak in the accents of someone deserving of respect, should not expect to get very much of it. It is no accident that the two most successful populists of the English-speaking world, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, both speak in the accents of the ruling-class. How they speak to their followers tells them as much about their heroes as what they say – perhaps more.

In the crudest possible terms: losers do not want to be wooed by losers; they want to be seduced by someone in the accents of a winner.

That’s why so many middle-class people are happy to make fun of Simon Bridges accent. His failure to teach himself how to speak “properly” is seen as a failure to appreciate what is required of someone aspiring to the office of prime minister. Someone born in China or India who has, nevertheless, mastered the language of their adopted country is, by contrast, seen as a person to be admired. Making fun of their accent represents a failure to recognise their true merit. It is the behaviour of someone who does not understand how twenty-first century meritocracy works; someone still mired in the nineteenth and twentieth century fallacy that ethnicity, in and of itself, confers merit. Yesterday’s ideology, for yesterday’s failures.

Neoliberalism cares nothing for the markers of ethnicity, gender or sexuality. What it values is the individual who understands not only the importance of rising up the socio-economic ladder, but also the importance of “making it” in the right way. The meritocratic winners can be black or white, male or female, gay or straight: no one cares. But, those aspiring to membership of the global elite who fail to grasp the importance of thinking in the right way, dressing in the right way, and yes, speaking in the right way, will soon discover that being laughed at and ridiculed are the least of their worries.

While capitalism endures, it will always be open season on the working class – even its accent. “Classist bullshit” it may be – but it works.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 25 July 2019.

The Greens Used To Be So Likeable – What’s Gone Wrong?

Once Were Likeable Eco-Warriors: The Green Party's parliamentary line-up is now a very long way from Rod’s beaming optimism, Jeanette’s grandmotherly wisdom, Sue B’s and Keith’s commitment to social justice and peace, Sue K’s safe food, and Nandor’s illegally resinous dreadlocks. Today's Green Party is fast taking on the character of a political cult: filled with zealots determined to enforce their policies on what we should be permitted to drive; what we should be encouraged to eat and drink, what it is acceptable for us to think; and what we should be allowed to say.

THERE WAS A TIME when it was really quite hard to dislike the Greens. Back in the days of Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons; of Nandor Tanczos and Sue Bradford; of Sue Kedgley and, yes, even the rather dour Keith Locke. There was also that bloke who called himself the “Musterer” (instead of the “Whip”) whose name I have completely forgotten. [Ian Ewen-Street – thankyou Google!] When they first made their way up the steps of Parliament, back in 1999, I called them “The Magnificent Seven” – so perfectly did they cover all the bases of ecological politics.

If you counted yourself among the Left of New Zealand politics, and you didn’t vote for the Greens, you needed to be able to supply yourself with a very good reason why not. The Party made not voting for them a lot harder by being so damn nice. They practiced politics in the way most people agreed it should be practiced: by sticking to ideas and to the policies those ideas gave birth to; by refusing to get down in the gutter with those politicians who seemed to regard politics as an excuse for being personally vicious and cruel.

On Wednesday afternoons, during the General Debate, you waited eagerly for the Greens’ turn to speak. It always came as such a welcome relief from the personal attacks, the snide remarks, and the puerile arguments which their fellow MPs resorted to. Invariably, the Greens’ contribution would be about something real and important. There was always an argument for listeners to follow – an argument based on, and backed up by, facts. You know, evidence. It was like the sun’s rays breaking through clouds: proof that somewhere out there, beyond all the bullshit and braggadocio, there remained a world of light.

It is still possible to catch an echo of the Magnificent Seven in the 2017 intake of Green MPs. Chloe Swarbrick, in particular, would not have been out of place in that special company. Sadly, however, Swarbrick is the exception. For the most part, her Green party colleagues have lost that tremendous likeability that made it so hard for the Left to vote for anyone else.

Partly, that’s because the Left itself has changed. Always among the Greens there was a powerful libertarian current. By and large the Greens did not like the idea of the State, or big corporations, or the petty tyrants who run so many small businesses, interfering in the harmless and victimless activities of their fellow citizens.

No one appealed to the libertarian fraction of the electorate like Nandor Tanczos. With this dreadlocks, his skateboard and his green hemp suit, he became a poster-boy: not only for the legalise marijuana movement, but for that fiercely contrarian bunch of New Zealanders who, without him, has veered over the edge into anti-vax and anti-1080 fanaticism.

But, it’s not just the unfortunate way in which the vacuum created by Tanczos’ departure from political life has been filled that’s the worry. Libertarianism, itself, has largely disappeared from the ranks of the twenty-first century Left. Even worse, in the ideological space formerly occupied by libertarian leftism, New Zealand now finds its exact opposite: Left Authoritarianism.

It does not require a very long acquaintance with the Green variety of Left Authoritarianism to realise that, in 2019, the number of activities defined as harmless and victimless has become vanishingly small.

To be fair, there has always been an element of authoritarianism present in the ranks of the Greens. On a number of issues – the Treaty of Waitangi in particular – those responsible for vetting potential candidates have always exercised zero tolerance for anything other than the full-recognition, tino rangatiratanga, line. Until relatively recently, however, this “politically correct” element of the Green Party apparatus was encouraged to keep itself out of sight. Today, however, among party activists and MPs alike, it operates loudly and uncompromisingly in plain sight.

The political and electoral consequences for the Greens are likely to mirror those which overwhelmed the Left generally in the early 1980s. The 1981 Springbok Tour had radicalised a great many New Zealanders who, in its aftermath, were eager to keep pushing for social change. For many Pakeha leftists, however, the concurrent upsurge in Maori nationalism proved too confronting. The aggressive pursuit of “Maori Sovereignty”, in particular, drove many Pakeha out of the so-called “New Social Movements”, where the sovereigntists were most active.

Organisations which considered themselves progressive, such as the aid organisation Corso, may have decked themselves out in the trappings of bi-culturalism, but only at the cost of making insincerity an unwelcome requirement of membership. The upshot was an emptying-out of many of the institutions of the “White Left” – a not inconsiderable number of whom took refuge in the much friendlier ranks of the Labour Party, which, in the early 1980s, boasted a mass membership in excess of 100,000.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the Greens, founded in 1989, attracted a large number of members for whom the precepts of identity politics formed the core of their political ideology. The Greens’ consensus-based decision-making processes allowed these ideologues to operate for many years within the party without the wider electorate paying them much attention. While the Greens were led by the likes of Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons, the influence of the “id-pols” could be managed. Following Donald’s death and Fitzsimons’ departure, however, the Greens parliamentary line-up has become at once less likeable and less representative than the seven-strong caucus which marched up Parliament’s steps in 1999.

The great problem now facing the Greens is that Labour finds itself in possession of the most likeable political face New Zealanders have encountered for many decades. When set against “Jacinda”, the Greens’ James Shaw comes across as a low-energy compromiser. Meanwhile, his co-leader, Marama Davidson, strobes identity politics in a fashion calculated to make a sizeable majority of the electorate feel decidedly queasy.

Neither Shaw, nor Davidson, is likely to hold in place many voters not already completely sold on the Greens’ brand of identity politics. The party is fast taking on the character of a political cult: filled with zealots determined to enforce their policies on what we should be permitted to drive; what we should be encouraged to eat and drink, what it is acceptable for us to think; and what we should be allowed to say.

It’s a long way from Rod’s beaming optimism, Jeanette’s grandmotherly wisdom, Sue B’s and Keith’s commitment to social justice and peace, Sue K’s safe food, and Nandor’s illegally resinous dreadlocks.

I liked them.

POSTSCRIPT: This essay was written before the Greens released their attack ad criticising National's Climate Change policies - mostly by ridiculing Simon Bridges' broad Kiwi accent. That the current leadership initially okayed the release rather proves my point. That the membership loudly demanded it be taken down (which it was) proves something else. That the spirit of 99 hasn't entirely disappeared! - C.T.

This essay (minus the postscript) was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 23 July 2019.

Deplorable Words.

Victory, But Not Ours: Trump uses his deplorable words in exactly the same way as C.S. Lewis' wicked queen, Jadis, used her single 'Deplorable Word'. To win – no matter what the cost. He knows the power of words. He understands the damage they can do. The bitter divisions they can open up. The fear they can inspire. The lust to inflict harm which they can trigger. But, like Queen Jadis, he doesn’t care. America must he his – even if he’s the only person left standing who doesn’t feel duped and sullied and robbed of everything they held dear.

BEFORE NARNIA THERE was Charn. Mighty Charn, which fell at last because Jadis, its final Queen, was willing to utter the “Deplorable Word”. C.S. Lewis describes the scene in his “prequel” to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Magician’s Nephew.

“The last great battle”, said the Queen, “raged for three days here in Charn itself. For three days I looked down upon it from this very spot. I did not use my power till the last of my soldiers had fallen, and the accursed woman, my sister, at the head of her rebels was halfway up those great stairs that lead up from the city to the terrace. Then I waited till we were so close that we could see one another’s faces. She flashed her horrible, wicked eyes upon me and said, ‘Victory.’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘Victory, but not yours.’ Then I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the sun.”

Written in 1955, as the Cold War was fast freezing the world into a seemingly permanent balance of terror, Lewis’ Deplorable Word did not require too much in the way of effort to decode. What else could he be thinking of but the growing global stockpile of nuclear weapons? Clearly, Lewis was convinced that even if a war between the superpowers began with conventional weapons, it would inevitably be ended by their doomsday devices. Whichever side found itself facing inevitable defeat would, like Queen Jadis, insist on having the last word – even at the cost of all life on Earth.

Now, in 2019, with the Cold War a distant memory, it is possible to read another meaning into Lewis’ Deplorable Word. Before making the attempt, however, lets hear some more about it from the mouth of the evil Queen:

“That was the secret of secrets,” said the Queen Jadis. “It had long been known that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. But the ancient kings were weak and soft-hearted and bound themselves and all who should come after them with great oaths never even to seek after the knowledge of that word. But I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it.

Those weak and soft-hearted kings of Charn did not want to die, but, being wise, they knew that, in the end, Death comes to us all. Of much more importance to them was their posterity. Charn was a mighty empire: the crowning achievement of their world. Keep it alive, and with it all the many and mighty accomplishments of its living people. That was all that mattered. That was why they did all they could to prevent the Deplorable Word from ever being spoken.

Though he is very far from resembling the beautiful and terrible Queen of Charn, the present President of the United States, Donald Trump, shares her pathological hunger for recognition and power – even at the cost of the American republic’s utter destruction.

The difference between the President and the Queen, however, is that he is not content with just one deplorable word. Trump has made himself the master of many, many deplorable words. Hundreds of them. Thousands. As many as it takes to kill all the living institutions out of which the democratic spirit of America was fashioned. As many as it takes to destroy decency and dignity and public decorum. As many as it takes to overwhelm all the traditions and values that made America truly great. Words so deplorable that they snuff-out the living light of American liberty and justice – even as they kindle the roaring bonfires of American rage and hate.

Trump uses these words in exactly the same way as Jadis used her single word. To win – no matter what the cost. He knows the power of words. He understands the damage they can do. The bitter divisions they can open up. The fear they can inspire. The lust to inflict harm which they can trigger. But, like Queen Jadis, he doesn’t care. America must he his – even if he’s the only person left standing who doesn’t feel duped and sullied and robbed of everything they held dear.

The terrible magic he has unleashed on the four congresswomen of colour is proof of just what a powerful political wizard he has become. First he singles out the women as enemies of America, and then, when their Democratic Party comrades hasten to their defence, he turns their gestures of solidarity into evidence of treason. See how far the stain of “radical socialism” has spread, he tells his baying supporters. “Throw them out!” they chant. “Throw them out!”

The American presidents who came before Trump knew the power of these deplorable words, which is why they foreswore them. Such fastidiousness strikes Trump, just as it struck Queen Jadis, as “weak and soft-hearted”. If the only object of the game of power is to rule, then what does it matter if everything of value in the republic you have made your own has been destroyed?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 19 July 2019.

A Fool Rushes In.

Seeking Refuge: Were Jesus, Mary and Joseph fleeing persecution in Palestine or Judea? Were they Palestinians or Jews? Green MP, Golriz Ghahraman, in describing the Holy Family as Palestinian refugees, touched off a firestorm of controversy, demonstrating the sinister ease with which history and propaganda can be confused.

ONLY RARELY has History been press-ganged so brutally into the service of political propaganda. The moment Golriz Ghahraman bestowed the status of Palestinian refugees on Jesus, Mary and Joseph, everybody with an opinion on Israel/Palestine immediately rushed to their respective corners and, following a quick word with their trainers, came out swinging.

What was Ms Ghahraman thinking when she tweeted her opinion on the nationality of the Holy Family? The easiest answer would have to be: she wasn’t. Caught up in the endless cut-and-thrust of the pathologically politicised Twittersphere, the Greens’ foreign affairs spokesperson was simply slashing back wildly with her rhetorical cutless.

If the Christian Right was asserting that members of its faith community were under no moral obligation to assist refugees, then it was only fitting that they should be reminded that Jesus, Mary and Joseph had once been refugees – and Palestinian refugees at that!

It is interesting to speculate how long it took Ms Ghahraman to grasp the full political consequences of her outburst. Given the instantaneity of the Internet, one must assume that the realisation came quickly. Certainly, the speed with which she was prevailed upon to issue a fulsome apology to the Jewish community suggests that her colleagues recognised the magnitude of Ms Ghahraman’s insult more-or-less immediately.

For insult it was. Deliberate or unintentional? It hardly matters. To characterise Jesus, Mary and Joseph as anything other than a Jewish family is to locate oneself in the midst of the very worst kind of antisemitism.

It was, after all, the Nazis who insisted that Jesus was an Aryan.

How could he not be? To claim that Jesus of Nazareth; a Galilean carpenter; and a subject of Herod, King of Judea; was a Jew; is tantamount to suggesting that the fount of all the World’s evil, is also, somehow, the source of its redeemer. No anti-Semite could possibly accept such a slander on the founder of the Christian religion.

That the Christian churches of Germany did not protest loudly against these theological and historical calumnies indicates how deeply the notion of Jesus’s non-Jewishness was imbedded in the popular imagination of Christendom. For centuries, ordinary Christians had been fed the “blood libel” that the Jews killed Christ. It seemed obvious, to Catholic peasant and Protestant townsman alike, that the Jews were hardly likely to murder one of their own.

For citizens and supporters of the State of Israel, the import of Ms Ghahraman’s message was equally alarming.

To claim Jesus, Mary and Joseph for the Palestinian cause is to make of Israel an interloper and a coloniser: the malignant cuckoo in the Arab peoples’ historical nest. Even worse, Ms Ghahraman’s characterisation neatly reverses the foundation myth of the Israeli state. Rather than the Jews returning to their ancient homeland, it is the Palestinians who are seeking to restore the status quo ante.

The name Palestine is recorded in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, chiseled a thousand years before the Roman Empire ever sent its legions a-conquering. By this reckoning, the people between the Jordan River and the sea have always been Palestinians. Therefore, the people calling themselves Jews have no claim. They came a-conquering from somewhere else.

Israel’s answer to such revisionism is an emphatic “No!”

The presence of the Jewish people in the lands between the Jordan River and the sea in the early years of the Christian Era is an indisputable historical fact. When the Roman Empire’s man in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate, had a religious rabble-rouser called Jesus crucified, it was for the crime of allowing himself to be called “King of the Jews” – not “King of the Palestinians”!

It would be another 100 years before Rome renamed the territory between the river and the sea “Palestine”. After repeated revolts, culminating in the ruthless expulsion of what remained of territory’s inhabitants, the Emperor Hadrian determined to make it as if the homeland of the Jews had never existed.

And yet, no matter where they landed, the great Jewish diaspora did not forget. Passover after Passover, century after century, they lifted their cups and vowed: L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim – Next year in Jerusalem!

Small wonder that Ms Ghahraman apologised so speedily. Her foolish and inflammatory tweet blundered into a world where, today, angels themselves fear to tread. The riddle of Israel, Palestine, and their holy refugees, renders even Twitter mute.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 July 2019.

Racing To The Bottom, Or Chasing Our Tails?

Always Playing Catch-Up: Throughout the 1970s, the purchasing power of the ordinary worker’s pay packet – the only meaningful measure of his or her wealth – was being eaten away every passing year by seemingly inexorable rises in the cost-of-living. Small wonder that New Zealand (and the rest of the Western world) was plagued by strike after strike, as the unions made increasingly desperate – and ultimately futile – efforts to catch-up. Neoliberalism has many faults, but encouraging inflation isn't one of them.

A NEW FRONT has opened up in an old battle. The New Zealand Initiative (NZI) a think tank funded by this country’s largest corporations, has come out swinging against this government’s proposed “Fair Pay Agreements” (FPA).

As the linear descendent of the Business Roundtable, of unhappy memory, this is hardly surprising. For the NZI’s principal funders, preserving the gains of the dramatic changes in employment law which rounded-off New Zealand’s neoliberal revolution remains a high priority.

In the ears of New Zealand’s biggest bosses, the FPAs sound too much like the old “Industrial Awards”, which, for nearly 100 years, underpinned the industrial relations system swept away by the Employment Contracts Act 1991 (ECA).

It has been an article of faith among trade unionists (and the Left generally) that the passage of the ECA led directly to a decisive shift in the balance-of-power in the workplace. Not only between the boss and the union, but also – and more generally – between wage and salary earners and shareholders. The ECA has caused the share of national wealth claimed by the workers to shrink, the Left insists, while growing the share claimed by the capitalists.

All the other arguments advanced by the labour movement: that the employment relationship, as modified by the ECA and its successors, has grown increasingly one-sided and unfair; is based upon this crucial statistic. If the size of the Capitalists’ slice of the national pie has, indeed, grown relative to the workers’ slice, then change is justified. If, however, the slices have remained more-or-less the same, or, if the workers’ slice is growing (albeit very slowly) then the Left’s case for change is weakened – perhaps fatally.

Hence the NZI’s latest offensive: a statistical dagger-thrust at the unions’ key argument that unjust employment laws are keeping the workers poor, weak and exploited. Here’s the point of the dagger:

“[I]t is claimed current labour market settings have seen a decline in the share of New Zealand’s gross domestic product (or “share of the pie”) going to workers. This concern is a myth. The share of GDP going to workers did decline in the late 20th century, but this fall largely occurred in the 1970s and 1980s (at a time when New Zealand had a system of industrial awards similar to the FPA arrangements proposed by the FPA[Working Group]). Since the 1991 reforms, the decline in workers’ share of GDP has been arrested and is now trending upwards.”

Could this possibly be true? Actually, the NZI just might be right.

A week or so ago, while researching another topic entirely, I had cause to refer to my late mother’s amazing collection of Encyclopaedia Britannica yearbooks. In the entry devoted to New Zealand in the year 1977, I read with astonishment that the rate of inflation recorded for 1976 was 15.6 percent. In March of 1977, however, the Wage Hearing Tribunal had awarded wage workers an across-the-board increase of just 6 percent. The unions had asked for 12.8 percent. In other words, the purchasing power of the ordinary worker’s real wage had shrunk by at least 6.8 percent – probably more.

No matter that union membership was compulsory in 1977. No matter that industrial awards mandated a minimum set of wages and conditions across entire occupational groupings. The purchasing power of the ordinary worker’s pay packet – the only meaningful measure of his or her wealth – was being eaten away every passing year by these seemingly inexorable rises in the cost-of-living. Small wonder that New Zealand (and the rest of the Western world) was plagued by strike after strike, as the unions made increasingly desperate – and ultimately futile – efforts to catch-up.

Clearly, there were more ways of killing the poor old worker’s cat than by hitting it over the head with the ECA.

The Council of Trade Unions may be right about the ECA and its workplace bargaining setting off a “race to the bottom”, whereby wages are constantly being suppressed by employers competing aggressively to reduce the size of their wage bill. But, the very same rigors of competitive neoliberal microeconomics are also preventing employers from simply passing on the wage rises secured through collective bargaining into the price of their goods and services.

While neoliberalism holds inflation in check – allowing workers’ real wages to rise – the trade unions will struggle for members – and relevance.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 July 2019.

Can Jacinda Give National The KISS Of Populist Death?

Let's Do Them! All Jacinda Ardern has to do to clinch the 2020 General Election is frighten the bejesus out of the electorate by describing in the most graphic terms imaginable what will happen to all the positive beginnings her government has made if National is returned to power. Paint Simon Bridges, or, Judith Collins (if National are silly enough to gift Labour “The Crusher”) as wanton toddlers, hell-bent on smashing-down what all the other children are striving to build.

AS THINGS NOW STAND, NZ First cannot surge. This is a serious problem for all the parties making up the Coalition Government. NZ First has come to rely upon the last-minute surge in popular support which its leader skilfully engenders, and which, again and again, has carried himself and his colleagues over the 5 percent MMP threshold. The problem facing the Coalition in 2020 is that, hitherto, Winston Peters’ target: the object fuelling the popular resentment behind the surge; has been the incumbent government. Peters can hardly set about organising a populist surge against himself!

Unfortunately, for the Coalition Government, it is living through what might be called “The Populist Moment”. All over the world, voters are deserting the parties of the centre-left and the centre-right for political leaders and parties eager to denounce the failed orthodoxy of the political establishment. The era of post-war optimism, founded on a rising tide of prosperity lasting thirty years, is well and truly over. All the promises to re-start the happiness machine have proved hollow. The new god of Neoliberalism, which replaced the failed god of Keynesianism, has turned out to have feet of clay. Nothing works anymore, and somebody must be to blame.

Ordinarily, it would be Peters and NZ First positioning themselves front-and-centre in the blame game. As we lurch towards election year, however, we encounter a howling void where New Zealand’s twenty-five-year-old populist party used to be. It’s not as if there’s any shortage of issues for the populists to take up: immigration, affordable housing, freedom of speech, social and cultural engineering; all are crying out for a champion.

And that’s the only question. Is there a politician out there tough enough to pick them up and run with them?

Act’s David Seymour would like to, but he simply doesn’t strike enough voters as the right sort of person for the job. National’s Simon Bridges can also see the gap in the political market which Peters’ decision to throw in his lot with Labour and the Greens has opened up. Unfortunately, he just can’t decide whether his colleagues are ready – or even willing – to hare off down the populist path. It’s that indecision, ultimately, which disqualifies him from following in the footsteps of this country’s most ruthless populist politician, Rob Muldoon.

No other New Zealand political leader has produced a surge like Muldoon’s. In just 18 months he exactly reversed Labour’s huge 23-seat majority. The only other National Party leader who’s come anywhere close is Don Brash, who took National from its worst defeat ever and turned it back into a credible contender for power. There’s no doubt that National can do populism: what else were Muldoon’s dancing Cossacks and Brash’s Iwi/Kiwi billboards? What is much more doubtful, is the National Caucus’s willingness give Judith Collins a crack at it.

Which just leaves one more contender: the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.

Is that even possible? Has an incumbent government ever successfully run a populist campaign?

The answer is an unequivocal “Yes.” All that’s required is an extremely popular leader (Check) and a poorly-led and vulnerable Opposition (Check). As Scott Morrison demonstrated across the Tasman: if these two prerequisites are in place; and if you have the self-discipline to stay on-message for the duration; then you can confound the pundits and snatch victory from the jaws of what everyone insisted was certain defeat.

All Jacinda has to do is frighten the bejesus out of the electorate by describing in the most graphic terms imaginable what will happen to all the positive beginnings her government has made if National is returned to power. Paint Simon Bridges, or, Judith Collins (if National are silly enough to gift Labour “The Crusher”) as wanton toddlers, hell-bent on smashing-down what all the other children are striving to build. Negative campaigning? Attack advertising? Of course! But in a noble and positive cause.

And the really exciting thing is that a huge part of the campaign need not be visible. If Labour in New Zealand is not too proud to copy the extraordinary social-media campaigning techniques perfected by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in the recent European elections, then Jacinda should be able to avoid pretty much all of the blood-splatter.

If Labour can bear to eschew complexity, in favour of “Keep it simple, stupid!”, Jacinda will surge home.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 July 2019.

Goff And Tamihere Are Both Wrong. (But Bernard Hickey Is Right On The Money!)

Show Me The Money! The alternative to state funding of infrastructure is, of course, to fund it by taking on massive amounts of private debt. On this issue, at least, Auckland mayoral challenger, Tamihere, has some solid points to make. In his own colourful turn of phrase, the incumbent mayor, Phil Goff, and the Auckland Council, have “maxed-out the credit card”. If the City is to preserve its international credit rating of AA, then it simply cannot afford to take on any more debt.

NEITHER PHIL GOFF, nor John Tamihere, are telling Aucklanders the truth about their city, but Bernard Hickey has given it a pretty good shot. In a powerful and deeply insightful article, posted on the Newsroom website, Hickey not only explains why KiwiBuild failed, but why it could never have succeeded. In the process, he lays bare the fundamental failures of political and economic intelligence fuelling New Zealand’s conjoined national and local infrastructure crises. Goff and Tamihere are part of that intellectual failure, and that is why neither politician is giving Aucklanders meaningful answers to their most pressing questions.

Tamihere has proposed selling 49 percent of Watercare to either the Accident Compensation Corporation, or the Superannuation Fund, or both, and using the proceeds (estimated at around $5 billion) to fund Auckland’s urgent infrastructure needs. Goff, who, in his years as a member of the Fourth Labour Government, never once voted against the privatisation of state-owned monopolies, has come out as a staunch defender of the municipally-owned Watercare company. He is warning Aucklanders that Tamihere’s plan would increase the average Aucklander’s water bill by $200-400 per year – falling most heavily on the poorest Auckland families.

What does Hickey say about the funding of local government infrastructure?

“After the mid-1980s, the Government saw the private sector as the provider of housing and saw any infrastructure as a cost that needed to be borne by those building the new houses and local Government, not the wider taxpaying public. Even now, that thinking is infused through Treasury and into the minds of the current Labour leadership, going from Ardern through Finance Minister Grant Robertson to Twyford.”

In other words, the neoliberal principle of “user pays” has been extended well beyond its original target, the hapless individual consumer of government services, to encompass everyone: consumers, businesses, central and local government institutions; everyone. The contrast between the neoliberal approach and the nation-building approach, which, historically, has informed the policies of successive New Zealand governments, could hardly be starker.

As Hickey makes clear:

“[N]neither the National or Labour-led governments of the last 35 years have seen it as their role to pay for [housing’s] underlying infrastructure. Their instincts have been to get others to pay for it, unlike during the golden eras of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and early 1970s when governments of both colours used the national balance sheet to build and subsidise that infrastructure through the Ministry of Works, State Advances Corp and various Group Building schemes and child benefit capitalisation policies.”

The alternative to state funding of infrastructure is, of course, to fund it by taking on massive amounts of private debt. On this issue, at least, Tamihere has some solid points to make. In his own colourful turn of phrase, Goff and the Auckland Council have “maxed-out the credit card”. If the City is to preserve its international credit rating of AA, then it simply cannot afford to take on any more debt. What’s more, the rest of the country cannot afford for Auckland to take on any more debt.

Hickey tells us why:

“The technical problem is the Auckland Council is almost at its debt-to-revenue limit ratio of 270 percent, which is the level specified by Standard and Poor’s for Auckland to keep its AA credit rating. This is important because taking on more debt would mean Auckland’s credit rating would be downgraded, which would increase the interest costs on existing debt and force up rates. But it would also breach the rules set by the Local Government Funding Agency [LGFA] about Auckland’s credit rating not falling more than one notch below the Government's AA+ rating. That’s important because Auckland’s rating essentially sets the base for all local government borrowing through the LGFA. It means there is enormous political pressure locally and financial pressure from other councils (and the LGFA) for Auckland not to borrow much more. Councils beyond the Bombays and north of Orewa would scream blue murder if their interest bills went up because the Auckland Council decided to solve a funding problem the central Government won’t solve.”

Unable to take on any more debt, Tamihere knows that the only way for Goff to fund infrastructure development in Auckland is by increasing rates, raising user-charges, and/or adding another 5-10 cents to the price of a litre of petrol. Tamihere is far from convinced that Goff (or anyone else) is willing to risk a ratepayers’ revolt by leading Auckland up that particular garden path, hence his plan to access five billion desperately needed dollars for urgent infrastructure development by selling 49 percent of Watercare.

The politics of this is quite clever, because, by the time ACC and/or the Superfund take the necessary steps to secure their standard rate-of-return from Watercare by taking it out of everybody’s water bill – Goff is quite right about that – Tamihere may have earned himself enough public good-will to be re-elected Mayor in 2022. (Assuming, of course, that this partial privatisation policy enables him to beat Goff in October 2019.) Five billion dollars builds a lot of infrastructure, so, who knows, Tamihere’s use of Peter’s central government funds, to pay for Paul’s local government needs, might just work. “The Mayor who rebuilt Auckland without plunging us all into deeper debt!” – has a rather nice political ring to it.

In the long run, however, Tamihere’s gambit can only be a bust. Liquidating and then spending Auckland’s capital assets can only end up dragging the city to the same point Goff has already reached. Namely, facing the politically unpalatable reality of requiring people to give up an increasing proportion of their income to the Council and/or its commercial arms. While the New Zealand political class – and that includes you, Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and James Shaw – remains incapable of thinking outside the neoliberal box, New Zealand’s crumbling infrastructure, not to mention the many large-scale public works projects that will be required to meet the challenges of the future, cannot be addressed.

Goff and Tamihere would be better advised to jointly demand, as the leading mayoral candidates, that the State once again steps up to the plate of nation-building. In a country whose entire population is smaller than that of a medium-sized global city, there never has been, and still isn’t, any other viable alternative to turning the state into New Zealand’s angel investor.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 4 July 2019.

Un-Friending The People.

The People's "Friend": In this masterpiece of revolutionary propaganda, the homicidal political psychopath, Jean-Paul Marat, has been transformed by Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolution's most accomplished artist, into a martyred hero of the ordinary people of Paris. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, the ignorant and the angry no longer need a radical 'friend' with a printing press to amplify their voices. Today they can change the world with a fingertip.

BEN MORGAN IS RIGHT: “This is the first time in history that people with so little competence can so powerfully enter the civic discourse.” The consequences of this undeniable fact, for ourselves as citizens, and for our entire democratic political culture, are huge. When noise equals money, and ignorance has been given such a mighty amplifier as the Internet, then democracy, as a viable system of government, must come under enormous pressure.

The dangers of giving the angry and ignorant their own media outlet was demonstrated most powerfully in the early 1790s, just as the French Revolution was entering its “Reign of Terror”.

The radical political philosopher, physician and noted scientist, Jean-Paul Marat, recognising the rising power of the poorest people of Paris, founded a newspaper dedicated to both arousing and expressing their most extreme political passions. In a sinister anticipation of the very worst aspects of today’s social media, Marat’s Friend of The People turned rumour into fact and gave voice to the poverty-stricken masses most bloodthirsty impulses. To be denounced on the pages of Marat’s “fake news”-paper very quickly became the equivalent of a death sentence. That Marat, himself, was afflicted with an excruciating skin disease did nothing to calm his homicidal fury towards any person or group he judged to be an enemy of the people.

It was at Marat’s instigation that the revolutionary militia – known as the National Guard – carried out the infamous “September Massacres” of 1792. Over the course of a week National Guardsmen, their numbers augmented by the Paris poor, broke into the capital’s prisons and butchered more than a thousand prisoners. Marat had told his readers that the jails of Paris were full of aristocrats ready to assist the counter-revolutionary forces massing on France’s borders. To save the revolution, he declared, they must all be pre-emptively executed. Some of the victims were, indeed, political prisoners awaiting trial. Most, however, were common criminals. Even by the grisly standards of eighteenth century Europe, the grotesque horror of the September Massacres was profoundly shocking.

Marat’s next victims were the “Girondins”, a faction of the National Assembly whom he suspected of excessive moderation. The Friend of the People’s relentless campaigning convinced Marat’s readers that the Girondins were plotting against the Revolution. In short order, his allies in the National Assembly, the radical Jacobin faction, had the Girondins arrested, tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal, declared guilty, and guillotined.

Marat’s bloody reign was brought to an abrupt end by a young Girondin sympathiser called Charlotte Corday, who famously stabbed him to death in his medicinal bath, after gaining access to the “people’s friend” by passing herself off as an anti-Girondin informant. Secretly relieved to be rid of their dangerous journalistic demagogue, the Jacobins transformed Marat into the Revolution’s first great martyr. The painting entitled The Death of Marat, executed by the era’s most accomplished artist, Jacques-Louis David, is an acknowledged masterpiece of revolutionary propaganda.

This cautionary historical tale records only the consequences of a single radical intellectual’s decision to align himself wholeheartedly with the least educated and most desperate elements of a society gripped by revolutionary change. The important difference between Marat’s Friend of the People and Facebook is that, in order to work its malign political magic, the former still required the participation of a guiding editorial hand, a printers’ workshop, and a host of newspaper sellers. Contemporary social media has done away with all these intermediaries. Today, the people need no friend, they can speak for themselves.

These individual voices, algorithmically assembled into vast aggregations of the like-minded, now possess the power to dictate the editorial policies of the world’s newspapers and broadcasting networks. Dependent on the electronic devices of these volatile and easily bored consumers for their economic survival, the legacy media has all but given up on the notion that a newspaper, magazine, radio station or television network should lead and inform public opinion. This clear political goal, which Marat, himself, would have endorsed – albeit in relation to the Parisians’ most extreme opinions – has been supplemented by the media’s existential need to fashion itself into a politically agnostic parasite. The new media organism’s only hope of sustaining itself is to feast, with cynical efficiency, on the madness and mania of the masses, and then excrete it back to them.

With the ignorance and prejudices of the masses setting the social and political tone, the desperation and disdain of well-educated and culturally sophisticated managers and professionals – the people who actually keep a modern, technologically-driven society functioning – is easily imagined.

Gone are the days when these folk were able to filter out the masses’ mania and madness from the news media; when the political parties they largely controlled could aggregate a coherent policy agenda with which to guide an otherwise inchoate electorate. Confronted with such monumental stupidity in every sphere: politics, medicine, science; is it any wonder that the technocrats in charge have learned how to transform the self-same social media which has undermined the guided democracy of the past into the undisclosed vector of its destruction in the present?

The covert manipulation of elections by means of social media has now reached such a level of sophistication that those lacking the skills to participate are rendered utterly irrelevant to the electoral process – except as window-dressing. The impact of these techniques is already evident in the deep organic political crisis currently gripping the United Kingdom. Brexit, that great victory of the ignorant and the angry, has set the UK up for a revolution of its own. A similar fate looks set to overwhelm the United States in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential elections.

Will these revolts throw up their own versions of Jean-Paul Marat? Of course. Only this time the people will not see him. And he will not be their friend.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 2 July 2019.