The Last Left-Wing Mohican.

Indefatigable Campaigner: Murray Horton has been fighting the good fight on the left of New Zealand politics for nearly fifty years. On Saturday, 27 January 2018, outside the Waihopai Spy Base, he and his comrades will launch the Aotearoa Independence Movement. “It’s time for this country to pull the plug, to finish the business started in the 1980s which saw NZ both nuclear free and out of ANZUS; and to break the chains – military, intelligence, economic and cultural – that continue to bind us to the American Empire.”

MURRAY HORTON really is the last of the Mohicans. I know this because, at one time, I was a member of his tribe. For fourteen years I was the editor and publisher of a left-of-centre periodical, NZ Political Review. Alas, it has been nearly thirteen years since the final issue of that publication appeared on the newsstands. In 2018, the title of “the last man standing” in left-wing publishing belongs, unquestionably, to Murray Horton.

It was not always so. Thirty-five years ago, there were at least a dozen left-wing periodicals published in New Zealand. From the independent, left social-democratic, NZ Monthly Review, to the Workers’ Communist League’s newspaper, Unity, political parties and activist groups to the left of the Labour Party maintained a lively presence on the New Zealand media stage.

Thirty-five years on, only Murray Horton’s Foreign Control Watchdog remains. Officially, the journal of the Christchurch-based Campaign Against Foreign Control in Aotearoa (CAFCA), the Watchdog offers the last substantial paper and ink forum for left-wing commentary and analysis on the vexed question: “Who owns New Zealand – and why?”

Since the first appearance of Watchdog in the mid-1970s, however, the answer to that question has been the same. New Zealanders control less and less of their own country – for the very simple reason that they keep selling off large chunks of it to foreigners.

Perhaps it’s because the answers to the questions CAFCA and the Watchdog were set up to investigate have not changed in more than 40 years, that Murray Horton and his comrades will next week, outside the Waihopai Spy Base in Marlborough, be launching the Aotearoa Independence Movement (AIM).

“It’s time for this country to pull the plug,” says the Horton-penned pamphlet announcing AIM’s launch, “to finish the business started in the 1980s which saw NZ both nuclear free and out of ANZUS; and to break the chains – military, intelligence, economic and cultural – that continue to bind us to the American Empire.”

With President Donald Trump doing such a splendid job of alienating the rest of the world from the American Empire, 2018 would certainly rate as a very good year to launch such a radical project. Not since the American invasion of Iraq, nearly 15 years ago, have the United States’ global stocks been so low. Right now, the idea of severing all New Zealand’s ties to US imperialism sounds pretty good.

But, is it?

Murray Horton is old enough to remember what happened to the last two southern hemisphere leaders who dared to break the ties that bound them to the USA. At roughly the same time as the first issue of Watchdog appeared in 1974, Salvador Allende, the left-wing president of Chile, and Gough Whitlam, the left-wing prime-minister of Australia, had either just received, or were in the process of receiving, a sharp lesson in what the American Empire will – and will not – accept from its “colonies”.

The Whitlam case is especially instructive, with Robert Lindsey, author of The Falcon and The Snowman arguing that the act which precipitated the Labor Government’s 1975 dismissal by Governor-General John Kerr was Whitlam’s declared determination to close the US electronic signals interception facility at Pine Gap.

The Pine Gap facility performs exactly the same service to the US global intelligence gathering effort as the Waihopai Spy Base, in front of which Horton proposes to launch his new independence movement.

The Chilean and Australian examples are instructive in another important respect. In both cases the offending governments were overthrown by internal – not external – actors. The US Marines did not come storming ashore on the beaches of either country. Rather, the tasks of first weakening and then toppling Allende and Whitlam were left to the right-wing parties and national security institutions of their respective nation states.

These conservative bodies strongly suspected that any programme which began with a severing of ties to the USA would be unlikely to end there. Breaking free from the global guardian of capitalism was, almost certainly, the preliminary step towards breaking free from capitalism itself.

To his credit, Murray Horton makes no attempt to hide AIM’s anti-capitalist light under a bushel:

“The stated goal of this Government is to ‘put a human face on capitalism’. But AIM sees capitalism as the problem, not the solution, and this needs to be part of the national dialogue.”

AIM’s introductory pamphlet reassures its readers that it is “a campaign, not an organisation. And definitely not a new political party.”

To which I can only reply:

“Well, Murray, it should be. Because foreign policy reorientations and economic transformations on the scale AIM is proposing are beyond the scope of mere “campaigns”. To bring about the sort of changes you’re suggesting requires a mass political party: well-organised and well-funded; and with a great deal more than just one Mohican.”

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 16 January 2018.

Moving Beyond Good and Evil: Can Gerry Brownlee Get Past America’s Moral Absolutes?

He Was A Big Man Yesterday - But Boy You Ought To See Him Now! Except, if Gerry Brownlee wishes to be taken seriously as New Zealand's new Minister of Foreign Affairs, he will have to stop looking and sounding as if he considers himself much too busy to think.

 

GERRY BROWNLEE’s rise began with a fall. Or, more accurately, with a push and a shove. It all happened at the launch of the National Party’s 1999 election campaign. Neil Able, a Native Forest Action “campaigner”, had attempted to participate in the event, and Gerry Brownlee, the first-term MP for the Christchurch electorate of St Albans, had used what a District Court Judge would later describe as “excessive and unnecessary force” to shut him up – and out – of the proceedings. Hardly the most auspicious of beginnings for the man Prime Minister Bill English today (24/4/17) introduced as New Zealand’s next Minister of Foreign Affairs.

 

Notorious among journalists for his tendency towards tetchiness, the words “Gerry Brownlee” and “diplomat” seem particularly ill-matched. The truly great foreign ministers of our history have all been thoughtful, measured and principled individuals. One thinks of Labour’s Peter Fraser and Norman Kirk, or National’s Brian Talboys and Don McKinnon. Bluster, bluff and belligerence tend to be associated with the portfolio’s also-rans. Brownlee will need to display a hitherto unrecognised talent for perspicacity, subtlety and tact if he is to be mentioned in the same breath as his more illustrious predecessors.

 

Of course, Brownlee could be aspiring to the same rogue status that attached itself to David Lange and Winston Peters. The former’s wit and verve, when combined with his Methodist lay preacher’s determination to “let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like an never-failing stream” allowed him to set New Zealand foreign policy on a new and bracing course. Winston Peter’s easy gregariousness and roguish charm, by contrast, drew New Zealand’s erstwhile American friends out of their Lange-induced aloofness and back into the warm waters of mateship.

 

To reach those giddy heights, however, Brownlee will have to stop looking and sounding as if he considers himself much too busy to think.

 

Interviewed by the breathless Corin Dann on last Sunday’s Q+A current affairs show, for example, Brownlee spoke darkly of the North Koreans’ “evil intent”. Clearly, the new Foreign Affairs minister does not subscribe to the idea that terms like “good” and “evil” are a profound hindrance to establishing fruitful international relationships. If a regime is designated as “evil”, then the moral scope for constructive engagement and dialogue is zero. Diplomacy works best when it is guided by empiricism – not metaphysics.

 

But an empirically driven foreign policy requires a minister who is not only in full command of the facts about his neighbours, but who is also determined to understand them. That presupposes a deep personal affinity for history and geography, science and culture, philosophy and religion. Nowhere is the French proverb tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner (to understand all is to forgive all) of more practical use than in determining the most apposite response to the actions of nation states.

 

Sadly, that does not sound like our Gerry. As is the case with so many of his right-wing political brethren, the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989-91 and the Al Qaeda terror attacks of 9/11, have caused Brownlee to regard international relations as a grim global morality play in which the Children of Light (the US and its Western and oil-producing allies) are called upon to wage a ceaseless metaphysical struggle against the Children of Darkness (everybody else, but especially Russia, China and “Radical Islamic Terrorism”).

 

Viewed from this perspective, the world is a place in which the pronouncements of the United States – that “shining city set upon a hill” – are accorded the status of  holy writ. It is the “indispensable nation” that decides who is “Good”, and who is “Evil”, and against America’s judgements there is no appeal.

 

Under this peculiar diplomatic dispensation the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Rules of War and the carefully constructed checks and balances of the UN Security Council are relevant only to the degree that they accord with the judgements of the United States. If they do not facilitate the expression of American will, then those affirming them must be condemned, ignored and, in the most egregious cases, punished.

 

In his guise as New Zealand’s Defence Minister, Brownlee exhibited every sign of wanting New Zealand to go on doing its bit against these “evildoers”. As far as Gerry was concerned, the global ambitions of the United States were in every case praiseworthy and true. Those who stood against them were not only her enemies – they were our enemies, too. And the only acceptable New Zealand response to an American command to “Jump!” was to ask: “How high up the Tirgiran Valley?”

 

We can only hope that the Minister’s transition from Defence to Foreign Affairs results in New Zealand having much less to do with excessive and unnecessary force, and considerably more engagement with the intelligent empiricism so vital to conducting a practical, principled and proudly independent foreign policy.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 April 2017.