Describing The Katipo.

Poisonous! From a very early age New Zealanders are warned to give small black spiders with a red blotch on their abdomens a wide berth. The Katipo, we are told, is venomous: and while its bite may not kill you, it can make you very unwell. That said, isn’t the Acting Chief Censor’s decision to suppress absolutely mass killers’ manifestoes a bit like a parent telling his child that, yes, New Zealand does have a venomous spider, but, no, he is not going to give her any information about what it looks like and where it is most likely to be found?

THE ACTING CHIEF CENSOR’S decision to ban the “manifesto” of the latest hate criminal doubles-down on his predecessor’s error. Putting to one side the universal tendency of all forbidden things to stimulate popular interest purely on account of being banned, keeping the deranged, hate-filled ravings of Brenton Tarrant – and now Payton Gendron – out of New Zealanders’ hands has once again robbed us of the opportunity to gain some understanding of the tortured and fantastical world these individuals inhabit.

Since the ideas of these mass killers are extremely dangerous, and potentially fatal, it is surely in the interest of society to be provided with the means of recognising them when encountered. When a family member or friend starts spouting forth the sort of racist ideas that motivated Tarrant and Gendron, that is presumably a strong indication that all is not well. But, with the ideas of both men kept out of the reach of the public, how are those closest to potential offenders supposed to know what they’re looking for?

From a very early age New Zealanders are warned to give small black spiders with a red blotch on their abdomens a wide berth. The Katipo, we are told, is venomous: and while its bite may not kill you, it can make you very unwell. That said, isn’t Mr Rupert Ablett-Hampson’s decision to suppress absolutely Gendron’s manifesto a bit like a parent telling his child that, yes, New Zealand does have a venomous spider, but, no, he is not going to give her any information about what it looks like and where it is most likely to be found?

Ablett-Hampson’s news release justifies his decision to declare Gendron’s manifesto “objectionable” – thereby making it a serious offence to possess and/or disseminate its content – by referencing the harm it could do if accessed by the wrong sort of person:

We understand most people in Aotearoa reading such publications would not be supportive of these hateful messages but these kind of publications are not intended for most people. We have seen how they can impact individuals who are on the pathway to violence.

It is, however, extremely doubtful if declaring such documents “objectionable” will have the effect Ablett-Hampson intends. Those disposed to the arguments of white supremacy, for example, need only search for the topic on YouTube to activate the algorithms that will supply them with a great deal more information than is good for anyone’s mental digestion.

Moreover, if our white supremacist is persistent he will soon be in a position to move well beyond the material available on YouTube. There are places on the web where the red meat of murderous racism is served up blood raw and dripping. In these infernal regions of the Internet, the Acting Chief Censor’s writ simply does not run.

Another place the Acting Chief Censor’s writ does not run (at least, I hope it doesn’t!) is the past. History, sadly, is one long chronicle of human cruelty and suffering. The acts of injustice committed by our ancestors cannot be undone by the simple expedient of declaring them “objectionable”.

One could try, I suppose, but it would mean banning all material relating to the Knights Templar (who inspired the Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik) and the Ottoman Conquest of South-East Europe (which played an important part in the formation of Brenton Tarrant’s worldview). All literature and films relating to the Ku Klux Klan (To Kill A Mockingbird, Mississippi Burning) would have to be proscribed, along with all histories of the Third Reich, and, of course, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. A similar fate would, presumably, lie in store for the writings of the eugenicists and “scientific racists” of the early Twentieth Century. The thoughts of H.G. Wells, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Winston Churchill – all would have to be declared objectionable.

The list of things one could be sent to jail for possessing and disseminating grows long!

And then there are the everyday conversations and personal rantings of ordinary New Zealand citizens. A fair proportion of these are bound to contain all manner of objectionable ideas and claims. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia are to be found everywhere. Misinformation and disinformation are not restricted to social media, they constitute the daily subject matter of our national discourse. It is still possible to sit on a bus and hear the person seated in front of you regale his companion with the long discredited myth that the Māori, upon arriving in these islands, encountered the culturally less sophisticated Moriori people, and exterminated them.

Objectionable? Of course it is. But what is the best way to finally put this white supremacist myth to rest? By jailing everyone who repeats it? – A solution which would require all of us to become government spies ready and willing to dob in our neighbours, relations, friends, lovers? Or, for New Zealand society to use its considerable educational and media resources to set forth clearly the anthropological and historical evidence revealing what actually happened – thereby equipping our children to move beyond the myth and embrace the truth?

Would there still be some, diehard racists all of them, who still peddled the Moriori myth? Yes, there would. The point, however, is that when we heard them spout their racism we would be well placed to assess whether or not we were listening to nothing more alarming than a bore in a bar, or, to an individual “on the pathway to violence”.

Hate speech is jarring, distressing, and potentially indicative of murderous intent. After the Christchurch Mosque Attacks it was completely understandable that many of us made the leap from the terrible events of 15 March 2019, to the terrible idea that another such event might be prevented by banning the expression of objectionable ideas – on pain of imprisonment.

But, the actions of the Acting Chief Censor notwithstanding, we cannot incarcerate our way to virtue, we can only arm our fellow citizens with a reasonable description of vice. So that, when they encounter it in the street, the pub, on the bus, or at a dodgy Coastal Otago gun-club, they will recognise it and contact the appropriate authorities – who will do something about it.

Like the blood red blotch of the Katipo, the manifestoes of mass killers must be allowed to acquaint us with the offensive smell and the bitter taste of ideological poison.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 May 2022.

Hollow Laughter, Mixed With Tears.

Guarding The Stable Door: In the absence of the hard evidence only an actual terrorist atrocity can supply, the ability of New Zealand’s national security apparatus to pre-empt such attacks is legally and politically compromised. Indeed, even in the aftermath of an all-too-real terrorist massacre, the judicial and bureaucratic machinery of the state proved criminally inadequate to the task of keeping New Zealanders safe.

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus

When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.

“They All Laughed”, Ira and George Gershwin, 1937


THERE IS absolutely no humour in the tragic sequence of events that unfolded in the New Lynn mall on Friday. Perhaps the only positive aspect of this latest terrorist attack is that, to date, the only fatality has been the terrorist himself. There was plenty of heroism in the bloody aisles of that Countdown supermarket, however, and plenty of cool professionalism also. On a shaky cellphone video, now viewed by millions, the clearly audible sequence of rapid-fire pistol shots indicated an officer determined to bring the Isis-inspired, knife-wielding perpetrator’s stabbing-spree to a halt.

Why quote the Gershwin brothers, then? What is there to laugh at?

The black humour of this situation derives not from the terrorist attack, but from a review of the way elements of the New Zealand Left have, by turns, scoffed at the very idea that terrorism might constitute a genuine threat to this country’s national security; castigated the national security apparatus for failing to prevent the atrocity of 15 March 2019; and then, reversing direction once again, cautioned against an excessively draconian response to the events of the past few days.

One of the reasons the New Lynn terrorist, Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen, was not safely incarcerated on Friday afternoon, is because, as the judge overseeing an earlier trial pointed out, securing a conviction on a charge of planning and/or preparing to carry out a terrorist attack in New Zealand is just too difficult. Only when an act of terrorism has been committed does the law have anything useful to contribute. The judge’s speculation that this weakness in New Zealand’s anti-terrorist legislation might turn out to be its “Achilles Heel” has been dramatically vindicated.

Why nobody spotted this deficiency in the Terrorist Suppression Act 2002, which was passed by the New Zealand Parliament in response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, remains a mystery. It is, after all, rather difficult to imagine how terrorism might be suppressed if, when preparations for launching a terrorist attack are detected, the loose wording of the Act effectively prevents the authorities from intervening until after the event had taken place. They would have been better advised to entitle the legislation the “Shutting the Stable Door Act”.

It took the curious case of the alleged Urewera military training camps to fully expose the inadequacies of the Terrorism Suppression Act. As things turned out it proved to be next-to-useless in dealing with activities suggestive of a terrorist campaign in its preparatory stages. Alerted to the existence of armed groups engaging in military-style training exercises in the Urewera mountains, the Police mounted an extensive surveillance operation culminating in the arrest of 17 individuals in October 2007.

There were many reasons why the Police’s “Operation Eight” failed. The inadequacy of the Terrorism Suppression Act was one of them; the excessively intimidatory raid on the little town of Ruatoki another. Critical to the whole exercise’s failure, however, was the extraordinarily successful campaign waged on behalf of the defendants by the Far Left.

At the heart of this campaign was the carefully cultivated perception that the whole exercise was farcical – a bit of a joke. New Zealand just wasn’t the sort of place where terrorism was seriously contemplated. The Police had grossly overreacted to what was no more than a bit of harmless play-acting. The only people terrified by Operation Eight were the traumatised Māori residents of Ruatoki. Those in serious search of terrorism need look no further than the racist and colonialist depredations of the New Zealand state.

They all laughed at Police Commissioner Howard Broad and his damned-if-he-did, damned-if-he-didn’t, predicament. The nation’s politicians, however, were quick to draw the obvious lessons.

What the Urewera debacle made clear was that not only will intervention before the fact of a terrorist attack expose the national security apparatus – and its political masters – to the ruthless excoriation of the Far Left, but also, crucially, to serious criticism from the news media. As the Far left critics of “Operation Eight” proved, pre-emptive policing is all-too-easily presented as the action of a “police state” over-eager to put its new-found powers to the test.

Small wonder, then, that both major parties became extremely wary of displaying too much interest in correcting the all-too-obvious defects in the Terrorism Suppression Act.

How differently New Zealanders might have responded to “Operation Eight’s” videos of armed individuals moving stealthily through the Urewera bush if they had been recorded subsequent to the terrible events of 15 March 2019. By then, of course, the notion that domestic terrorism was a bit of a joke had been tragically and decisively dispelled. Fortunately for the Left, those twelve-year-old Urewera images had been largely forgotten – along with the Far Left’s insistence that they conveyed nothing sinister.

Harmless Play-Acting? “Operation Eight” surveillance footage of military-style training exercise in the Ureweras, 2007.

Indeed, within days of the Christchurch Mosque Massacre, the Far Left’s position had changed dramatically. Not only was the threat of terrorism dangerously real, but it was also latent in a colonialist Pakeha population fatally tainted with both the legacy and the actuality of “white supremacy”. The cry from the Far Left, now, was not that the national security apparatus was too heavy handed, but that it was not heavy-handed enough. Why had the SIS not subjected the Alt-Right and militant ethno-nationalist groups to the same oppressive surveillance it reserved for Muslims?

The Māori Party demanded to know why the Police and the SIS weren’t working together to root out the white supremacist threat. Radical leftists called for the curtailment of “hate speech” – especially against New Zealand’s Muslim population. The Labour Government promised to oblige.

Which was odd. Because long before Brenton Tarrant unleashed terror in Christchurch, Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen had been giving the government of Jacinda Ardern nightmares. Ever since 2016, three years before Tarrant’s attack, New Zealand’s national security apparatus had been grappling with the clear and present danger of a dangerously radicalised Islamist who made no secret of his support for and admiration of the actions of the murderous Islamic State. If Tarrant slipped past the SIS, GCSB and Police Intelligence watchers, it was for the very good reason that they had another predator in their sights. What’s more, they could not be absolutely sure that Samsudeen was the only Isis-inspired “lone wolf” in the forest.

George and Ira Gershwin’s 1937 hit, “They All laughed”, concludes with the lines:

Hee, hee, hee!
Let’s at the past laugh
Ha, ha, ha!
Who’s got the last laugh now?

Faced with the Far Left’s cynical gyrations on the subject of terrorism, and whether or not it poses a threat to ordinary New Zealanders (like Muslim New Zealanders at Friday prayers, or the seven unsuspecting Kiwis stabbed in the aisles of their local supermarket as they innocently shopped for groceries on a Friday afternoon) the answer to the question “Who’s got the last laugh, now?” offers a variety of answers.

First and foremost, the last laugh belongs to those who, fourteen years ago, attempted to protect the New Zealand public from terrorism, only to discover that, in the absence of the evidence only an actual terrorist atrocity can supply, the ability of the national security apparatus to pre-empt such horror is legally and politically compromised. Indeed, even in the aftermath of an all-too-real terrorist attack, the judicial and bureaucratic machinery of the state proved criminally inadequate to the task of keeping New Zealanders safe.

Also entitled to a final, grim chuckle, are those stalwarts of the Old Left who never wavered in their conviction that the infliction of violence for political purposes must never be treated as a purely tactical issue. The Far Left’s argument that: in one context, training with weapons in the bush can be forgiven as harmless play-acting; but, in another, treated as evidence of the criminal plans and preparations of murderous white supremacist terrorists; must be rejected as ideologically-driven moral relativism of the worst kind.

Finally, a rough grunt of vindication is due to all those who have argued consistently that no matter what the location: Central Christchurch or West Auckland; the paying of History’s debts with innocent blood is always and everywhere a crime.

But, when these principled New Zealanders laugh at the Far Left’s tawdry equivocations on who is, and who isn’t, a terrorist; that laughter will not be light or mirthful. It will be hollow, filled with rage, and mixed with tears.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 7 September 2021.

I understand why you want to do it, Jacinda – but don’t.

Promise-Keeper: The events of 15 March 2019 are seared upon Jacinda Ardern’s memory. She will not, therefore, abandon the proposed “Hate Speech” legislation lightly, seeing it as a particularly effective means of preventing such horrors. It is also clear that the Prime Minister believes she has promises to keep to the victims of the Christchurch Mosque Attacks. All of this is understandable, but none of it makes the abrogation of New Zealanders’ freedoms acceptable.

I UNDERSTAND WHY the Prime Minister feels so strongly about “Hate Speech”. The events of 15 March 2019 are seared upon Jacinda Ardern’s memory. She will not, therefore, abandon lightly what she sees as a particularly effective means of preventing such horrors from ever happening again. It is also clear that the Prime Minister believes she has promises to keep to the victims of the Christchurch Mosque Attacks. From her perspective, legislating against “Hate Speech” is the most important way of keeping those promises.

She’s wrong, of course.

Prime Ministers cannot afford to take things personally. That may sound harsh and unfeeling, but it is, nevertheless, true. As the leader of this country, Jacinda Ardern has a responsibility to honour not just the pain and suffering of the victims of the Christchurch terrorist, but the pain and suffering of the generation of New Zealanders who battled against the most malign terrorist of all time.

Tens-of-thousands of young New Zealanders were killed or wounded in the global struggle against Adolf Hitler. One of the most precious things they were fighting to protect was the first thing Hitler and his fellow Nazis set out to destroy: the right of every human-being to think, speak and communicate freely.

The urge to suppress ideas and beliefs which contradict what one fervently believes to be the truth is not a healthy urge. It is a totalitarian urge. An urge to bend the whole world to your way of thinking. The great danger of succumbing to this urge is that you begin to see those who disagree with you as willful enemies of the truth. Confronted with their dissent, with their deliberate refusal to acknowledge what is self-evidently true, with their hate speech: what else can you do but make sure that the offenders are disciplined and punished?

Tragically, this is the direction in which the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into The Christchurch Mosque Attacks opted to steer the Government. Out of the terrorist’s mayhem, the Royal Commissioners were determined to bring forth what they called “Social Cohesion”. The people of New Zealand, they said, must be brought closer together, and in order for that to happen, all forms of speech which foster division, are insulting, create disharmony, and/or incite discrimination and hate, should be criminalised.

Had the Royal Commission restricted itself to recommending that language intended to incite hatred and/or violence against followers of the Islamic faith be outlawed, it is just possible that New Zealanders would have conceded the point. After all, if the law already forbids such expression in relation to ethnicity, then why not religion? In the dark shadow of the Mosque attacks, surely it would have been the least New Zealanders could do?

But, no. Restricting the extension of the existing law to cover religion was not deemed to be sufficient. The strengthening of New Zealand’s social cohesion would require the creation of a whole swathe of new “protected groups”. To bring the country together, the Royal Commission – and now, seemingly, the Labour Government – is intent on empowering the citizenry to send their neighbours to jail for up to three years for the “crime” of pissing them off.

One can only feel desperately sorry for the Police as women turn on men, Trans on TERFs, Maori on Pakeha, Christians on atheists, supporters of Palestine on supporters of Israel, Baby Boomers on Millennials, and Neoliberals on Marxists. The courts will be filled with angry and bitter complainants and defendants. Juries will be asked to solve problems philosophers have struggled with for centuries. Vast sums of money will be expended on lawyers. No one will emerge from the process emotionally unscathed. And all in the name of strengthening New Zealand’s social cohesion!

It won’t work, Jacinda. No matter how much you’d like it to; no matter how sincere all those promises you made to the victims. It won’t work. You need to listen to those who are warning you that the unintended consequences of this direct attack on the freedom of thought and expression, guaranteed to all New Zealanders in the Bill of Rights Act, will be huge.

Uniformity of belief and behaviour is Xi Jinping’s goal – it shouldn’t be Jacinda Ardern’s.

Freedom is unruly. It’s rude. It hurts people’s feelings. Makes them angry.

But people died for it, Jacinda.

Leave it alone.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 July 2021.

Has Jacinda Ardern United The Country Behind Her Radical Agenda?

Follow Me: Could it be that Labour has found the same electoral sweet-spot that kept John Key’s National Party in the mid-to-high 40s for the best part of a decade? Is Labour now in the rare position of being able to satisfy “Middle New Zealand” that it possesses both a political leader, and a political programme, that meet the needs of the moment? What’s more, those “needs” may encompass ideas and issues which, hitherto, have been regarded as being far too radical for mainstream political parties to adopt.

IN THE SEASON of Matariki, it is fitting to look both backwards and forwards. Like the mid-winter festivals of the northern hemisphere, Matariki marks the pivot-point between death and re-birth. It is a time for taking stock and gathering strength before setting forth on the next stage of our human journey.

Something to take away from the twelve months just passed, is that this country has a huge capacity for solidarity and national unity. A recent survey conducted under the auspices of the World Health Organisation (WHO) found that 75 percent of New Zealanders considered their country to be more united as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic than it was before the virus struck. Those who described it as more divided represented just 23 percent. Only Singapore reported a more united population than New Zealand’s.

The comparison with other Western nations is stark. Only 10 percent of Americans believe their country has emerged more united as a result of Covid-19. Fully 88 percent of them believe the virus has left the United States more divided. In the United Kingdom the divided/united breakdown was 54:42. Considerably more positive were our Australian cousins. Across the Tasman, 59 percent felt more united, and 39 percent more divided. The median result of the nations polled was: More Divided, 61 percent; More United, 34 percent.

Given New Zealand’s high degree of national unity, the Labour Party’s spectacular election victory in 2020 was entirely predictable. Clearly, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s “Team of Five Million” metaphor resonated loudly with an electorate that had, indeed, come together to fight a common foe. The WHO poll should also serve as a timely reminder to all those who sneered at the PM’s messages of kindness and unity that it is they who are out-of-step with the popular mood – radically out-of-step.

Placed alongside the Colmar Brunton and Reid Research poll results, the WHO survey’s numbers, might also be telling us something else. It is just possible that the resilience of Labour-Green support, and the Opposition parties’ failure to fire, is a reflection of just how good the experience of striving together collectively makes New Zealanders feel.

Good enough, apparently, for the many failures of the Sixth Labour Government to be forgiven. With tens-of-thousands on the waiting-list for a state house, and one-in-five Kiwi children being raised in poverty, many political observers were anticipating a steady decline in the Government’s poll numbers once the euphoria of the 2020 election began to wear off. In reality, Labour’s support is only marginally lower today than it was eight months ago. Nearly half of the electorate is not yet willing to shake off “Jacinda’s” political spell.

The implications of Labour’s unprecedented (at least under MMP) levels of popular support are intriguing. Could it be that Labour has found the same electoral sweet-spot that kept John Key’s National Party in the mid-to-high 40s for the best part of a decade? Not on the basis of the same policies, of course, but on the basis of Labour finding itself in the rare position of being able to satisfy “Middle New Zealand” that it possesses both a political leader, and a political programme, equal to the needs of the moment. What’s more, those “needs” may encompass ideas and issues which, hitherto, have been regarded as far too radical for mainstream political parties to adopt.

Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that the initial surge of national unity under Labour came, not with the onset of the pandemic, but earlier, in the wake of the Christchurch Mosque Shootings.

Let’s further say that Ardern’s handling of that tragedy – especially her inspired formulation “They Are Us” – had the effect of sensitising a majority of New Zealanders to the racially charged character of the “lone wolf” terrorist’s attacks; and to the need for New Zealanders to unite against the evils of racism and white supremacy.

Throw into the mix the extraordinary contrast (which did not go unnoticed by the rest of the world) between the conduct of the New Zealand Prime Minister, and the wink-wink, nudge-nudge tolerance displayed by the US President, Donald Trump, towards America’s racists and white supremacists. There’s nothing Kiwis enjoy more than looking down on Americans from the high moral ground.

If this is what happened, then Ardern’s formidable “Team of Five Million” was already gathering itself in 2019. Her subsequent handling of the Covid-19 crisis further knitted it together into an electorally unbeatable cultural and political force.

For conservative New Zealand politicians this bodes very ill indeed. Their assumption has been that the Labour Government’s moves towards a bi-cultural Aotearoa, and their willingness to introduce draconian “Hate Speech” legislation, will alarm the roughly 440,000 centrist voters who switched sides electorally in order to reward Jacinda and her government for keeping them safe from Covid. Slap these political errors hard up against Labour’s failures in the fields of housing affordability, homelessness, climate change and child poverty, the conservatives argue, and Labour’s chances of winning in 2023 are slim to nil.

But what if “Middle New Zealand” actually feels proud of the moves the Ardern Government is making in relation to Maori and te Tiriti? What if it is right behind curbing the ability of racists and white supremacists to inflict harm on vulnerable communities? What if Jacinda has entered the same magical zone that John Key occupied for nearly ten years? Where, no matter how bad things get, the electorate steadfastly refuses to blame her, or her party, and elects Labour over and over and over again?

That would mean that, instead of going up in the polls, National will continue (just like Labour between 2008 and 2017) to plumb new electoral depths. It would also mean that NZ First, far from riding back into power on a wave of public anxiety over Maori separatism and the antics of “Ngati Woke”, will remain well below the MMP threshold. Moreover, as National’s numbers dwindle, Act’s support (just like the Greens’ between 2008 and 2017) will continue to grow. Assuming David Seymour manages to avoid his own “Metiria Turei Moment”, and National fails to find its own “Jacinda”, life on the Right could get very interesting indeed.

The rising of the Matariki star-cluster should remind us all that life, like the Koru, is an expanding spiral. Though every year we pass the same point, we never return to the same place. In continuity there is also change. The heavens tell us where we are, but they cannot tell us what to do. The successes and failures of human-beings are their own to make. The National Party would be most unwise to assume that yesterday’s defeats and tomorrow’s victories are made of the same stuff.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 28 June 2021.

Nobody Owns The Christchurch Tragedy.

Mass Outpourings Of Love And Solidarity: In excess of 20,000 Wellingtonians gathered at the basin Reserve in mid-March 2019 to reaffirm Prime Minister Ardern's "They are Us" response to the Christchurch Mosque Shootings. The opponents of the "They Are Us" movie project would rather the world was not reminded of the New Zealand people's inspirational reaction to Brenton Tarrant's terrorist crimes. Why? Because it contradicts fundamentally their "New Zealand is a colonialist, racist, white supremacist society" narrative.  

IT WOULD BE INTERESTING to know how most New Zealanders responded to the “They Are Us” movie project. The prospect of a movie recounting their country’s response to the Christchurch mosque attacks of 15 March 2019 would undoubtedly have evoked feelings of pride in a very large number of New Zealanders. That the central character of this historical drama was to be their own Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, would likewise have thrilled many Kiwis. Of equal interest, and perhaps more importance, however, would be some measure of New Zealanders’ reaction to the extraordinary hostility the “They Are Us” project has generated.

Over the space of just a few days, upwards of 55,000 signatures were gathered on-line for a petition opposing the film’s production. Within 48-hours of the project’s announcement, the Office of the Prime Minister felt obliged to issue a statement distancing Ardern from the production and making it clear that she’d had no warning of the film-makers’ intentions. The Mayor of Christchurch, Leanne Dalziel, publicly pilloried the project and curtly informed its promoters that they and their production crew would not be welcome in her city.

What motivated this astonishing outpouring of negativity and resistance? After all, the film’s promoters had made it clear from the get-go that the movie they hoped to make was not about the terrorist attack itself, or its victims, but about how a nation responded to an act of unprecedented savagery. Necessarily, the leader of that nation would be at the centre of the narrative because the New Zealand Prime Minister’s handling of the tragedy was a critical factor in shaping the overall response of her people.

It is important to pause here and acknowledge that Ardern’s reaction to the Christchurch shootings was as close to perfect as human-beings get. The world was by turns astonished and uplifted by her words and gestures. Ardern allowed humanity to rise above the evil of the terrorist’s actions. Few politicians are blessed with the skills to make such a contribution. So, why is it that so many have moved with such speed, and so much venom, to prevent this extraordinary story from being translated to the screen – and told again?

Superficially, the explanation is to be found in the film’s critics’ belief that the story of the Christchurch shootings belongs exclusively to its victims. That any work of art that fails to locate the terrorist’s, Brenton Tarrant’s, victims at its heart is not worth making. It is their story: not Jacinda Ardern’s story; not New Zealand’s story; not the World’s story; and no one has the right to make it anything else. As conceived, runs this argument, “They Are Us” reduces the attacks’ Muslim casualties to bit-players in their own tragedy. Tarrant treated them as objects to be used, and now the film’s promoters seem determined to do the same.

In one sense, those who make this argument are quite correct. Without the victims there is not only no story, but also no terror. Tarrant’s act has no meaning without the 51 defenceless Muslim worshippers who fell beneath his bullets. Likewise, without witnesses there can be no horror. Without families and friends left to grieve the dead, no pain. That’s how terrorism works. That’s why terrorism works.

Terrorism cannot be overcome, however, by fetishizing the horror and pain it causes and walling them in with its survivors. The act of terrorism is, by definition, a political act, and its intention is not only to shock, but to numb. The terrorist seeks to engender feelings of helplessness and, like all torturers, is hoping to extinguish hope itself. The evil of terrorism does not stop there, however, because the terrorist is also hoping to incite acts of political vengeance that will, in the long run, advance his cause.

When the followers of Osama Bin Laden flew jet airliners into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, they all knew that the resulting destruction of life and property would not materially weaken the United States. But, that was never the point. The purpose of the 9/11 attacks were to drive America mad: to set her on a course towards disaster and decline; to create a frenzied giant that would end up demolishing its own house. And, if we’re being truthful, they succeeded – beyond their wildest dreams.

Intentionally or inadvertently (it matters little) Tarrant’s terrorism has also successfully distorted the targeted country’s politics. Long before the Christchurch shooter pulled the trigger of his MSSA, there were individuals and groups on the left of New Zealand politics who characterised their country as a deeply immoral colonial state, founded upon and maintained by the principle of white supremacy. Its mostly European citizens, they alleged, were incurably racist, and their primary victims were the indigenous Maori. This systemic racism was not, however, confined to Maori. Xenophobia and Islamophobia were deeply ingrained in the White New Zealand population.

Tarrant’s crime offered those who subscribed to these ideas an extraordinary opportunity to inject them into the bloodstream of the political mainstream. Almost immediately, the Christchurch shootings were represented as the inevitable outcome of New Zealand’s white supremacist culture. A political agenda began to be advanced, which, if implemented in full, will result in the criminalisation of all thought and speech deemed inimical to the extreme anti-racist ideology. Depressingly, a great deal of this extremist agenda ended up in the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into The Christchurch Mosque Shootings.

Over the past two years, much energy has been expended on the Left to mask the central fact of the Christchurch tragedy: that it was conceived and executed by a Australian who had been radicalised online and overseas and who chose New Zealand to carry out his attack precisely because it was the least likely location for an act of white supremacist terrorism to be contemplated.

The truth of the latter proposition was demonstrated immediately following the Christchurch attacks by the statements and gestures of Jacinda Ardern, and by the answering outpouring of love and solidarity from the tens-of-thousands of Kiwis who gathered in all the main centres to express their determination to prevent Tarrant’s evil act from defiling and defining their nation. The last thing New Zealand’s anti-racist extremists need now is a feature film which re-tells and re-animates those feelings of love and solidarity.

Those demanding the abandonment of the “They Are Us” project have accused its promoters of using the victims of the tragedy as props in an outrageous attempt to further entrench the white privilege of Prime Minister Ardern, and to marginalise still further the 1.2 percent of New Zealanders who are Muslims. It is, however, possible to turn that attack on its head by observing that these anti-racist extremists could just as easily be accused of using the victims of the Christchurch shootings as a means of shutting down a cultural project that would show the world just how decent a society New Zealand’s truly is.

It is, quite simply, wrong to insist that the tragic events of 15 March 2019 belong to anything, or anyone, but History itself. Nor should it be forgotten that History lives only in its re-telling. The truth of the events that shape a nation emerges from many voices, many perspectives. The tragedy that unfolded at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques no more belongs to its victims than it does to its perpetrator. It belongs to the whole world. It is us.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 14 June 2021.

Who Poses the Bigger Threat: The Far Right, Or the Far Left?

Anyone Heard Of The 'Horseshoe Theory'? The notion that the political spectrum isn't really a straight line, but actually more of a horseshoe shape, is making something of a comeback in the 2020s. Its great appeal lies in the fact that it places those at the very ends of the Left-Right spectrum much closer to each other than to those at the centre. Listening to the diagnoses and proposed cures of those purporting to be opponents of the Far-Right, one is tempted to say: "If the horseshoe fits ..."

EVEN THE HEADLINE is misleading: “How the SIS Missed the Threat of the Far Right”. Marc Dalder’s latest posting on the Newsroom site purports to offer evidence of the Service’s failure to adequately assess the danger posed to New Zealand society by Far Right and White Supremacist groups. In fact, from the documents Dalder relies upon, it is clear that the SIS assessed the threat potential of New Zealand’s right-wing extremists with considerable accuracy.

That the SIS failed to prevent the “lone wolf” attack perpetrated by Australian extremist Brenton Tarrant is undeniable. But, once again, the official documents cited by Dalder make it very clear that without the assistance of the most extraordinary dumb luck the detection and prevention of such attacks is next-to-impossible. Curiously enough, this is also precisely what the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into the Christchurch Mosque Attacks concluded.

Dalder’s post highlights a paper produced by the National Assessments Committee of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (not, you’ll note, the SIS) entitled “The Right Wing in New Zealand: Myth versus Reality”.

According to Dalder:

The bulk of this paper examined the threat of far-right groups, even though previous right-wing terrorists like Anders Breivik were not affiliated with a specific organisation. It determined that ‘established, overt groups’ like Right Wing Resistance and the New Zealand National Front ‘posed no threat to domestic security’ and ‘there is no information to suggest either group has the intent or capability to impose their ideology through illegitimate means’.

Greater threats could be found in ‘small [extreme right wing] groups or individuals acting outside the sanction of established organisations’ who ‘are the key vector for harm associated with the far-right ... Extremist racist acts are rare and have not routinely featured the use of firearms, but the relative ease of access to semi-automatic firearms means that a ‘lone wolf’ attack scenario remains a possibility.

Reassuringly, the SIS agreed. Dalder quotes the relevant findings from the Service’s January 2018 Combined Threat Assessment Group report – the last issued before the Christchurch attacks:

This document briefly notes that publicly available information ‘indicates the popularity of far-right ideology has risen in the West since the early 2000s’ but that New Zealand's far-right groups don’t have ‘the intent or capability to promote their ideology by an act of terrorism’.

Yet again, this focus on groups appears to have slipped up the agency. What about a lone wolf attack?

As has been evidenced in similar jurisdictions to New Zealand, an extreme right-wing lone actor attack remains a possibility, albeit a remote one.

Dalder’s judgement of the New Zealand Intelligence Community – revealed in sentences like: “Yet again, this focus on groups appears to have slipped up the agency”, relies entirely on ex post facto reasoning. He knows that Tarrant’s terrorist attack occurred, and therefore feels entitled to say that the SIS “slipped up”.

Except that it didn’t slip up. The SIS and its sister agencies looked at New Zealand’s tiny – and, frankly, rather ridiculous – Far Right community and quite correctly assessed its miniscule groups as possessing neither the intent nor the capability of carrying out a terrorist act. Far from slipping up, the SIS made the right call. It advised the Government that New Zealand’s Far Right groups were nothing to worry about – and they weren’t.

The ideologies of overt white supremacism and/or National Socialism simply do not attract New Zealanders in anything like the numbers required to merit the serious attention of the SIS. Every time these wannabe stormtroopers attempt to strut their stuff on the streets, they are monstered by a far superior force of genuinely aggressive anti-fascists – so much so that they usually require Police protection! Terrorists should be (and are) made of sterner stuff.

Certainly, the Christchurch Shooter was made of homicidally sterner stuff. Stuff which, as New Zealand’s national security analysts rightly warned, is almost impossible to detect or prevent. Yet, even here, their predictions proved accurate. They had rated the chances of a “lone wolf” New Zealander emerging to wreak the sort of havoc unleashed by Anders Breivik in Norway as “remote”, and, once again, they were proved correct. Brenton Tarrant was an Australian, radicalised online and overseas, who chose to carry out his “mission” in New Zealand precisely because it was just about the last place on earth where anyone would expect such a dreadful tragedy to happen.

So, what, exactly, is Dalder hoping to achieve by constantly berating the SIS and the rest of New Zealand’s national security apparatus for missing a “lone wolf” Australian terrorist? Especially when our spooks had repeatedly warned their political masters that “lone wolf” terrorists were almost impossible to intercept? Is he hoping that by repeating these charges over and over again he and his supporters will establish a political climate in which truly draconian levels of state surveillance are accepted as both urgent and necessary?

Assessing the response of the “anti-fascists” to the clearly illegal communication of genocidal ideas via a YouTube posting (quickly taken down) from a person later confirmed by the Police as suffering from a mental illness, one is left wondering. Our current laws prohibit the sort of violent, racially-charged speech posted by this individual – who may yet find himself charged with inciting racial hatred.

A small measure of comfort should, however, be taken from the fact that his anti-Maori threats were broadcast on YouTube, and were, consequently, detected almost immediately. Would that Brenton Tarrant had stated his murderous intentions so publicly: because, had he done so, the Christchurch Massacres would never have happened.

Sadly, this is not the way the “anti-fascists” think. The call has gone out from the Maori Party for a special “joint taskforce”, comprised of the Police and the SIS (and, perhaps, Race Relations Commissioner, Meng Foon, from the Human Rights Commission, who has gallantly volunteered his assistance) and mandated to step up the surveillance (and harassment?) of Far-Right and/or White Supremacist groups targeting Maori.

Even without such a taskforce, New Zealand’s own version of Antifa has succeeded in getting one such purveyor of Far-Right (but not illegal) online content sacked from his job.

What would a national security profiler say, presented with an individual, already dangerously radicalised, who loses his employment amidst a shrill chorus of public condemnation? Would the profiler be concerned that the subject’s anti-social inclinations might be even further inflamed? That his imagination would soon be seething with bloodthirsty revenge fantasies. Scorned and shunned, could he see such a person descending into the criminal underworld and letting it be known that he’s in the market for a military-style semi-automatic rifle?

One suspects a national security profiler, presented with such a case, would recommend that the subject be declared a “person of interest”. It is to be hoped that law enforcement would have the resources to keep an eye on him 24/7. Although, strictly speaking, until he actually acquired an illegal firearm, he would have committed no offence. So, round-the-clock surveillance might not be possible. What about the SIS? Well, no, the SIS is not permitted to engage in law enforcement – that’s the Police’s job.

Perhaps that’s what the Maori Party has in mind: the spooks and the cops working together, side-by-side – ably assisted by Meng Foon and an unofficial collection of civilian spies and YouTube monitors. Once the accusation of Far Right, White Supremacist and/or anti-Maori proclivities was made, these folk could swing into action. Maybe take the suspect into protective custody? Maybe interrogate him?

After all, interventions of this kind, targeting communists, socialists, gays and Jews, worked really well for the Nazis.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 4 June 2021.

Can The State Pull The Lone Wolf Terrorist’s Teeth?

Punished, But Not Prevented: Though bitterly contested by those firmly convinced that the Christchurch Mosque Shootings represent something more than the crime of a Lone Wolf terrorist, the Royal Commission’s finding that no state agency could have prevented Brenton Tarrant from carrying out his deadly intent – except by chance – is correct. He understood that, for his “mission” to succeed, he must do nothing to draw the attention of the authorities – and, God help us all, he didn’t.

WHEN GOVERNMENTS EXTEND the state’s power to monitor their citizens’ ideas and activities, we should all be on our guard. Even when such extensions are introduced in response to a terrorist atrocity, we need to ask ourselves: would these new powers have prevented it?

For better, or for worse, this is no longer a moot point. Earlier this week the Justice Minister, Kris Faafoi, announced a raft of changes to our counter-terrorism laws.

Responding to the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch mosque shootings, the Minister gave notice of the Government’s intention to: alter the definition of a terrorist act; criminalise planning and/or preparing for a terrorist attack; further criminalise terrorist weapons and combat training; criminalise international travel for the purpose of carrying out a terrorist attack; further criminalise the financing of terrorism to include broader forms of material support; and broaden the scope of ‘Control Orders’ to include convicted terrorists who may have served their prison sentences yet remain, in the judgement of the state, an ongoing terrorist threat.

The Minister further justified his strengthening of New Zealand’s anti-terrorism legislation by drawing attention to the way the Christchurch attacks “mirrored how the nature of terrorism has been changing internationally, involving lone actors rather than organised terrorist groups. We need to ensure our laws can respond to that.”

But will these changes produce the intended effect? More pertinently, had they been in place in the year immediately preceding the mosque attacks, would they have led to the early apprehension of the Christchurch shooter?

The answer to that question, sadly, is: almost certainly not.

Brenton Tarrant inhabited a Manichean moral universe in which the forces of Good were engaged in a never-ending struggle with the forces of Evil. Geopolitical events led him to the conviction that, as in the Middle Ages, this struggle was manifested principally in the conflict between Christendom and Islam. Following the death of his father, Tarrant inherited a sum sufficient to fund overseas trips to battlefields where holy armies of crusading Christian knights had thrown back the Ottoman invaders of Eastern Europe. Fortified by his ever deeper immersion in anti-Muslim propaganda, Tarrant’s fanaticism gradually morphed into the cold-blooded mindset of the “Lone Wolf” terrorist. With great care he set about planning an “inspirational” massacre worthy of his hero, the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik.

It is extremely difficult to see how any of the legislative changes proposed by Minister Faafoi could possibly have deflected Tarrant from his murderous mission.

The state can hardly prevent citizens (or Australian visitors) from watching the news, surfing the Internet, or taking books on Medieval History out of the local library. Nor can it criminalise the intellectual tradition bound up with what writers and political activists have, for more than century, characterised as the “Decline of the West”.

The idea of Western civilisation under pressure is related to, but not quite the same as, the “white supremacist” beliefs attributed to Tarrant. This twisted individual was radicalised by, of all things, his tragically “wrong” reading of Europe’s past. Is Minister Faafoi proposing to criminalise history?

It would also be interesting to know how the Minister plans to prevent people from spending their inheritance. Does he propose to confiscate all legacies lest they be put to terroristic purposes?

Nor would the criminalising of terrorist weapons and combat training have stopped Tarrant. He purchased his weapons lawfully, on the basis of a firearms licence issued to him by the Police. His “combat training” involved attending – alongside many other firearms enthusiasts – a rifle-range about twenty kilometres from his Dunedin residence. Does the Minister propose to shut down all gun-clubs and rifle-ranges?

Though bitterly contested by those firmly convinced that the Christchurch Mosque Shootings represent something more than the crime of a Lone Wolf terrorist, the Royal Commission’s finding that no state agency could have prevented Tarrant from carrying out his deadly intent – except by chance – is correct. He understood that, for his “mission” to succeed, he must do nothing to draw the attention of the authorities – and, God help us all, he didn’t.

Against such careful and pitiless premeditation, all the laws on our statute books are powerless. The state can punish Lone Wolves, but it cannot stop them. In attempting to minimise the terrorist threat, however, the state can eliminate our freedoms.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 April 2021.

Hiding In Plain Sight.

Massey's Cossacks: New Zealand's employer class didn't need the services of a Pinkerton Detective Agency – strike-breakers par excellence in the service of US industrial titans like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Not when the strapping sons of Waikato and Wairarapa cockies could be quietly trained and organised by army officers to serve as New Zealand capitalism’s reserve militia against the Reds. 

THE RELUCTANCE of many left-wingers to accept that the Christchurch Shooter could not have been stopped is instructive. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the motivation driving “Lone Wolf” terrorists. The perpetrators of the sort of mass killings for which Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant were convicted conceive of their actions as grotesquely “inspirational” consciousness-raising “statements”.

Precisely because these individuals operate alone; and because they accept the near certainty of being either killed or captured by the authorities; they are extremely difficult to stop. Their missions are “one-offs”. In this regard, their outrages are very different from those planned and executed by organised groups coolly intent upon securing specific political objectives through intimidation and/or terror.

In a mature democracy, like Norway or New Zealand, it is difficult to conceive of any other kind of terrorism except Lone Wolf terrorism. In the absence of deliberate violent oppression, of the sort currently on display in Myanmar, the chances of any ideological current forging a military unit of sufficient fanaticism and operational coherence to carry out a deadly terrorist attack are vanishingly small.

The nearest New Zealand has come to such a unit was the group of left-wing activists observed “training” in the Urewera Ranges more than a decade ago. It is, however, extremely unlikely that the individuals involved in these exercises could have been prevailed upon to initiate the use deadly force. It is possible that fatalities might have been inflicted inadvertently: the result of some jittery young activist transporting firearms being stopped by the Police and panicking. This is, after all, how the Baader-Meinhof/Red Army Faction’s terrorist killing began, back in the 1970s. Even so, in the context of a government presided over by Helen Clark, the Urewera “guerrillas” struck most New Zealanders as tending more towards the farcical than the tragic.

It is the sheer implausibility of organised left-wing violence that has steered New Zealand socialists toward party political alternatives. Even in the midst of the Great Strike of 1913, when armed “Red Fed” strikers exchanged shots with the “Special Constables” summoned from farming districts by the Reform Party Prime Minister, William Massey, trade union leaders understood that the vast majority of New Zealanders were on the side of law and order. This awareness of the futility of raising the red flag of revolution in a nation as red-white-and-blue conservative as New Zealand has always undermined the efforts of novelists and film-makers to persuade us that an armed left-wing guerrilla force would last longer than five minutes against the NZDF.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work the other way around. The very same conservatism that made revolution so unlikely, has, throughout this country’s history, been more-than-willing to assist the dominant groups in New Zealand society maintain their hegemony against all-comers: Maori, Red Feds, Watersiders, Anti-Apartheid protesters. In practically every instance, however, the form of that assistance has been officially sanctioned and organised.

New Zealand had no need of a secretive racist terror-group like the Ku Klux Klan – not when an armed constabulary of land-grabbing Pakeha could be readied for action against defiant tangata whenua under the watchful eye of Settler Government ministers.

Nor did its employer class need the services of a Pinkerton Detective Agency – strike-breakers par excellence in the service of US industrial titans like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Not when the strapping sons of Waikato and Wairarapa cockies could be quietly trained and organised by army officers to serve as New Zealand capitalism’s reserve militia against the Reds – i.e. the Special Constables known forever after as “Massey’s Cossacks”. Those farmers on horseback were called out again following the Depression hunger riots of 1932.

The use of Special Constables (recruited this time from the nation’s Rugby clubs!) was also contemplated during the 151-Day Waterfront Lockout of 1951. But, thanks to the National Party Prime Minister’s, Sid Holland’s, fascistic “Emergency Regulations” (which made it illegal to feed a striker’s family) and the sterling work of the NZ Police in enforcing them, the swearing-in en masse of New Zealand’s Rugby players was not required.

Only once has the existence of a shadowy group of “unofficial” right-wing extremists, ready and willing to do whatever was necessary to preserve the capitalist status quo, come to the attention of New Zealand journalists and historians. Between 1972 and 1975, when the government of, first, Norman Kirk, and then Bill Rowling, were engaged in what was indeed a “transformation” of New Zealand society, a group of junior army officers, working secretly with elements of the SIS and the right-wing news media, began using the “C” word.

The mid-1970s was a time of threatened and actual coups against left-wing governments. In 1973, the democratically-elected socialist government of Chile was overthrown by the Chilean armed forces, and the country’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende, gunned down in his presidential palace. In 1974, Norman Kirk, obviously unwell, died alone and unattended in a second-rate Wellington hospital. His successor, Bill Rowling, was intercepted at Wellington airport by a person claiming to have documents indicating secret machinations against the Labour Government. The following year, the Australian Labor prime minister, Gough Whitlam, was deposed by his own Governor-General in a bloodless coup d’état.

That something similar did not happen here was due largely to the extraordinarily successful populist campaign waged against the Rowling Government by National’s Rob Muldoon. With a 23-seat majority, it was not considered possible for the government to be defeated. Had the political scientists been proved correct, and had Labour won a second term, who knows what those junior officers might have set in motion.

It is worth recalling that 1974 also marked the high-water mark of trade union power in New Zealand. The fear instilled in the employer class by the 10,000-strong march of workers up Queen Street to secure the release of the Moscow-aligned communist union leader, Bill Andersen – jailed for contempt of court – was palpable.

Nor should we forget that only 4 years earlier, following Allende’s 1970 victory, the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had told his shadowy secret operations group, the “Forty Committee”, that: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

There was a hard core of far-Right activists living in mid-1970s New Zealand: some in the army; some in the SIS; some in the news media; who endorsed Kissinger’s sentiments 100 percent. Thanks to Rob Muldoon, they weren’t needed.

Those on the left of contemporary New Zealand politics, horrified by the Christchurch Mosques Attack, continue to agitate for the country’s national security apparatus to upgrade its surveillance of far-right, white supremacist, extremists. They are convinced that there is a serious threat of coordinated right-wing terrorist activity once again being unleashed against innocent New Zealanders. More preventative effort from the SIS and the GCSB is being demanded.

Unfortunately, the ability of our security agencies to thwart the attack of another Christchurch Shooter is limited. With a modicum of caution, Lone Wolf attackers can avoid detection and interception – until it is far too late.

As for an organised far-right terrorist movement unleashing horror and death in New Zealand – all of our history points to it being unlikely. Only a government with both the numbers and the will to openly challenge the capitalist system could summon forth such a movement. And when it struck, it would, almost certainly, be acting on intelligence supplied by the SIS, and wearing the uniforms of the New Zealand Defence Forces and the Police.

Our far-right terrorists have always hidden in plain sight.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 30 March 2021.

In Harm's Way.

What It's Not About: The harms suffered by those on the receiving end of Free Speech will always be less than the harms unleashed upon the rest of society by any attempt to suppress it. The experience of suffering is part of the human condition. Nothing throughout history has given rise to more damage, injury and hurt than the attempts by ideologues of all persuasions to create a world in which nobody comes to harm.

WHAT IS “HARM”? On how this word is defined will turn a number of critical political debates. The meaning of Freedom of Expression and the definition of Terrorism are only the most important of these pending societal conversations. “Harm”, and what it is deemed to encompass, may precipitate profound legal and cultural consequences. Define the term too widely and many of the civil liberties we take for granted as citizens of a democratic state may disappear. Clearly, what we’re talking about here is “some pretty serious shit”.

Let’s begin with the generally accepted definition of “harm”. In plain language, to harm someone is to “damage, injure or hurt” them. In a legal context, harm may be inflicted by damaging, injuring or hurting a person’s body, mind, property and/or reputation. Thus, one’s standing in the community can be harmed by slander and defamation. One can also be harmed indirectly by being forced to witness hurt and injury being inflicted upon others. Intention is crucial to the definition of harm. In the absence of clear evidence that the alleged harm was inflicted intentionally, guilt is difficult to establish.

Over the next few months we are likely to see the concept of harm deployed in the name of further limiting Freedom of Expression. Our legal system already prohibits speech that is intended to – and likely to – inflict physical and/or emotional harm on persons on account of their ethnicity.

In the wake of the Christchurch Mosque Shootings, however, pressure has been building for a significant expansion of the legal meaning of harm. In addition to banning speech inciting physical violence and contempt against persons on account of their ethnicity, it is proposed to also ban criticism and/or vilification of the cultural and religious practices and beliefs of individuals, groups and “communities”. In effect the idea that a person’s reputation (and, hence, their well-being) can be harmed by untruthful words, spoken and/or written with malicious intent, is being extended to include entire ethnicities and faith communities.

If successful, this expansion of the definition of harm will make it legally hazardous to criticise too vigorously a religious faith and its adherents. These legal reforms may even extend to banning the expression of ideologies asserting the existence of an ethnic and/or cultural hierarchy in which people of colour are degraded and the “white races” exalted as supreme. Such restrictions would be justified by characterising such speech as a form of defamation: harming not only the collective reputation of the ethnic group under attack, but also inflicting serious emotional damage on the individuals targeted by such speech, and thereby materially damaging their ability to live full and happy lives.

If harm is construed in this way it will become possible for the definition of terrorism to be changed in the manner suggested by both Paul Spoonley and Paul Buchanan on this morning’s edition of RNZ’s Morning Report.

The old definition of terrorism spoke of “actual or threatened violence deployed by individuals or groups in pursuit of a specific political objective, or set of objectives”. But if harm is taken to include emotional as well as physical injury, then violence, too, can be redefined. Taking a leaf out of the family law textbooks, the concept of violence may be stretched to include the “collateral damage” inflicted upon those forced to witness the spectacle of others being hurt.

A terrorist could, thus, be any individual or group which, by seeking political changes based on the suppression of certain ethnic, religious and/or cultural communities, is guilty of inflicting emotional violence on other, supposedly non-targeted, individuals and groups. Merely by giving voice to hateful ideological precepts, it could be argued, these miscreants are applying direct political pressure to the nation’s democratic institutions – and thereby identifying themselves as terrorists.

Both Spoonley and Buchanan seemed keen for the creation of just such a regime. By freezing the assets of citizens designated as terrorists by the Prime Minister, they could be “calmed down” and brought into line. At which point, presumably, their property would be returned to them and, just like the drugged-up dissidents released from Soviet mental asylums in the 1970s, they could re-enter society as model citizens.

To a great many New Zealanders the redefinition of “harm” and “terrorism” in the manner described above will be greeted with dismay and suspicion. Extending the state’s legal powers in the ways suggested would weaken quite significantly the rights guaranteed to New Zealanders by the Bill of Rights Act 1990. Where once there had been general agreement on what could and couldn’t be said in relation to one’s fellow citizens, changes of this nature will open up deep rifts in New Zealand society. Such measures will be widely interpreted as an attempt to police people’s thoughts and beliefs by criminalising opinions with which the authors of the legislation disagree.

Far from calming people down and persuading them to come into line with the official view, laws seen as protecting specific ethnicities and cultures by limiting what other ethnicities and cultures are permitted to publicly endorse will undoubtedly embitter and inflame a dangerously large number of those so constrained. Convinced that they are being unjustly criminalised on account of their beliefs, a hard core of the targeted group will embrace the very hate-filled terrorist tactics such laws are intended to control and punish.

Buchanan would categorise such behaviour as evidence of the Right’s lack of consciousness of the consequences of their ideological convictions and utterances. He would argue that, since the taking of offence is justifiable only among those who have been offended, it is up to them – and them alone – to determine what is, and is not, offensive. That only those harmed can define what is harmful. Or, to put it more plainly, the right-wing assholes on the receiving end of these new definitions of harm and violence will just have to suck it up.

The glaring fault in this reasoning is that in attempting to rectify the Right’s lack of consciousness of the political consequences of its actions, the Left will have opened itself up to exactly the same charge – and the political consequences of its failure to be mindful of the future will be no less serious.

The only viable way out of this conundrum is to inculcate in both the Left and the Right the notion that the harms suffered by those on the receiving end of Free Speech will always be less than the harms unleashed upon the rest of society by any attempt to suppress it. The experience of suffering is part of the human condition. Nothing throughout history has given rise to more damage, injury and hurt than the attempts by ideologues of all persuasions to create a world in which nobody comes to harm.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 23 March 2021.

Sticks And Stones - And Bullets.

They're Only Words: New Zealanders are not angels, and they should not be expected to behave like angels. In the hours and days after the Christchurch Mosque Attacks, what mattered most was the swiftness with which the Prime Minister (unlike some of her left-wing fellow-travellers) moved to reassure her fellow citizens that they were not devils. That designation belonged to the terrorist alone. Words did not kill 51 innocent human-beings on 15 March 2019 – bullets did.

AT THE SERVICE marking the second anniversary of the Christchurch Mosque Attacks, New Zealand’s Prime Minister spoke of resilience.

“Many of us will remember, or indeed have seen children being taught from a very young age to be stoic.” Jacinda Ardern declared. “That if they face the harsh words of others they should adopt a stiff upper lip. Perhaps it has been our way of teaching children resilience in the face of those who might intend to cause harm.”

She’s right, that is the way New Zealanders used to bring up their children. Subjected to hurtful speech, those on the receiving end were taught to sing: “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

The Prime Minister was not convinced.

“Of course we want our children to be resilient,” she said, “but surely no more than we want our children to be kind?

“And so we have to ask ourselves, what does it take to create a generation that is empathetic but strong. That is kind, but fair. That is knowledgeable but curious. That knows the power of words, and uses them to challenge, defend, and empower.”

Jacinda’s question was rhetorical, but it deserves an answer.

What it takes is a society comprised of something other than human-beings – angels, perhaps.

Certainly, empathy confers a kind of strength: Jacinda proved that in the way she conducted herself in the hours and days after the massacres at Al Noor and Linwood. New Zealand was unquestionably strengthened diplomatically by the raw emotional power of its Prime Minister’s empathic response.

Jacinda’s empathy ran out, however, when confronted with the enormity of Brenton Tarrant’s crime. So unequivocal was her condemnation of its perpetrator that she vowed never to speak his name. Nor has she demonstrated the slightest curiosity concerning Tarrant’s motivation. On that matter, at least, she just doesn’t want to know.

But, how can words have power: how can they “challenge, defend and empower” if they are not imbued with the knowledge born of asking “Why?”

The Prime Minister’s own words notwithstanding, there is scant evidence that anyone in this government; the state bureaucracy; or the mainstream news media; has the slightest curiosity, or in-depth knowledge, of the forces that drive individuals like Tarrant. Indeed, within 72 hours of the massacre, New Zealand’s Chief Censor had declared his manifesto “objectionable” – thereby making its mere possession an offence punishable by imprisonment.

New Zealand has not been challenged to do anything about the Christchurch Mosque Attacks except condemn them.

And, of course, they should be condemned. They were cruel and wicked and utterly devastating of the lives of scores of innocent people. But, the overwhelming horror and disgust which such wanton savagery naturally elicits is all too easily harnessed to serve the interests of political causes that are neither kind, nor fair, nor innocent. Causes that have no interest whatsoever in encouraging the free exchange of words to “challenge, defend and empower” their fellow citizens. Causes whose purpose is, rather, to condemn, attack and weaken all those who refuse to endorse their ideology wholeheartedly and without reservation. Causes determined to silence all speech that does not echo their own.

In this regard, there is cause for New Zealanders to wonder exactly where their Prime Ministers stands on how free their use of words should be. What should we make, for example, of this rather oblique passage from her memorial address?

“We all own and hold the power of words. We use them, we hear them, we respond to them. How we choose to use this most powerful of tools is our choice.”

Is it drawing too long a bow to say that there is something vaguely threatening in the construction of those sentences? Something along the lines of: “Yes, of course you have freedom of speech – just be careful how you use it.”

The sense of menace is not dispelled in the sentences which follow:

“There will be an unquestionable legacy from March 15. Much of it will be heart breaking. But it’s never too early or too late for the legacy to be a more inclusive nation, one that stands proud of our diversity, embraces it, and if called to, defends it staunchly.”

Whenever political leaders begin to declare their intention to defend staunchly the ideas for which they stand – and for which they blithely assume the rest of the nation also stands – it is time to worry.

Stripped of its rhetorical finery, Jacinda’s speech boils down to this: If hateful words are directed at vulnerable groups, then legal sticks and stones will be deployed to silence those who utter them.

Jacinda wound up her speech by implicitly inviting her followers to be ready to respond, as she vowed to be ready, when empathy proves unequal to the darkness that dwells in the human heart:

“And [at] those moments, may I never, and may we never – be at a loss for words.”

The effectiveness of those words, however, will largely be determined by the strength of the person speaking them and the resilience of the society hearing them. Jacinda’s inspired words of 15 March 2019 – “they are us” – spoke much more to her strength than to her empathy. She imposed an explanatory framework on a society that was tough enough to carry it and make it work.

New Zealanders are not angels, and they should not be expected to behave like angels. In the hours and days after Tarrant’s attack, what mattered most was the swiftness with which the Prime Minister (unlike some of her left-wing fellow-travellers) moved to reassure her fellow citizens that they were not devils. That designation belonged to the terrorist alone.

Words didn’t kill 51 innocent human-beings on 15 March 2019 – bullets did.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 16 March 2021.

Will The Much-Criticised SIS Have The Last Laugh?

Be Careful What You Wish For: At the very heart of the Left’s stupidity on national security matters is its lamentable unfamiliarity with the basic techniques of counter-intelligence. In their reckless, ideologically-driven haste to smash the infrastructure of white supremacism in New Zealand, the far-left critics of the SIS and the GCSB are openly embracing the maximum possible deployment of state surveillance and interception technology.

LEFT-WING NAIVETY is nothing new, but its power to astound and enrage has not diminished. The scorn heaped upon the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) for failing to intercept a recent threat to the Christchurch Muslim community is a case in point.

The official version of this event has the Police receiving a tip-off from a member of the public. Someone who just happened to be hanging-out in the digital neighbourhood of 4-Chan’s most dangerous white supremacists stumbled, quite accidentally, upon plans to car-bomb the two mosques attacked by Brenton Tarrant in 2019, and like any public-spirited citizen, he called the cops.

Hmmmm …

This may, of course, be a true story. The informant’s accidental discovery of a terrorist plot may, indeed, be just one of those amazing examples of pure dumb luck that sometimes happens in this funny old world. Then again, it might not.

Maybe, just maybe, the official version of events bears absolutely no resemblance to what actually happened.

Because, let’s face it, if the SIS is doing exactly what the Left has been urging it to do since 15 March 2019; if it has made the surveillance, interception, infiltration and disruption of white supremacist groups its top counter-intelligence priority; then what possible motive would it have for announcing the fact – and offering public proof of its effectiveness – to the individuals and organisations it is watching?

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the SIS and its sister organisation, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) have not only been monitoring the “chatter” on 4-Chan, but that they have an agent, or agents, masquerading as hardline white supremacists participating energetically in any number of extremist chat-rooms. Let’s also assume that they are receiving a steady flow of HUMINT (human intelligence) from spies embedded in far-right and white supremacist groups. In these circumstances, only an imbecile would jeopardise these operations by waving their hands in the air and shouting “Lookit! Lookit! We’ve caught ourselves a terrorist!”

Surely, the SIS’s more likely response, in the event of it learning of a credible plan to car-bomb Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre on the second anniversary of Tarrant’s attacks, would be to let the world believe that the plot’s discovery was due entirely to the initiative of a sharp-eyed and public-spirited citizen who saw something and said something … to the Police?

If this was indeed the SIS’s response, then the loud braying of the Left will, for once, be a welcome noise. Criticism of the SIS’s “failure” to take white supremacism seriously will be music to the Service’s ears. The longer the far-right can be persuaded that the national security apparatus remains blind to the threat posed to New Zealanders by their most extreme elements, the better chance the government’s secret agents will have of shutting these extremists down.

It is, however, unlikely that the SIS chiefs will be placing too much faith in the Left’s condemnation of their inadequacies. Merely by reading the public disclosures of experts on the far-right, like Professor Paul Spoonley, they will be aware that more and more of New Zealand’s right-wing extremists are learning the basic trade-craft of clandestine political organisation. Aware that unfriendly eyes are on them, these groups are encrypting their communications and vetting with great thoroughness every potential recruit to their cause. Such people and groups are unlikely to risk saying anything potentially incriminating on 4-Chan – not when there are many much safer places on the Internet in which to take refuge.

Given that one of the persons arrested by the Police was released without charge, and the individual in custody was charged under the Crimes Act – rather than the Terrorism Suppression Act – with Threatening To Kill, one might even speculate that there is more than a faint whiff of public relations about the whole incident.

Face it, rigging a car-bomb – especially one intended to be detonated remotely, rather than delivered directly to the target by a driver willing to sacrifice their own life for the cause – is not a game for amateurs. A former, or active duty, soldier, highly trained in the use of explosives and detonation devices, might be capable of such an attack. Alternatively, skilled and experienced operatives with similar backgrounds might be imported to perpetrate the outrage. With New Zealand’s borders closed by the Covid-19 Pandemic, however, this latter scenario can be confidently discounted. It is also inconceivable that the arrest of a suspect with such a military background would not have prompted a significantly higher security response on the part of the authorities.

How much more likely is it that a couple of idiots, talking big on what was effectively an “open line” were easily intercepted by the SIS and GCSB “watchers”; and that their identity was made known to the Police – not because they posed a serious threat to the Christchurch Muslim community, but because announcing the arrest of a couple of far-right, Islamophobic terrorist wannabes, just days away from the second anniversary of the Mosque Massacres, would constitute a major public relations coup?

Such an operation would achieve a number of objectives. First and foremost, it would reassure Muslim New Zealanders that their fellow citizens and, of course, the Police, still have their back – thereby reconfirming “They Are Us” in the most dramatic fashion. Secondly, it would serve as a reminder that there was still a great deal of hate out there – murderous hate. Precisely the sort of hate that the Labour Government is determined to keep in check with its proposed legislation outlawing “hate speech”. Thirdly, as intimated above, the circumstances of the alleged offender’s apprehension would set up the SIS and the GCSB for exactly the sort of left-wing bollocking that has, in fact, occurred. Criticism which, hopefully, will make the Service’s surveillance, interception, infiltration and disruption operations all the more effective. Assuming, of course, that the far-right is as predictable in its stupidity as the far-left!

At the very heart of the Left’s stupidity on national security matters is its lamentable unfamiliarity with the basic techniques of counter-intelligence. In their reckless, ideologically-driven haste to smash the infrastructure of white supremacism in New Zealand, the far-left critics of the SIS and the GCSB are openly embracing the maximum possible deployment of state surveillance and interception technology.

To root out Islamophobia and silence hate speech, they are happy to have the national security apparatus secure the demise of far-right extremists by any means necessary. That their own uncompromising demands are as predictable as they are extreme does not appear to have occurred to them. That their antipathy to the far-right might be used to the long-term advantage of the security services has, similarly, never crossed their minds.

Nor, apparently, has the realisation that, when they have rounded up the last ethno-nationalist extremist, those same security services will come after the Left with exactly the same surveillance technology and censorship powers. More tellingly, they will be able to do so citing precedents with which the Left itself has furnished them. The far-left critics of the national security apparatus will be hung by a rope which they, themselves, have twisted.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 March 2021.

The French Connection.

Anti-Philosopher President?  Emmanuel Macron and his party’s reaction to the terrorist atrocities committed on French soil targets the very same philosophical movements excited and emboldened by New Zealand’s own terrifying tragedy.

IT IS NOT the sort of thought experiment New Zealanders are encouraged to conduct in these culturally sensitive times. Even so, let’s imagine that the 2019 massacre which seared itself across New Zealand’s collective memory had not been of peaceful Muslim worshippers by a white nationalist extremist. Let’s imagine, rather, that as practically the whole of this country’s national security apparatus was anticipating, the massacre had been of Christian worshippers by an Islamic jihadist extremist.

Overnight, the ideological climate in this country would have become exceedingly hostile to the forces of progressivism. A bitter mood of “we told you so” would have settled over the nation: a mood as far removed from Jacinda Ardern’s inspired “they are us” formulation as it is possible to imagine.

Responding to the angry clamour of public opinion, the security services would have cracked down hard on the Muslim community, activating the multitude of surveillance and control measures already thoroughly tested (and strongly recommended) by their Five Eyes partners. Attacks on Muslims and their places of worship would have skyrocketed. Tragically, most New Zealanders would have struggled to summon-up much in the way of sympathy.

Certainly, the Green Party leadership would have had to think twice about exploiting the emotional turmoil arising from the massacre to launch an all-out assault of white supremacy and colonisation. The actual behaviour of Marama Davidson and Golriz Ghahraman in 2019 did the Greens few enough favours. Had an identical strategy been attempted in the circumstances of a jihadist attack, the consequences would have been politically suicidal.

The personal impact on Jacinda Ardern of a jihadist attack would, similarly, have provided a stark contrast with her actual response to the Christchurch tragedy. Rather than the empathic woman in the hijab, it is likely the Prime Minister would have adopted the persona of the stern shield-maiden of the nation. Unleashing without hesitation the terrible swift sword of national retribution, she would have become New Zealanders’ avenging angel. Not so much “they are us” as “they will pay”.

In this jihadist scenario, the deep and enduring bond between the Prime Minister and New Zealand’s Muslim community following the white nationalist attack could not have been forged. Consequently, her strong personal commitment to restricting Islamophobic “hate speech” would not be there. Equally absent would be the Ardern government’s determination to rid New Zealand of automatic weapons. Indeed, this government’s unusual receptiveness towards ideas and policies aimed at suppressing right-wing extremism and curbing white privilege would not be in evidence anywhere.

Over and above its devastating impact on the faith community directly involved, the Christchurch mosque massacre also acted as the catalyst for a sharp shift towards the ideological left in New Zealand. The very opposite to what is currently unfolding in France.

Since the year 2000, France has lost more than 250 of its citizens to jihadist violence, precipitating a pronounced political repositioning within the French electorate. Repulsed by the actions of Islamic fanatics, French politicians have reasserted their nation’s strong traditions of secularism and egalitarianism. Just last week, the French National Assembly passed a law which, in addition to proscribing “Islamicism”, also requires every citizen to indicate active support for the classic republican virtues of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Aware of the opening which this reconstitution of political forces has provided for the Radical Right, ministers in the government of President Emmanuel Macron are indicating a wish to go further. Leading the charge is France’s Minister for Higher Education, Frédérique Vidal. In a recent television interview, she announced an investigation into “the totality of research underway in our country”. Firmly in her sights was what she calls “Islamo-leftism”.

According to Vidal, “Islamo-leftism corrupts all of society and universities are not impervious.” Unsurprisingly, French academics reacted with fury – not least because Vidal went on to accuse those involved in race and gender studies of “always looking at everything through the prism of their will to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy.” In response to this, the National Centre for Scientific Research, came out swinging, condemning in particular “attempts to delegitimise different fields of research, like post-colonial studies, intersectional studies and research on race.”

In a nation like France, however, with such a long and strong imperial tradition, these fields of study are precisely those from which the political right stands to derive the most electoral advantage. Hence Macron’s haste in heading-off his principal rival in next year’s presidential elections, the far-right nationalist, Marine Le Pen, at the ideological pass. Both candidates are determined to not to be found wanting by those French voters who still take patriotic pride in their nation’s past glories.

Ironically, the same “intersectional” academic disciplines under attack in France are also responsible for inspiring the New Zealand government’s new and compulsory history curriculum designed to rectify New Zealanders’ woeful understanding of their country’s long and (allegedly) ignoble record of conquest and expropriation. That such a radical policy (along with kindred initiatives on Maori wards, hate speech, and limiting the rights of defendants in rape trials) could have advanced so far is inconceivable without the tremendous political impetus provided by the Christchurch mosque massacres. More, and even bolder, advances will be hazarded – most especially in relation to constitutional issues – if Labour’s current initiatives are concluded successfully.

That the success of Labour’s radical programme appears imminent is not only explicable in terms of the Christchurch attack, but also on account of the National Party’s all-too-evident ideological confusion. Some in National seem quite relaxed about intersectionalism and its policy implications, while others seem bitterly opposed. Should the former faction emerge triumphant, their party risks electoral marginalisation. At present there seems barely enough room on the New Zealand electoral stage for two “woke” parties – let alone a third in two minds on the subject! A win for the conservative faction would, therefore, seem the most likely outcome – especially since, thanks to Macron and his ministers, there is now a growing body of coherent ideological opposition to Islamo-leftism and its kindred political faiths for them to call on.

National will have to be quick, though, if Act is not to occupy the ground opened-up by the French Right first. Ideologically-speaking, David Seymour and Emmanuel Macron have much in common. Both are confident technocratic liberals, perfectly at ease in their defence of “Enlightenment values”, even as they unashamedly promote the arguments and interests of free-market capitalism. Both men, and their parties, also possess the philosophical clarity of mind to confront the intersectional and post-colonial theorists head-on. Unless they’re keeping their light especially well-hidden under a bushel, the person in National with that capability has yet to be elected to Parliament.

One final point needs to be made here. Macron and his ministers have been quick to blame the intellectual disorientation of its best and its brightest on what The New York Times describes as “destabilising influences on US campuses”, with Macron himself denouncing “certain social-science theories entirely imported from the United States.” Now, that is a particularly cheeky gallic accusation! Because, when it comes to the destabilising influence of the philosophical movement generally referred to as “Post-Modernism”, just about all of its leading intellectual lights – past and present – declaimed at length upon the death of meaning in strong French accents.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 22 February 2021.