Disinformation From The Left.

Dangerously Persuasive: When Hamas unleashes terror in Southern Israel, and the State of Israel unleashes hell in retaliation, disinformation is important. Which is why, by way of example, the Instagram message released a day ago by Pere Huriwai-Seger on behalf of the Aotearoa Liberation League is important.

DISINFORMATION has been part and parcel of the political process since, well, forever. It was only in the Nineteenth Century, however, that the need to create narratives advantageous to one’s own cause, and disadvantageous to one’s opponents, gained access to technologies enabling disinformation to be communicated at great speed and on a massive scale. With the dawning of the Twentieth Century, even more startling technological innovations upped the effectiveness of disinformation by several orders of magnitude. The old adage: “A lie will be half way around the world before Truth has pulled his boots on”; became a straightforward description of reality. By the Twenty-First Century, technology had advanced to the point where the separation of truth from falsehood required the adjudication of experts – and the ability to distinguish fake expertise from the real thing.

When people talk about disinformation today, it is almost always from within a left-wing narrative framework. The villains behind the disinformation tsunami allegedly inundating the civilised world are identified as white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes, anti-vaccination zealots, and fundamentalist Christians.

In normal circumstances, the pet-hates of leftists don’t carry very much weight. Unfortunately, the life of the world stopped being normal in January 2020, as it became clear that a novel coronavirus – Covid-19 – was about to ignite a global pandemic. Fearful that the small but very vocal clusters of anti-vaccination zealots, located in just about all Western nations, would undermine the public health and immunological measures vital to fighting the virus, public servants began establishing anti-disinformation units to identify and counter the lies being spread about Covid-19, and, more importantly, the vaccines developed in record time to bring it under control.

In those countries with centre-left national and/or state governments, most particularly the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, politicians and activists moved swiftly to extend the brief of these disinformation units to encompass just about all of the Left’s pet-hates. The situation was not improved by the intervention of national security agencies alarmed at the volume of Russian and Chinese disinformation pouring onto Western social media platforms.

From the perspective of the Left, this conflation of Far-Right disinformation with the disinformation emanating from authoritarian nation states would prove to be enormously helpful. A pro-censorship position, which at least some of the mainstream media might have challenged, could now be presented as a matter of national security. In New Zealand, willingness to buy into this aspect of the anti-disinformation project was aided by the still raw memories of the Christchurch Mosque Massacres. Far-Right lies could produce deadly consequences, argued the Left. Free speech should not be considered an unqualified good, not when it empowers “bad actors”.

What the New Zealand Left – notoriously ignorant of its own, and the international movement’s history – finds it almost impossible to accept is that disinformation (or, as it was once, more honestly, known: “propaganda”) was, and is, every bit as rampant on the revolutionary left, as it was, and is, on the reactionary right. Indeed, modern disinformation/propaganda was more-or-less invented by Willi Münzenberg, a German political impresario, commissioned by the Communist International to spread the Bolshevik’s revolutionary creed across the West. Tactics we take for granted today: front organisations, activist celebrities, newspapers, magazines, plays, movies, and phonograph records – all with an easily digestible political sub-text, were Münzenberg’s inventions. In the early 1920s, the Right had nothing to match “Willi’s Wurlitzer”.

Not that the state-subsidised Disinformation Project would ever acknowledge the fact, but the effectiveness of New Zealand’s right-wing disinformers is well below that of their left-wing rivals. Better educated, more articulate, technically more proficient, and – most importantly – working with, not against, the grain of New Zealand’s official “progressive” ideology, New Zealand’s left-wing activists’ political and cultural production throws that of the Right into the shade. Their output can be found on Facebook, Instagram, X and Tik-Tok – global platforms often denied to the Right by Silicon Valley’s “progressive” billionaires. Freed from the need to hawk their ideological wares in the murky swamps of Telegram, the Left’s disinformers/propagandists have no need for false identities. Operating freely, under their own names, they have ready access to the hearts and minds of millions.

Not that very many New Zealanders know or care what the Left is saying. Indeed, political speech only becomes important in moments of national and international crisis. In the middle of a global pandemic, disinformation is important. When Russia invades Ukraine, disinformation is important. When Hamas unleashes terror in Southern Israel, and the State of Israel unleashes hell in retaliation, disinformation is important. Which is why, by way of example, the Instagram message released a day ago (22/10/23) by Pere Huriwai-Seger on behalf of the Aotearoa Liberation League (a front organisation comprised of Pere and his wife Sarah) is important.

With film-star good looks and a compelling verbal style, Pere commands the viewers attention from the moment he authoritatively disabuses them of any notion that what is currently unfolding in Gaza is not their fight. New Zealand, he informs them “has troops involved”. An alarming “fact” if one’s knowledge of New Zealand’s role in the Middle East is poor – i.e. most of the New Zealand population. That Pere flashes up a media release explaining that New Zealand has eight military personnel serving in the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation in no way excuses his claim that the country has troops involved. In the minds of his viewers his words will have conjured up images of Kiwi soldiers rubbing shoulders with members of the Israeli Defence Force. It’s misinformation shading into disinformation.

Pere’s pace is brisk, and just seconds later he is informing his viewers that New Zealand has “long supported the colonisation of Palestine”. This is historical nonsense – and malicious nonsense at that. He states as a fact that New Zealand “invaded” Palestine and “seized it for Britain” in 1917. Curiously, he neglects to inform his viewers that the New Zealand Mounted Rifles was merely one unit in the British Expeditionary Force waging war against the Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was a mere province. According to Pere, the province was handed over to “Zionist terrorists”. Curiouser and curiouser, since Ottoman Palestine was actually handed over to the British by the League of Nations as a “mandated territory”, and remained in British hands until 1948.

But Pere is just getting warmed-up. While they were busy making Palestine safe for Zionism, argues Pere, the Kiwis treated the Palestinian people “horribly”. He cites the Surafend massacre of 1918 as proof.

What happened at Surafend wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t happen out of the blue. Troopers of the NZ Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse went to the village of Surafend to secure the surrender of the Palestinian Arab who had shot dead a New Zealander, Trooper Leslie Lowry, after stealing his kit-bag. Their demand refused, the Anzacs attacked the men of the village (having evacuated the women and children to a place of safety) killing between 40 and 200 Arabs, and setting their houses on fire. The Anzac perpetrators received a tongue-lashing from the British commander, Allenby, but none of them were ever punished.

Had Pere homed-in on the Surafend massacre right from the start of his video, he could have presented a picture of New Zealand’s complicity in British, and later American, imperialism that was not only persuasive by truthful. Instead, by surrounding the Surafend massacre with a string of disinformative statements, the whole four-minute video becomes an exercise in the most blatant propaganda. And not just any propaganda, Pere’s falsehoods are the falsehoods of Hamas and their Iranian backers – whose cause Pere equates with the cause of Māori nationalism in Aotearoa. Presumably, what Hamas terrorists did to the Jewish inhabitants of Southern Israel is what decolonisation looks like.

Imagine the reaction of the Disinformation Project if they had found a video presentation promoting right-wing disinformation and hate on such a scale. A video dripping with Islamophobic hate in the same way Pere’s drips with annihilationist hatred of Israel. Such a video would have been presented to the mainstream media as evidence of the danger posed by radical political extremism; of the need to take decisive action against such horrific hate speech.

And the mainstream media would have lapped it up.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Monday, 23 October 2023.

Thinking About The Roman Empire.

Template For Masculine Politics: It is as well, then, that, all over the Western World, young men are thinking about Rome. Because, if ever there was time to “unleash hell” on the decrepit, the corrupt, and the criminally incompetent, then that time is now. For, make no mistake, all across the rest of the world, there is no shortage of young men thinking about the Barbarians.

WHY ARE MEN always thinking about the Roman Empire? Women, baffled by their partner’s quickening heart-rate when confronted with images of disciplined legionaries preparing to “unleash hell”, or worried by the Caesar-like poses they catch them striking in front of the bedroom mirror, have turned to their sisters on Tik-Tok for answers. Predictably, it was men who responded. The conclusion of the male commentariat? Men think about the Roman Empire a lot because the Roman Empire still contributes such a lot to what it means to be a man.

But, Rome retains its relevance for another reason, one only partially bound up with masculinity. Rome provides the template for empire: a template so powerful that we have been surrounded by its symbols for centuries. From the Dark Ages, when Charlemagne received the title of Holy Roman Emperor from the Pope; to the Consuls of the French Republic and, after them, the Emperor Napoleon; to the fasces that can still be seen adorning the United States House of Representatives and Lincoln’s memorial throne; to the classical colonnade of our own Parliament Buildings in Wellington: the legacy of Rome is ubiquitous.

The simple truth about Rome’s persistence of vision is that the ideas, the institutions, and the leaders that nourished it continue to inspire and guide our own. The way we think about politics: our curious bifurcation of means and ends; the way we honour the spirit of the Laws, even as our leaders flout the reality; the way we seek peace by preparing for war; all this is as Roman as “Hail Caesar”.

So, too, the notion that, to a favoured people, God (or, the Gods) might promise “empire without limit”. There are still numerous New Zealanders who recall hearing their parents talk about “the British Empire, upon which the sun never sets”. To this very day, Americans still celebrate in song a continental republic stretching from “sea to shining sea”.

So, Rome lives, and men of all ages still thrill to its unalloyed celebration of power. Ninety years ago, Nazi stormtroopers marched beneath devices self-consciously modelled on the eagle standards of the Roman legions. “Hail Hitler” they cried, as lustily as the men of Rome’s Thirteenth Legion had shouted “Hail Caesar!”, offering their leader the same stiff-armed Roman salute. Certainly, the movie director Ridley Scott had as little difficulty as Joseph Goebbels in mixing valour and violence into a thrilling, if extremely dangerous, recapitulation of Rome’s political imperatives. “Gladiator” is fascism in sandals.

Rome’s shadow is visible even in today’s headlines. It is said that the Roman senator, Cato, ended every speech with the same sentence: Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam [Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed.] When it came to which great city-state should command the Mediterranean basin –  Carthage or Rome – there could be only one. Clearly, the Israeli state and Hamas have arrived at the same conclusion. Like Cato, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seems hell-bent on destroying his mortal enemies. When Carthage finally fell, the Romans left not one stone standing upon another. The Israeli’s seem determined to leave Gaza in the same state.

Confronted with the imminent demise of his people, the Roman historian Tacitus has the ancient Briton, Calgacus, say of his conquerors: ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant – they make a desert and call it peace. We must earnestly hope that Tacitus’s words do not supply Gaza with its epitaph.

Equally relevant to the headlines of the 2020s is Rome’s bloody transition from republic to empire.

Very few people living today understand that Julius Caesar, the man who made the Roman Republic’s fall inevitable, was what most of us would call a socialist. Though a patrician (aristocrat) by birth, Caesar saw in the Roman Senate little more than a corrupt body of elite oppressors of the plebs (the ordinary people).

Attempting to protect the plebs from the patricians was, however, a risky enterprise. Caesar had before him the fate of the Gracchi brothers (think of the Kennedy brothers in togas) whose lack of a sufficiently large body of armed men to protect their reformist agenda resulted in both of them being assassinated.

Caesar’s success as a political leader was founded squarely on Rome’s legions and the money they allowed him to amass. By the time the patricians became desperate enough to kill him, Caesar had made sure that the corrupt, elite-driven Roman Republic was beyond saving. His adopted heir and protégé, Octavian, would become Rome’s first emperor – Augustus.

It is very difficult to look upon the corruption and dysfunction of the present American Republic without recalling the moral and social disintegration of the Roman Republic. (The constitutional inspiration, incidentally, which guided the USA’s founding fathers.)

Like the young Roman Republic, the young United States would acquire its own version of empire and, by virtue of its military and economic strength, emerge as the master of its world. As is so often the case, however, the vigour and vitality of a young republic fades. Wealth substitutes for glory. Republican virtue becomes a memory. Unity dissolves. The republic falls into the hands of men with too much money and too many years.

The question upon which the fate of the world now turns is whether or not the American Republic, still rich, still immensely powerful, can rise above the rancour and corruption into which it has fallen. Caesar was murdered by men who clung to a Roman republican constitution that no longer worked. It had become a threadbare veil, no longer capable of hiding – let alone restraining – the naked ambition of ruthless political and military leaders eager to replace it with something more rational – and less restrictive.

There are many who would argue that the United States is not that far removed from the circumstances which led to the fall of the Roman Republic. America’s enemies would appear to be better students of history than either the Democratic or Republican parties. Profound challenges to American hegemony in Europe, the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East can hardly be faced down by a nation that cannot even elect a Speaker of the House of Representatives – let alone pass a budget! Not even Rome, in all its long history, was able to produce a cavalcade of clowns to match the current American spectacle.

That the USA is presided over by a man in his 80s speaks eloquently of the USA’s predicament. Every day, it’s sclerotic institutions make it clear that America is no longer a country for young men. America desperately needs what Rome, in extremis, always seemed to find: a vigorous political general, with a plan in his mind – and loyal legions at his back.

It is as well, then, that, all over the Western World, young men are thinking about Rome. Because, if ever there was time to “unleash hell” on the decrepit, the corrupt, and the criminally incompetent, then that time is now. For, make no mistake, all across the rest of the world, there is no shortage of young men thinking about the Barbarians.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 23 October 2023.

Lord Liverpool's Ghost.

Taking It From The Top: Though more than a century has passed since the outbreak of the First World War, there remains a deeply-embedded fraction of the New Zealand state apparatus which continues to regard New Zealand as simply a loyal cog in a much larger and more powerful imperial machine. Like their forebears, these civil servants see no meaningful role for the democratic public in determining matters of national security and defence.

WHEN NEW ZEALAND WENT TO WAR on 5 August 1914 it was by vice-regal declaration. The Governor of New Zealand, Arthur William de Brito Savile Foljambe, the Second Lord Liverpool, chose to announce the commencement of hostilities with Germany from the steps of what is now the General Assembly Library. Although the country’s leading politicians were gathered around him, there wasn’t even the slightest nod in the direction of democracy. Neither the House of Representatives, nor the Legislative Council, saw any need for debate. In London the King-Emperor, George V, acting upon the advice of his ministers, had declared war, and as a loyal Dominion of the British Empire, New Zealand fell in behind the “Mother Country” without hesitation.

Though more than a century has passed since the outbreak of the First World War, there remains a deeply-embedded fraction of the New Zealand state apparatus which continues to regard New Zealand as simply a loyal cog in a much larger and more powerful imperial machine. Like their forebears, these civil servants see no meaningful role for the democratic public in determining matters of national security and defence. Thankfully, they are no longer so arrogant as to sanction a declaration of war without allowing Parliament to go through the motions of democratic debate. The possibility that a solid majority of MPs might decline to follow their advice would not, however, occur to them.

That this fraction remains so sure of itself on matters of national security and defence is rather odd. At least three times in the last 50 years, its expectations have been overturned by a democratically elected government – all of them Labour. The first rejection came in 1973, when Prime Minister Norman Kirk astonished the world by sending a New Zealand navy frigate to protest French atmospheric nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll. The second came in the mid-1980s, when Prime Minister David Lange refused to renege on Labour’s promise to create – and enforce – a nuclear-free New Zealand. The third occurred in 2003, when Prime Minister Helen Clark and her Labour-led Government refused to join the USA, the United Kingdom and Australia in their illegal invasion of Iraq.

In all three cases the reaction of what some now refer to as the “Deep State” was one of alarm and embarrassment. Of the five digits making up the Anglo-Saxon fist, New Zealand is obviously the “pinkie finger”. When the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia set out to deliver a geopolitical blow, New Zealand is expected to contribute to its impact – not witter on to the rest of the world about morality and international law.

It is the job of the defence chiefs, the national security apparatus, and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to make sure that when the “Empire” (aka “The Five Eyes”) delivers its orders, New Zealand stands to attention and salutes. Any wayward lefties are to be brought into line by the defence and security experts who best understand New Zealand’s permanent interests – and know who its friends are. Failure to secure the pinkie-finger’s compliance can only mean a huge loss of face for all those Kiwi soldiers and spooks who, for years, have been reassuring their Anglo-Saxon colleagues that everything is under control.

The democratic public (as opposed to the leading financial, commercial, industrial and farming interests, for whom democracy is either an irritating distraction from the all-important job of generating profits for shareholders, or a genuine threat to same) have never warmed to the idea of expending blood and treasure for the greater glory of British and American imperialism.

As a people living in one of the oldest enduring democracies on Earth, albeit a very small one, New Zealanders have long grasped the concept of “soft power”. Going all the way back to the Liberal Government of Balance and Seddon (1891-1912) the democratic public have revelled in their country’s description as “the social laboratory of the world”. In both the League of Nations and the United Nations, New Zealand has taken advantage of the fact that it offers not the slightest military threat to anyone to become a consistent voice for peace, justice and the rule of international law.

It is interesting to note that Sir Robert Jones’ New Zealand Party (1983-93) although resolutely free-market in its economic outlook, also advocated massive reductions in military expenditure and withdrawing New Zealand from the ANZUS alliance. Jones personally favoured following the example of the tiny Central American state of Costa Rica and abolishing the New Zealand armed forces altogether!

Such was the heterodox political environment out of which the Fourth Labour Government’s anti-nuclear policy (and the United States’ angry reaction to it) gave birth to the broadly supported idea of New Zealand operating – and maintaining – its own “independent foreign policy”. That this was essentially Labour’s diplomatic position was strongly reinforced when Helen Clark eliminated the fighter-arm of the RNZAF and refused to participate the invasion of Iraq.

Small wonder, then, that Defence Minister Andrew Little’s release of the latest Defence Policy Review, and New Zealand’s first National Security Strategy, has elicited such a critical response from Helen Clark. As Clark herself notes, the documents bear all the hallmarks of those defence and national security “experts” whose primary allegiance has always been to the “Anglosphere” rather than the people of New Zealand. This was her tweet:

Defence policy and security strategy documents released in Wellington today [4/8/23] suggest that NZ is abandoning its capacity to think for itself and instead is cutting and pasting from 5 Eyes’ partners. Drumbeat from officials has been consistent on this for some time.

This is reminiscent of the Frank Corner-led Defence Committee of Inquiry of 1985 set up by David Lange, which in effect – and in the end unsuccessfully – tried to put brakes on the Govt’s nuclear free and independent foreign policy.

Now there appears to be an orchestrated campaign on joining the so-called ‘Pillar 2’ of AUKUS which is a new defence grouping in the Anglosphere with hard power based on nuclear weapons. New Zealand removed itself from such a vice when it adopted its nuclear-free policy.

It is extremely rare for a former Labour prime minister to intervene in a live policy debate with such acerbic force. Clark’s tweet (viewed more than 90,000 times and counting) indicates just how seriously these documents, formulated under Chris Hipkins’ Labour government, threaten the legacies of Kirk, Lange and Clark herself.

On display in Little’s defence of these documents is just how far the centre-left of New Zealand politics has drifted from the foreign-policy and defence shibboleths of even 20 years ago. What we appear to be witnessing is the same moral surrender that accompanied the “Red Scare” of the early 1950s, when Labour abandoned its traditional socialist objectives out of fear of being branded Red China-loving “commies”. Indeed, it would not be surprising, at this point, to hear Little say that he his “neither for, nor against” New Zealand having a nuclear-free and independent foreign policy. (Just as the Labour Opposition leader, Walter Nash, infamously declared that Labour was “neither for, nor against” the Watersiders during the bitter Waterfront Lockout of 1951.)

Those passing the steps of the General Assembly Library late at night should not be surprised to encounter the ghost of Lord Liverpool – smiling.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 7 August 2023.

The Empire Strikes Back.

From The Periphery To The Metropole: Beyond its personal dimensions, Rishi Sunak’s rise speaks to the extraordinary dynamism and diversity of global capitalism. Brexiteer though Sunak may be, his rise to the prime-ministership of Britain will strike many Brexit voters as yet further proof that, like the guests at the Hotel California, they can check out any time they want, but they can never leave.

WITH RISHI SUNAK’S “CORONATION” as Britain’s third prime minister in as many months, numerous imperial ghosts have been awakened. Sunak’s personal history is inextricably intertwined with the history of the British Empire’s rapid and reckless dissolution.

Beyond its personal dimensions, however, Sunak’s rise speaks to the extraordinary dynamism and diversity of global capitalism. Brexiteer though Sunak may be, his rise to the top will strike many Brexit voters as yet further proof that, like the guests at the Hotel California, they can check out any time they want, but they can never leave.

Global capitalism will always have the last laugh – eh Liz?

Born in Southampton, Sunak is no less “British” than his hapless predecessor. All of us are, however, an inextricable part of our parents’ stories, and Sunak’s parents’ story is about East Africa.

For the peoples of India and Africa the Indian Ocean has always been a mighty highway. Backwards and forwards across it travelled all kinds of cargoes and all kinds of people. Under the tutelage of successive empires, this easy commerce, and the cultural enclaves it created, thrived. It was only when the last of these overlords, the British, cut and ran, that East African cosmopolitanism began to fray.

Substantial Indian minorities in the newly independent former colonies of the British Empire sat uneasily alongside the African nationalist majorities who found themselves governing nation states whose borders owed more to the compromises of competing imperial map-makers than they did to the economic and cultural history of the regions they were carved out of.

Descendants of the tens-of-thousands of indentured Indian labourers imported by the British to build their imperial infrastructure, and of the Indian entrepreneurs and fortune-seekers who accompanied them, the Indians of East Africa had every reason to follow the retreating imperialists back to Britain. Among those who made their way to the Empire’s enfeebled heart were Yashvir and Usha Sunak, from Kenya and Tanzania respectively, Rishi Sunak’s parents.

Decolonisation and the struggle for independence have become a staple of the contemporary Left’s love affair with identity. Its lazy historiography casts all but the white villains of the imperial story as heroes. But, the thing to remember about empires, and the complex human societies they nurture, is that those positioned below the imperial rulers are by no means all inclined to cry: “I am Spartacus!” Certainly, empires can keep people down, but they can also lift them up. Imperialism creates winners as well as losers.

Rishi Sunak’s parents were never losers. Professionally-trained, English-speaking, confident in their ability to negotiate the labyrinthine class structure of British society, Sunak’s mother and father did everything within their power to ensure that their clever son’s abilities were fully revealed to those most likely to value them. Trees that fall in the forests of Winchester and Oxford are more or less guaranteed to make a great deal of noise.

From the dreaming spires of Oxford, the transition to the gleaming towers of London, was relatively seamless. Like so many who climb their way to the top of a social pyramid (as opposed to being born there) Sunak made a close study of those whose ranks he planned to join.

For all their sneers, the British upper-classes have never forgotten that cash-money is always trumps. A coat-of-arms is no substitute for a seven-figure bank-balance – not least because a nine-figure bank-balance can always buy you one!

To fully appreciate the role of money in a globalised capitalist world there is no experience more educative than working for a hedge-fund. And assuredly, there is no more telling proof of how much a hedge-fund manager has learned than arranging to marry a billionaire’s daughter.

Interestingly, among the last hedge-funds with which Sunak was associated was called Theleme Partners. The name is instructive. It is derived from the Greek word for the human will. “Thelema”, derived from the same word, was (and maybe still is!) the name given to a belief system combining occult knowledge with esoteric philosophy. Among its most famous devotees were the British “magus”, Aleister “The Beast” Crowley, and the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard.

The first rule of Thelema sounds about right for a hedge-fund manager: but, maybe, just a little bit alarming for the Prime Minister of Britain.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 October 2022.

Understanding Colonisation.

Relentless Advance: The Anglo-Saxon colonisation of North America and Australasia was a very different proposition from the colonisation of India and Africa. In a relatively short period of time the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand were reduced to insignificant minorities by an unceasing flood of settlers from Europe.

SO, HOW DOES IT WORK? At every level, on every subject, the same explanation is offered for Māori disadvantage – colonisation. What’s more, the word itself has acquired such a talismanic quality that its mere utterance is sufficient to close down any further discussion. After all, the only people likely to challenge the colonisation explanation for Māori disadvantage would be the colonisers’ descendants themselves. And they would say that – wouldn’t they?

The colonisers’ descendants might also raise the question as to whether Māori were, in fact, colonised at all. Not a question that anyone would have thought to raise fifty years ago. In the 1970s the argument that Māori had not been colonised would have been laughed out of court. Back then it was generally accepted that, under the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori had ceded sovereignty to the British Crown. What’s more, the British, very soon after the signing of the Treaty, had exercised their sovereignty by annexing New Zealand, declaring it a British colony, and appointing a Governor to rule it. Oh yes, the Māori had been colonised alright – they’d been colonised good and proper.

But, fifty years later, the story has changed. Today we are enjoined to believe that the Māori chiefs gathered at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 did not cede sovereignty to Queen Victoria. Indeed, no less a body than the Waitangi Tribunal has declared that the sovereignty of Māori iwi and hapu remains intact to this day.

It is a curious sort of coloniser who, 180 years after the event, proclaims the untrammelled sovereignty of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands his ancestors had claimed as their own. If the indigenous people of New Zealand were not subjugated by military force, relieved of their lands, forests and fisheries, and pushed to the margins of colonial society, then what was going on between the 1850s and the 1970s?

In the most brutal and unvarnished terms, what was going on between the signing of the Treaty and the military suppression of all Māori resistance in the 1860s and 70s, was a deliberate policy of overwhelming the indigenous people by settling tens-of-thousands of immigrants across the country, to the point where their numerical superiority rendered the construction of a second Britain in the South Pacific a feasible proposition. What made “New Zealand” possible was the reduction of the Māori to a militarily and politically powerless minority in their own land.

A particular kind of colonisation, then? Not at all the same as the colonisation visited upon India and Africa. Not even the same as the colonisation visited upon England and Ireland by the Normans. That sort of colonisation featured a relatively small number of conquerors and a very much larger number of conquered. Hundreds-of-millions of Indians were ruled over by around 100,000 British soldiers and administrators. This was the sort of colonisation which colonised peoples could dismantle – which is pretty much what they spent most of the twentieth century doing.

But, the Anglo-Saxon colonies of North America and Australasia were a very different proposition. In a relatively short period of time the indigenous peoples of those lands were reduced to insignificant minorities by an unceasing flood of settlers from Europe.

This huge discrepancy in numbers rendered military resistance futile. Always there were more, and more, and more Europeans to replace the settlers and soldiers killed by the indigenous tribes. North America and Australasia thus became “Neo-Europes”, ruled over and overwhelmingly populated by Europeans. Even where they escaped becoming the victims of outright genocide, indigenous cultures: their languages, customs, modes of political and economic organisation; found themselves smothered by the sheer pressure of European numbers.

This is the process which Māori, along with the many other indigenous peoples forcibly assimilated into the Neo-Europes created by Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, call “colonisation”. The cultural suffocation that inevitably attended the submerging of indigenous peoples beneath a relentlessly rising tide of nineteenth century immigrants. Settlers who came to stay – and who, more than a century later, are still here.

Within the institutions of the state, and even in a number of private organisations, the answer to colonisation is being presented as “decolonisation” and “indigenisation”. As if the cultural and demographic facts of New Zealand life can be re-configured to the point of somehow undoing the facts of New Zealand history. Regrettably, this strategy carries within it distressing intimations of coercion. The threat is there, all the more daunting for being unstated, that those who refuse to decolonise and indigenise will pay a price.

Given the degree of coercion involved in colonisation itself, this hard-line approach is entirely understandable. Unfortunately, it is also likely to provoke the colonisers’ descendants into adopting an aggressively oppositional stance, which, given the balance of demographic forces, is almost certain to be counterproductive. Attempting to undercut “the tyranny of the majority” by unilaterally redefining the meaning of democracy will only make matters worse.

The decolonising concept of “co-governance” cannot succeed if it is understood by Pākehā to mean that Māori will be empowered to exercise a right of veto over the ownership and delivery of essential state services mostly paid for by Pākehā taxes. European cultural traditions and political norms are simply too deeply embedded in the Neo-Europe called New Zealand for this crude approach to righting the wrongs of the past, and overcoming the inequities of the present, to succeed.

Much more likely to secure Pākehā support is the argument that, in the making of New Zealand far too little concern was shown for the impact the colonists’ nation-building was having on the lives and treasures of Māori iwi and hapu. In their eagerness to create a second Britain in the South Pacific, the colonisers simply crowded-out the indigenous people whose rights they were pledged to respect. Presenting co-governance as a way of encouraging Māori to reclaim their lost space has a high chance of success. That the colonial state smothered and suffocated Māori culture and Māori rights is historically undeniable, and morally indefensible.

Ceding Māori the space they need to both rediscover and redefine their tino rangatiratanga is unquestionably the right thing for Pākehā to do. Encouraging Pākehā to join them in that expanded space is unquestionably the best way for Māori to make Aotearoa less European and more indigenous.

Decolonisation is not a programme to be imposed, it is a skill that Māori and Pākehā can only acquire together.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 7 October 2022.

The Flashman Factor.

The Empire Within Which Bullying Never Ceased: The bitter truth about Great Britain’s “public” schools (and their many imitators in the Empire’s far-flung dominions) is that they were consciously designed to produce a very particular kind of imperial administrator. These men needed to be courageous, but not compassionate; clever, but not too clever; up for anything their superiors deemed necessary, and indifferent to others’ pain and suffering. 

TOM BROWN’S SCHOOL DAYS defined a whole generation of “Muscular Christian” English gentlemen. The author of this immensely popular Victorian novel, Thomas Hughes, set out to redefine the values deemed essential to ruling the greatest empire the world had ever known. He had no time whatsoever for effeteness, and even less for arid intellectuality. What Great Britain and its sprawling empire needed were strong and practical souls – leavened by a sound education. What it had absolutely no need for, Hughes insisted, were bullies.

Tom Brown’s School Days provided the model for all the many “school novels” that succeeded it – the most recent of which, J.K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter series – owe a great deal to the original. The all-wise figure of Professor Dumbledore, for example, bears an uncanny resemblance to Dr Thomas Arnold, the real-life headmaster of Rugby School from 1828-1841 who “plays himself” in Hughes’ partly autobiographical novel.

In many respects, Tom Brown’s School Days represented a girding of British ruling-class loins for the great tasks that lay ahead, as British imperialism got its second wind in the Nineteenth Century’s second half. Certainly, the novel’s hero possesses an impressive tally of the virtues required for the daunting mission of imposing “civilisation”. He’s physically fit, amiable, courageous, and up for any challenge. As the novel unfolds, however, it becomes clear that these muscular qualities are not of themselves sufficient. Minds need training as well as bodies, and courage must always be tempered by compassion.

Lest their be any confusion, however, Hughes introduces the unforgettable figure of Flashman, Rugby’s biggest and most brutal bully. It is Flashman who supplies the novel’s most memorable scene, in which a defiant Tom is held in front of a roaring fire by Flashman’s accomplices. Although Tom is ultimately rescued from Flashman’s torture, it is the bully’s viciousness that remains with the reader.

As George MacDonald Fraser, author of the best-selling Flashman novels, realised, it would be the anti-hero’s amorality, not Tom’s Christian piety, that titillated readers in the much darker Twentieth Century.

Hughes’ civilising mission, though indisputably admirable, was always doomed to fail. A thousand Dr Arnold’s could not overcome the brutal fact that imperialism is a brutal business. Seizing and holding other peoples’ lands is an undertaking for which the Flashmans’ of this world are much more suited temperamentally than the Tom Browns.

The bitter truth is that Great Britain’s “public” schools (and their many imitators in the Empire’s far-flung dominions) were consciously designed to produce a very particular kind of imperial administrator. These men needed to be courageous, but not compassionate; clever, but not too clever; up for anything their superiors deemed necessary, and indifferent to others’ pain and suffering. Most importantly, these imperialists needed to enjoy wielding power and subjecting weaker peoples to their will.

In other words, producing bullies was what Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and all the other public schools, were all about.

Why else would public schoolboys be expected to read Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul in the original Latin? (Hint: It wasn’t because he demonstrated Muscular Christianity!) The other great lesson these privately educated gentlemen were required to learn, apart from the practicalities of genocide, is that what a ruling class tells the world it is doing, and what it actually does, are two very different things. Hypocrisy is, always, the indispensable aspect of effective governance. Take note of what I say, not what I do (or have done in the past) is the necessary expectation of those who wield power over others.

These, the instincts and habits of domination are much too important to learn on the job. That is why the pliable young saplings that enter our elite schools must be bent, twisted and violently pruned until they are ready to be released upon the world. It’s why the people responsible for running these schools turn a blind eye to the brutalities by their star pupils, and protect them when they go too far. After all, isn’t life just one long game of rough-and-tumble? And isn’t it better to win at that game than to lose?

The Powers-That-Be may say they want a world filled with the likes of Dr Arnold and Tom Brown. What they really want, however, is a world filled with the likes of Flashman.

Bullying isn’t a bug in the private education system – it’s a feature.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 August 2022.

Indigenous Imperialist?

Defending The Anglo-Saxon Lake: Clearly, it was too much to hope that Nanaia Mahuta might balk at this grotesque imperialist assignment. That she might simply refuse to act as the Five Eyes’ policewoman in the South Pacific. Sadly, the Foreign Minister’s response to the Solomon Island’s decision to sign a security agreement with the People’s Republic of China has been everything her Anglo-Saxon bosses could wish for.

THE APPOINTMENT OF NANAIA MAHUTA as New Zealand’s foreign affairs minister was hailed as a triumph for indigenous peoples everywhere. Now, at last, the foreign policy of Aotearoa-New Zealand could move beyond the very white and very male perspectives of her predecessors. (A group which, sadly, includes Winston Peters.)

As the Māori development minister who commissioned the controversial He Puapua Report, Mahuta gave every appearance of wanting to bring a new and radical perspective to the task of representing a state born of, and still very much a prey to, the historical processes of colonialism and imperialism.

As late as November 2021, Mahuta was still signalling that hers was a perspective distinct from those of most of New Zealand’s friends and allies:

Our connection to the Pacific is reflected through language, peoples, ocean, history, culture, politics, and shared interests. Together, we share kaitiaki responsibilities for Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa — the Blue Ocean Continent. This concept is enduring and inter-generational: what we do for our children today, sets the course for our tamariki and mokopuna. When we consider livelihoods we speak to intergenerational objectives.

Set alongside her earlier statements suggesting a measure of diplomatic separation between New Zealand’s perspectives and those of its “Five Eyes” partners, Mahuta’s remarks to the NZ Institute of International Affairs continued to sustain the hope that she remained determined to give her country’s “independent foreign policy” a decidedly indigenous inflection.

It was not to be. When push comes to shove in the Pacific, New Zealand will always find itself among the pushed and the shoved. No matter how fervently factions in the NZ Defence Force and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade (MFAT) might wish it, this country is unlikely to ever be included among the major-league pushers and the shovers. In the five-fingered Anglo-Saxon fist, New Zealand’s is the “pinky” finger – attached to, but wielding no power over the much larger and stronger fingers of the USA, UK, Canada and Australia.

But, if New Zealand possesses insufficient heft to push upwards, or shove outwards, it is regarded by its big Anglo-Saxon brothers as having more than enough power to push downwards on the micro-states of the Pacific. The countries it locates, condescendingly, in New Zealand’s “back-yard”.

In a division of diplomatic labour indistinguishable from the imperialistic carve-ups of the Nineteenth Century, Australia has arrogated unto itself the responsibility for keeping the independent nations of Melanesia in line. New Zealand’s job is to do the same in Polynesia.

Like a couple of pith-helmeted district officers of the British Raj, the two “White Dominions” of the Southern Hemisphere are positioned side-by-side on the imperial verandah, sipping their gin-and-tonics, and keeping a watchful eye on the “natives” of the Blue Ocean Continent.

Clearly, it was too much to hope that Mahuta might balk at this grotesque assignment. That she might simply refuse to act as the Five Eyes’ policewoman in the South Pacific. Sadly, Mahuta’s response to Solomon Islands’ decision to sign a security agreement with the People’s Republic of China has been everything her Anglo-Saxon bosses could wish for.

Not only have she and her fellow Labour Māori Caucus member, Defence Minister Peeni Henare, flown off to Fiji to sign the “Duavata Partnership”, a beefed-up climatic, economic and defence deal with the Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, but Mahuta has also introduced a whole new term to the geopolitical lexicon – “Regional Sovereignty”.

Speculating that the actions of the Solomon Island’s government might necessitate a bringing forward of the scheduled meeting of the Pacific Island Forum (PIF) in June, Mahuta declared:

It’s my view that several of the Pacific nations will want greater clarity from the Solomons around the nature of those agreements, and the extent to which the sovereign interests of Solomons may well impact on the regional sovereignty and security interests of the Pacific.

Clearly, it is Mahuta’s view (and presumably the view of her advisors at MFAT) that while the Solomon Islands, as an independent nation state and member of the United Nations, possesses, along with all other states, “sovereign interests” to advance and protect according to its own best judgement; the “Blue Ocean Continent”, which, as a mere figure of speech, cannot claim the rights of an independent nation state, nor become a member of the United Nations, nevertheless possesses regional sovereign interests of its own.

Further implied, in this new coinage of Mahuta’s, is that “regional sovereignty” trumps national sovereignty. Bluntly: Honiara proposes, but the PIF (i.e. Australia and New Zealand) disposes.

Not only is this concept new, but it is also profoundly pernicious. With the undoubted backing of New Zealand’s Five Eyes “partners”, Mahuta is asserting the right of Solomon Islands’ neighbours to determine its foreign and defence policies.

A century-and-a-half ago, the high point of the Age of Imperialism, such an overt curtailment of national sovereignty would have been described as transforming what was formerly independent territory into a “protectorate” of one of the great imperial powers. In the Solomon’s case, the “protectors” are the five English-speaking nations which have, since the end of the Second World War, looked upon the Pacific Ocean as an Anglo-Saxon lake.

So much for the “Pacific resilience” about which Mahuta boasted in her speech to the NZIIA last November. New Zealand’s foreign minister is openly participating in the restoration of Anglo-Saxon imperialism across the “Blue Ocean Continent” – for no better reason than to keep her country’s largest and most important trading partner out of it.

China will draw its own conclusions. And so, too, if it has any instinct for national self-preservation, will the Solomon Islands.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 5 April 2022.

A Coalition Of The Waning.

The Sunset Of Anglo-Saxon Imperialism: To join this “Coalition of the Waning”: this AUKUS pact composed of the three military aggressors of the Iraq War; would not only be folly – it would be criminal folly.

THE FORMATION OF AUKUS, the new military pact linking Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, is a mirage. It’s most important element, the arming of the Australian Navy with 8-12 nuclear-powered attack submarines, will almost certainly never happen. The Chinese Government, against which the agreement is aimed, will not be daunted. Indeed, in a shrewd diplomatic manoeuvre, Beijing has applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) from which the USA remains self-excluded, and of which New Zealand remains the “secretary”. What other word except “mirage” is fit to describe this latest, rather desperate, fantasy of Anglo-Saxon imperialism? Long-term strategic decline cannot be wished away by dreaming up a new acronym.

Not that New Zealand’s foreign affairs and defence “establishment” (FADE) will understand AUKUS in such terms. To the contrary, it is already mounting a full-court press to convince New Zealanders that their country has been slighted and snubbed, and its long-term national security imperilled, because their government has not sung along lustily enough in the new “Indo-Pacific” chorus-line. Over the next few weeks and months FADE will attempt to apply maximum pressure on Jacinda Ardern’s government by wheeling out every academic expert, former military officer, US-aligned politician and journalist at its disposal.

The first of what promises to be a great many of these AUKUS promoters appeared on the Q+A current affairs programme just yesterday morning (19/9/21). Former New Zealand Deputy-Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, with the sparkling waters of the Bay of Islands as his backdrop, was interviewed with uncharacteristic deference by the programme’s presenter, Jack Tame. Absent entirely from this encounter was the hectoring tone usually reserved for the NZ First leader by mainstream journalists. What viewers saw was a senior New Zealand statesman invited to shed light on New Zealand’s disturbing exclusion from this new and important security agreement.

Peters, naturally, did not disappoint. Indeed his performance was excellent – full of gravitas and more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger exasperation at the failings of his former Labour colleagues. He didn’t quite say Si vis pacem, para bellum (he who desires peace, should prepare for war) but that was clearly the message delivered by this antipodean Cincinnatus. Peters also made it plain that words have consequences: a not-so-subtle reminder that while his speeches as Foreign Minister only strengthened this country’s relationship with the United States, the speeches of Nanaia Mahuta have produced the opposite effect.

With the National Party locked in what Matthew Hooton calls a “death spiral”, and Act out of contention as a coalition partner for Labour, NZ First presents the Americans with a tempting prize. Subject to proper nurturing, and the right kind of advice, Peters’ party could once again find itself in a position to dangle the keys to the kingdom in front of a desperate Labour caucus. As the price of opening the castle gates, Peters could demand – and would, almost certainly, be given – both the Foreign Affairs and Defence portfolios. The chances are high that, very soon thereafter, the doors to AUKUS would also swing open.

The next New Zealand General Election is, however, still two years away, and much can change in two years. Beijing has just handed Wellington an extraordinary opportunity to place itself at the head of those Indo-Pacific nations that would much rather expand the opportunities for economic co-operation and trade, than join in ratchetting-up the tensions of a new Cold War. Imagine the diplomatic awkwardness for Canberra if Washington made it clear to “the fella down-under” that he was expected to blackball China from membership in the CPTPP. A China seeking to increase economic opportunities across the Indo-Pacific region would have been frozen-out by an Australian government more interested in the prospects of war than the benefits of peace. The contrast between the policies of Wellington and Canberra could not be rendered more starkly: to New Zealand’s Pacific neighbours, her trading partners, and, not least, to Beijing.

It is also quite possible that, by 2023, the United States will be embroiled in domestic strife bordering on civil-war. By fair means or foul the Republican Party appears poised to seize back control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in next year’s mid-term elections. With both the Congress and the Supreme Court under their effective control, the possibility exists that the Republicans will attempt to depose President Biden and replace him with Donald Trump. The Trump-dominated Republican Party is certainly crazy enough to try. The real question, then, will be: who, in a constitutionally compromised United States, possesses both the means – and the will – to stop them? Is the American military prepared to destroy the American republic in order to save it? If it is, then AUKUS will be the last thing on its mind!

As for those nuclear-powered submarines the Americans have promised their Australian “mates”. To employ a popular Australianism: “Tell ‘em they’re dreaming!” The six diesel-powered Collins-class subs the Aussies already possess have been one long pain in the Australian Navy’s arse. Plagued by repeated breakdowns and difficulties in accessing spare parts, the Australian submarine fleet is almost never fully functional.

When it is ready for action, however, the Collins-class submarine is considerably nimbler and harder to detect than its larger, nuclear-powered, counterparts. Having only just learned how to get the best out of their current fleet, the idea that their incredibly hard to recruit submariners will have to master an infinitely more complex boat must be seriously depressing Australia’s naval commanders.

And that’s not even factoring-in the white-hot fury of the French – who have just been stiffed out of $93 billion!

All of which suggests that, upon hearing the news about AUKUS, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and Canada’s Justin Trudeau would have both breathed huge sighs of relief. There is something ever-so-slightly bonkers about this supposedly “new” security arrangement. For a start, what, exactly, is new about cobbling together military alliances against surging nation-states threatening to up-end the status quo? Isn’t that the sort of carry-on that led to World War I?

More to the point, how is anyone supposed to take Boris Johnson and his brand new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth II, seriously? A man so enamoured with the life and times of Winston Churchill surely cannot have forgotten the fate of the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse – sunk, almost casually, by Japanese bombers in December 1941? Surely, someone has told him about China’s hypersonic, carrier-killing missiles?

And what are the Chinese supposed to make of British warships in the South China Sea? Johnson may have forgotten all about the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century, but Xi Jinping has not.

Surely, it is time for New Zealand to break free of the imperial project in which it has been enmeshed for the past 181 years? Surely, as an independent nation, it is in our long-term interests to recognise Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States for what they are? The three countries which, in March 2003, and in blatant contravention of international law and the United Nations Charter, attacked and invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. In planning and unleashing aggressive war upon a country which had not attacked them, the leaders of the US, the UK and Australia were guilty of the same war crimes for which the leaders of Nazi Germany were tried and convicted at Nuremburg in 1946. To join this “Coalition of the Waning”: this pact composed of the three military aggressors of the Iraq War; would not only be folly – it would be criminal folly.

The shimmering vision of Imperial Hegemony Regained: the mirage which leads Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison deeper and deeper into a waterless diplomatic desert; will be the ruin of them all.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 20 September 2021.

The Men of the West’s Day Has Come – and Gone.

The Western Sun Sets: What nation, looking aghast at the chaos and confusion created by the United States precipitate withdrawal from Afghanistan, would consider putting its faith in American promises? What peoples, oppressed and abused though they may be by tyrannical regimes, will ever again look to the Western democracies for inspiration? What enemy of freedom and equality need any longer quail before the might of the West? The answers, tragically, are: “None.”

AS I WATCHED the big American helicopters circling the US Embassy in Kabul, I thought of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”. As the smoke of burning files billowed out of the Embassy compound, I recalled Aragorn before the Black Gate of Mordor. As Sauron’s Orc legions marched towards the uncrowned King of Gondor’s vastly outnumbered army, he rallied his quailing knights with a speech that has always stuck in my memory:

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!”

In those stirring lines, Fran Walsh captures perfectly the chivalric Western ethos. The idea that an oath, once given, cannot be broken. That protection offered and accepted cannot be withdrawn unilaterally and arbitrarily. Most of all, that there is no greater sin than the betrayal and abandonment of the weak by the strong. Through all the blood and sweat and tears of our history. In spite of them being honoured more in the breach than in the execution – these have been the animating ideals of the “Men of the West”. The principles they strove to live by.

No more.

What nation, looking aghast at the chaos and confusion created by the United States precipitate withdrawal from Afghanistan, would consider putting its faith in American promises? What peoples, oppressed and abused though they may be by tyrannical regimes, will ever again look to the Western democracies for inspiration? What enemy of freedom and equality need any longer quail before the might of the West? The answers, tragically, are: “None.”

The true measure of the Afghanistan debacle will not be calculated in terms of the blood and treasure expended in that unhappy country. It will be calculated in terms of the loss of faith in the West’s word, and the West’s values, that the West’s betrayal and abandonment of the Afghan people – especially its women and girls – has provoked.

Henceforth, whenever anyone hears the “International Community” (a mealy-mouthed euphemism for the nations of North America, Europe and Australasia) warning some international miscreant against earning its displeasure, all that’s likely to be evoked is hollow laughter. It is difficult to imagine a more compelling miscreant than the Taliban, but it is equally difficult to imagine the Taliban losing too much sleep over what the “International Community” might do to it. After all, it’s been demonstrating its displeasure for twenty years with “Daisy Cutter” bombs, Cruise missiles, and “pinpoint” drone strikes, and all the “International Community” has achieved is the restoration of Taliban power.

And what about the nations not generally included in the “International Community”? What of the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Peoples Republic of China? What will they make of the West’s forsaking of its friends; its breaking of the bonds of fellowship?

What has happened, they will ask themselves, to the West that responded to Stalin’s provocations of 1948 with the Berlin Airlift? The West that met North Korea’s sudden southward thrust with a UN “Police Operation” that drove its forces back across the 38th Parallel, and which, thanks to the United States, has maintained a strong military presence in South Korea for nearly 70 years? The West that massed its armies against Saddam Hussein in 1990-91 and made good the promise of President George H.W. Bush that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait “would not stand”. The West that, however imperfectly, and self-interestedly, kept its word?

Gone.

Writing for the Newsroom website earlier this week, Professor Robert Ayson, observed: “Kabul’s fall could be the last echo of a period when western governments believed their armed forces could knit together broken nations. Despite all of today’s talk about democratic values, the message is that we don’t really mind how you govern yourselves, or actually whether you govern yourselves, as long as you don’t harm us.”

But, cowering behind walls, while the rest of the world burns, is the policy of appeasers and defeatists. The Men of the West’s day has come – and they have not stood.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 August 2021.

Should We Trust The Science – Or Ourselves?

“Pure” Science: The lesson to be drawn from the history of science, however, is that knowledge is always and everywhere embedded in culture. That the one cannot be separated from the other. Culture can empower knowledge, or suppress it; advance it or divert it to the utmost wickedness. Knowledge goes where it’s told.  

“TRUST THE SCIENCE” – those three words have become the mantra of the global fight against Covid-19. That the population must be exhorted to trust the advice of scientists, however, speaks directly to humanity’s diminishing faith in the scientific ethos. There was a time when politicians didn’t have to ask.

Nowhere has this loss of faith been demonstrated more dramatically that on the streets of London, Paris and, closer to home, Sydney. Once revered as a secular priesthood, scientists are now depicted as the willing accomplices of tyrants hellbent on the elimination of all human freedoms. One utterly deranged London protester breathlessly recalled that doctors and nurses had faced the judges at Nuremberg – “and they were hung!”

Leaving aside the absurdity of equating NHS doctors and nurses with Joseph Mengele and his entourage, the reference to the Nazi era is curiously apposite. Scientists of every kind flocked to the new Nazi regime. From rocketeer Werner von Braun, to atomic scientist Werner Heisenberg, scientists embraced Hitler’s new order as the invincible vector of rational modernity. The intellectual promoters of “scientific racism” and eugenics looked forward to working at the cutting edge of a ruthless, ultra-radical, technological society; unburdened by sentiment and driven exclusively by unfettered science.

So, what does this tell us about “the science”? The lesson to be drawn is that knowledge is always and everywhere embedded in culture. That the one cannot be separated from the other. Culture can empower knowledge, or suppress it; advance it or divert it to the utmost wickedness. Knowledge goes where it’s told.

In the guise of scientists, the holders and manipulators of knowledge often pretend to a status entirely independent of the inexactitude of cultural impulses and individual prejudices. But, as the horrific history of the Third Reich bears witness, those calling themselves scientists proved no less susceptible to the ethno-nationalist culture of Nazism than the most thuggish stormtrooper.

Unsurprisingly, scientists resist these assertions with considerable energy. Here in New Zealand, battle has recently been joined between those who argue that “Matauranga Maori”, the Maori way of knowledge, is no less deserving of respect and inculcation than “Western Science”; and those who insist that science and the scientific method transcend all indigenous understandings of the way the world works.

The seven highly respected scientists who penned a letter to the New Zealand Listener (31/7/21) expressing similar reservations, were particularly perturbed by an NCEA working group’s claim that “science is a Western European invention and itself evidence of European dominance over Maori and other indigenous peoples.”

From an historical perspective, however, the seven letter-writers’ objection to this characterisation of science is extremely difficult to uphold. The relationship between race and science in the history of Western imperialism is simply too strong; and the brutal uses to which the fruits of scientific inquiry were put, too irrefutable. Science both enabled – and justified – the European conquest of the world.

By contrast, Matauranga Maori recognises the wisdom of knowledge and culture working together: each one both tempering and expanding the other. Or, as the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, Dame Juliet Gerrard, wrote back in 2019:

“[Matauranga Maori’s] approach of embedding practice in society and grounding the project in a community of acceptance before it starts is the very model of ensuring impact and connectivity. Often those trained in Western traditions, however fine, struggle to grasp this until it is perhaps too late. How many technologies will be developed in isolation before we learn that we need to engage our publics sooner, not later, to make sure there is cultural license to proceed?”

Another way of describing this approach might be “the democratisation of science”. Certainly, the tradition of citizen scientists, operating independently of big business and the state, and applying their scientific discoveries in ways that brought obvious benefits to ordinary people, goes a long way towards explaining why Europeans initially embraced the achievements of science.

It was what Churchill called “perverted science” that sowed the seeds of popular doubt and scepticism. Science without scruple or sanction; science driven by national self-aggrandisement and/or private profit.

Dame Juliet suggests that: “To turn the tide on anti-science sentiment, we need to reframe our science as ‘here to serve’ and ‘here to listen’.”

This is all Matauranga Maori asks. Not that we “trust the science”, but that we trust ourselves.

This essay was originally published by The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 July 2021.

Anzac Day 2021: Myths Under Pressure.

Imperial Mission: All nations need myths: common narratives – usually heroic, or tragic, or both – with which to bind their citizens to the state with just the right mixture of awe, pity, gratitude and pride. New Zealand’s historical myths were initially crafted to instil loyalty to the imperial British mission, and have maintained a remarkably tenacious grip on the public imagination.

NICHOLAS BOYACK’S controversial commentary piece for Stuff is a harbinger of historical controversies to come. Published just 48 hours before Anzac Day’s dawn parades, Boyack’s “We need an honest debate on Gallipoli and a fresh approach to history”, offers an unashamedly revisionist take on the Gallipoli landings. Not surprisingly, it aroused powerful emotions in Stuff’s readers.

Predictably, many of these emotions reflected the affronted nationalism of adherents to the official version of the Anzac story. More interesting, however, were the responses signalling sympathy with Boyack’s anti-imperialistic views.

With the current government strongly committed to overseeing a revolution in the teaching of New Zealand history, Boyack’s Anzac bombshell looks set to be just the first of many such attacks on our national myths. There are few individuals more subversive of the status quo than historians on a mission.

All nations need myths: common narratives – usually heroic, or tragic, or both – with which to bind their citizens to the state with just the right mixture of awe, pity, gratitude and pride. New Zealand’s historical myths were initially crafted to instil loyalty to the imperial British mission, and have maintained a remarkably tenacious grip on the public imagination. The second great wave of national mythmaking gathered strength in the 1950s and 60s and was aimed at inculcating a robust faith in New Zealand’s “progressive” impulses – the reforms that made “little New Zealand” the “social laboratory of the world”. The grip of this second iteration of “New Zealand-ness” turned out to be considerably weaker than the first.

The proof of the imperial mythology’s enduring strength has just been presented to us in the impressive numbers once-again turning out for the traditional Anzac dawn parades. The devotion of the young to the Anzac Myth has perplexed and delighted not only traditional historians, but the entire New Zealand political class.

It was, after all, the young New Zealanders of the 1970s and 80s who had offered up the first serious challenges to the monolithic imperial mythology of the “RSA Generation”. Provoked, at least initially, by New Zealand’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Anzac revisionism soon expanded into a critique of the deeply-ingrained conservative values, and limited political vision, of the taciturn Kiwi blokes who returned from World War II. The fear was that as those with personal memories of the First and Second World Wars became fewer and fewer the Anzac spirit would also march away, shoulder-to-shoulder, with their ghosts.

The Scotsman-turned-Aussie songwriter, Eric Bogle, summed-up this anxiety in his famous song about Gallipoli “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”: 

And so now every April, I sit on me porch
And I watch the parades pass before me
And I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reviving old dreams of past glories
And the old men march slowly, old bones stiff and sore
They’re tired old heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, “what are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question

But the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men still answer the call
But as year follows year, more old men disappear
Someday no one will march there at all

Except, astonishingly, the thinning ranks of the world war veterans were filled by their children, grandchildren and, by 2021, their great-grandchildren. The Baby Boom generation may have been sceptical of Anzac Day and what it stood for, but Generation X et seq embraced the Gallipoli myth with a passion that was little short of embarrassing. The question is: Why?

Much of the answer is doubtless bound up with the dramatic social and economic transformations of the 1980s and 90s. The free-market reforms that characterised the political histories of both Australia and New Zealand during that critical period effectively put paid to the “progressive” mythologies of the Anzac “brothers” – represented most forcefully by the Labour governments of Gough Whitlam and Norman Kirk.

Globalisation was an important part of the sales pitch of their successors, Bob Hawke and David Lange, and their respective finance ministers, Paul Keating and Roger Douglas. The only problem being that a political project based on giving de-regulated capitalism its head is extremely difficult to reconcile with the tightly regulated capitalism of the social-democratic Australia and New Zealand which Hawke and Lange were in the process of sweeping away. With the costumes of “progressive nationalism” now passé, the Anzac brothers had little other recourse but to reach into the depths of their national memory chests for the imperial paraphernalia of an even older era.

That the Anzac nations did not emerge from this re-invention exercise wearing pretty much the same clobber is due to New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy. Cold-shouldered by Canberra and Washington, and scolded by the British, New Zealand’s embrace of the old imperial myths was tempered by its new status as the scourge of the English-speaking nuclear powers. For a while, at least, this gave to New Zealand’s Anzac Day commemorations a decidedly Blackadder Goes Forth flavour. While the Aussies become increasingly jingoistic (to the point of almost forgetting what the “nz” in Anzac stands for) the Kiwis played up the horror and tragedy of war.

Unfortunately for the New Zealand political class, that doesn’t really work. Play up the horror and tragedy of war too poignantly and people cannot avoid questioning the point of going to war at all. Moreover, it’s only a short step from recognising the futility of war to grasping, as Nicholas Boyack does so persuasively in his commentary, the less-than-honourable motivations of the imperial politicians who refused to stop the war; and the willingness of New Zealand’s politicians to trade so much blood for butter.

And so it is that the rattle of imperial harness has become more and more a feature of Anzac Day commemorations. Youngsters, in particular, will declaim proudly on how the Anzacs went to war for “freedom” and “democracy”, rather than to strengthen the Mother Country’s grip on the oil reserves of the Middle East. One is moved to wonder if the new and compulsory New Zealand history curriculum will appraise these young New Zealanders of the fact that the wartime government of William Massey considered it advisable to lock up freedom and democracy for the duration: conscripting socialist MPs and subjecting the Christian pacifist, Archibald Baxter, to the torture of “Field Punishment No.1”

“It is time for a national debate on our history, focusing on what we can do to lift the standard in schools and universities” says Nicholas Boyack. “We also need to stop peddling myths about Gallipoli and New Zealand nationalism, and take a more honest approach to our history.”

Ah, yes, but that will entail emulating the sorcerer in Aladdin who offered new lamps for old. And when our historians set about exchanging old national myths for brand new ones, who knows what sort of genies will be summoned forth – or what they will be asked to do?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 26 April 2021.

Principled, Pragmatic AND Expedient? You Betcha! Replying To Paul Buchanan.

Predatory Morality: Is geopolitical consultant, Paul Buchanan, right? Does the rest of the world truly monitor New Zealand’s miniscule contribution to the international arms trade so closely? Are foreign chancelleries truly so insensitive to their own governments’ complicity in the world’s horrors that they expect all other sovereign states to be unblemished moral exemplars – especially New Zealand?

MUCH IS BEING MADE of the fact that New Zealand firms are exporting military equipment to unsavoury regimes. Geopolitical consultant, Paul Buchanan, reflected the views of many critical of New Zealand’s involvement in the international arms trade when he declared on his Kiwipolitico blog: “If NZ is to regain a semblance of integrity in diplomatic circles, its foreign policy decision-making matrix must change away from trade obsessed expediency and towards the principled but pragmatic orientation that grants it the independence that it claims to have.”

“Regain a semblance of integrity”? Seriously? Does the rest of the world truly monitor New Zealand’s miniscule contribution to the international arms trade so closely? Are foreign chancelleries truly so insensitive to their own governments’ complicity in the world’s horrors that they expect all other sovereign states to be unblemished moral exemplars?

Certainly, New Zealand’s arms exports are not going to be condemned by their principal recipients (which, if Buchanan is to be believed, includes the NATO countries and many of our most important regional allies). Nor should we tolerate the slightest reproof from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (USA, China, Russia, United Kingdom, France) who also just happen to be the world’s five largest arms exporters. Unlikely, too, that this country will suffer criticism from the really “bad buggers” on our list of arms importers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They, at least, have no expectations of ever being regarded as unblemished moral exemplars. Murderous autocracy is its own reward.

So, if the foreign offices and state departments of the world are not going to waste a moment tut-tutting little New Zealand for daring to export military equipment to their friends, allies and leading petrochemical suppliers, then who is?

A couple of idealistic RNZ journalists, seemingly. Tipped-off, perhaps, by that outspoken anti-imperialist Valerie Morse, who has never seen a gun she didn’t abhor – unless it was in the hands of her wannabe freedom-fighter friends “exercising” in the Urewera bush.

Then there’s the Greens’ Golriz Ghahraman, who has been tut-tutting fit to beat the band. But, then, Ghahraman, if properly cross-examined, would probably admit to not wanting New Zealand to have an arms industry at all – or, for that matter, an army. In the eyes of the Greens, guns (and mortar sights) are inextricably bound up with imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy and all those other things deemed injurious to children, animals and other living things. Away with them!

One can only feel a pang of sympathy for the boffins in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT). On the receiving-end of a flurry of Official Information Act requests, they had little option but to reveal the extent to which New Zealand’s high-tech industries have been making the most of the world’s insatiable appetite for the weapons of war.

Promoting trade is, after all, MFAT’s job, and, to give them their due, they’re bloody good at it. Like the rest of the world’s diplomats and bureaucrats, ours tend to work on the principle that what is not expressly prohibited is tacitly permitted. Should someone have been looking over someone’s shoulder when the application for a permit to export military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the UAE came across their desk. Probably. Politicians hate surprises, so a good public servant anticipates trouble before it becomes a headline. Even so, no laws were broken.

Buchanan has posed the question: “Principled, pragmatic or expedient”. Once again, the proposition is a curious one. Is he arguing that it is possible to be both principled and pragmatic but not expedient? His positioning of the word “or” would suggest so. But to treat all expedient decisions as in some way morally objectionable is to render practical diplomacy impossible.

The conduct of sovereign states is almost always dictated by what their rulers deem expedient. Indeed, it is easier to mount a moral case for the most principled diplomacy being that which delivers the most expedient outcomes for all the states involved in an international dispute. Pragmatism, in this context, may be seen as the ability to obtain the maximum of one’s country’s objectives with the minimum of moral and material compromises.

Buchanan would also have New Zealand draw a clear distinction between the moral status of its Five Eyes partners – most especially his homeland, the United States – and other international actors. Included on his list of countries with whom it is unacceptable to seek expedient outcomes one finds not only Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia, but also the People’s Republic of China. The latter is castigated by Buchanan for systemically abusing human rights at home, denying individual and collective rights as a matter of course and treating minorities as if they were foreign enemies.

As someone who has worked closely with not only America’s soldiers, but also America’s diplomats, Buchanan must be aware of the speciousness of this line of argument. The great distinction between Chinese and American imperialism is that China, for its whole history, has been a contiguous land empire. Unlike the United States, which, upon subduing (and in many cases exterminating) all those who hindered its expansion across the North American continent, proceeded to extend its imperial reach across the entire planet, China has been content to remain within its historical borders. Ethnic and religious threats to China’s rulers have always been dealt with internally. Threats to America’s global hegemony, by contrast, almost always originate offshore. From Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq, the USA – no less than China – has abused human rights with wanton and murderous abandon.

Buchanan’s laborious description of the United States process of determining whether or not arms should be supplied to a particular regime would be funny if it was not for the sobering fact that this former participant in “the decision-making chain” for “US military sales and training, etc. to Latin American countries” clearly believes every word he is writing. As if the sickening history of Uncle Sam’s murder and mayhem in Latin America was perpetrated by some other power. “The process was slow and circuitous but in the end it was comprehensive and transparent.” Tell that to the victims of the Contras, Paul! Tell it to the Mayans!

Perhaps it is Buchanan’s own experiences in Latin America that cause him to treat expediency as a dirty word. Certainly, what New Zealand finds it expedient to do differs greatly from what the United States considers expedient. Buchanan knows full well that New Zealand’s size and relative powerlessness severely restricts the harm it can do. Ultimately, the well-being of New Zealanders depends upon their country’s trading relationships with the rest of the world. Maximising that trade is, accordingly, the principled, the pragmatic and the expedient thing to do.

Buchanan is the son of a brutal imperial power. New Zealand used to be the colony of one and must now do all within its power to avoid becoming the colony of another. It ill-behoves a former citizen of the United States (and a newly-minted citizen of New Zealand) to lecture his adopted country on the morality, or otherwise, of its foreign policy. The Kiwi, unlike the Bald Eagle, is not a bird of prey.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 13 April 2021.

To Apologise For Your Country's History, Is To Admit That You Don't Understand it.

Retrospective Moralising: Ideas that have, generation after generation, been ingrained in the minds of children by their parents, taught in school textbooks, and articulated forcefully by teachers, preachers, politicians and journalists of every stripe, are extremely hard to kill. All the more so when the identity of those to whom they have been transmitted is bound up inextricably with the pride and self-confidence they communicate, and the power they purport to guarantee.

THE DECISION BY STUFF to publish an all-purpose mea culpa for its racism towards Maori will be regretted. That regret will be fuelled in part by future generations’ acute embarrassment at the simplistic anachronisms which constitute the apologists’ central “argument”. Mostly, however, it will be fuelled by the effects of the highly racialised backlash it is bound to provoke. It is clear that a certain privileged layer of New Zealand society has learned nothing from the recent political convulsions besetting both the United Kingdom and the United States. Spit upon the most cherished beliefs and achievements of your “deplorables” and – eventually – they will spit back.

Let us deal with the anachronisms first. The word itself simply means: “a chronological inconsistency in some arrangement, especially a juxtaposition of persons, events, objects, language terms and customs from different time periods.” To judge the actions of historical actors by the prevailing moral precepts of the present is not only philosophically impermissible, but it also betrays the writer’s fundamental ignorance of the history he is purporting to condemn.

The founders of The Press, The Dominion, The Evening Post, The Taranaki Herald and The Waikato Times; the editors they appointed; and the journalists they hired; were all children of their times. They were living in a colony of the British Empire and in their writing they evinced the beliefs and values of what historians have dubbed “The Age of Imperialism”.

The conquest of other peoples’ lands, and the ruthless dismantling of cultures that inevitably followed, was justified by the imperialists’ unshakeable conviction that the steady advance of Western Civilisation across the planet lay at the very heart of human “progress”. The corollary to this belief in Western superiority was the notion that any resistance on the part of those the imperialist poet par excellence, Rudyard Kipling, called “lesser breeds without the law” was an unacceptable impediment to progress and must, at all costs, be crushed.

Which is not to say that these imperialist beliefs were accepted uncritically by everyone. There were contemporaries of the men who founded New Zealand’s colonial press who, while undoubtedly accepting the racial hierarchies proclaimed by the science of the day, nevertheless recognised the theft of other people’s property when they saw it – and weren’t afraid to say so.

If the white races were so self-evidently superior to the rest of humanity, these critics argued, then surely they were honour-bound to uphold the core civilisational values of which they were so inordinately proud? Promises, freely given, must be kept. Rights universally shared must be universally acknowledged. Equality, once proclaimed, cannot be rescinded. It was people of this temperament – a tiny minority of the settler population – who felt moved to write to those same colonial newspapers condemning with considerable force the destruction of Parihaka and the detention without trial of the settlement’s leaders.

It is also a fact that the colonial newspapers printed their letters. Proof, one might think, that the Pakeha New Zealanders of 140 years ago were not all the slavering racist monsters portrayed by Stuff’s current crop of anachronistic moralisers.

Which is not to say that, right up until the childhoods of people still alive today, those racial hierarchies weren’t upheld as scientific truths. Not even the unqualified evil of the Holocaust and the eugenicist murder of innocents by Nazi doctors in the 1930s and 40s, was enough to shake the white supremacist prejudices of the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese imperialists who attempted to pick up where they left off before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

It took the breaking of the imperialists’ grip in India, Africa, Indo-China and Indonesia – by Indians, Africans, Indo-Chinese and Indonesians – bolstered by the scholarship of post-Holocaust anthropologists, historians and political philosophers, to upend finally the racial hierarchies that had justified white supremacy for upwards of four centuries. That, and the fight for civil rights in the belly of the American beast that quickened radically the debate over the place of race in the development of the United States – and the whole of the “Western World”.

It was not an easy fight. Ideas that have, generation after generation, been ingrained in the minds of children by their parents, taught in school textbooks, and articulated forcefully by teachers, preachers, politicians and journalists of every stripe, are extremely hard to kill. All the more so when the identity of those to whom they have been transmitted is bound up inextricably with the pride and self-confidence they communicate, and the power they purport to guarantee. The simple idea that “The West is the Best” is not contradicted – or apologised for – without unleashing resentments and hatreds of punishing force.

Reading the various essays published in the Stuff newspapers, it becomes clear very quickly that the writers possess not the slightest insight or empathy for the settler society they condemn; nor understanding of the 150 years of “racist” journalism they apologise for. What, one is moved to wonder, do they see when they look upon the works of their ancestors? The roads and the railways? The public buildings? The farms and factories? The family histories of struggle, disappointment and ultimate success? The sacrifice of tens-of-thousands of young men in wars whose casualty-lists reduce the New Zealand Wars to a skirmish.

A few years ago, I recall describing to an academic friend from Turkey the “battle” of Rangiaowhia, and explaining the discrepancy between the accounts of Pakeha and Maori historians as to the number killed. Was it twelve or seventeen? “Thousand?”, my companion asked, confused. “No, no,” I replied, embarrassed, “just twelve or seventeen.” She shook her head in quiet disbelief.

To apologise for one’s history is to invite those wronged by it to seek either restitution or retribution – or, maybe, both. The problem is, that what was taken by a combination of force and trickery is unlikely to be reclaimed by anything else. The children of the settlers who built “New Zealand” on the body of “Aotearoa”, understand in that special place known to all human-beings who love their homeland, that the apologies being offered by these radical journalists (who clearly despise everything “New Zealand” stands for) are a warning of deep and tragic upheavals to come.

Some of these Pakeha will reluctantly abandon their country. Some will retreat deeper into what is still its racist heartland. And some will struggle to preserve the nation they have grown up in. A nation whose true history is one of Maori and Pakeha finding more and more to be proud of in the way each ethnicity has adapted to the presence of the other. In the course of that history many apologies have been earned, and some have been given, but not, until recently, for being caught up in historical forces too vast for blame, and too permanent for guilt.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 1 December 2020.