Forwards And Backwards.

The Right In Action: Nothing in politics is ever settled. The hands of History’s clock can go backwards, as well as forwards.

IT REALLY WAS THE BEST OF TIMES. The brief recession of the late-1950s was over. The United States was led by a young, Harvard-educated war hero, with the dashing style and good-looks of a Hollywood movie star.

The Kennedy Administration had made idealism sexy, and politics heroic. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” John F. Kennedy had declared in his Inaugural Address of 20 January 1961, “ask what you can do for your country.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and its peaceful resolution, offered proof positive that “the best and the brightest” of the “Free World” were more than a match for the hard men of Soviet Communism. There was a confidence and purposefulness about the United States that not only lifted the spirits of Americans, but fuelled the hopes of people all over the world.

Even the great American scars of racism and poverty no longer seemed beyond remedy. Dr Martin Luther King’s non-violent civil rights movement was galvanising young Americans of all colours in ways not seen since the Civil War of the 1860s. It recalled the high idealism of the Abolitionists: that extraordinary fervour for racial justice reflected in the words of The Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As [Christ] died to make men holy, let us die to set men free.”

Kennedy had also invited Michael Harrington, democratic socialist and author of the 1962 best-seller, The Other America, to the White House for a briefing on those pockets of poverty Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had left in place, and how, finally, they might be eradicated.

Underlying all this optimism and idealism was a rising tide of Keynesian-inspired economic prosperity that had lifted all boats high enough for the usual hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth priorities of ordinary Americans to be temporarily set aside. If the United States was rich enough to contemplate putting a man on the moon by 1970, then perhaps the elimination of racial inequality and poverty could be overcome.

Paradoxically, Kennedy’s assassination only hardened the resolve of Americans to meet the challenges their fallen leader had set before them.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson pledged unreservedly to make good his predecessor’s promises. In January 1964, just weeks after the tragedy in Dallas, “LBJ” used his first State of the Union Address to declare an unconditional “war on poverty”. In November of that same year, Johnson handed Barry Goldwater, the presidential candidate of a Republican Party hi-jacked by its far-right lunatic fringe, a stunning and humiliating defeat.

In his most effective campaign ad’, Johnson said, simply: “Either we must love each other, or we must die.” Less than sixty years ago, an American President had secured a landslide victory on a platform of delivering racial justice, ending poverty, and keeping America at peace.

In the bitter aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s revocation of Roe v. Wade, the above history lesson should serve as a sharp reminder of just how tenuous, and temporary, political progress can be. In the space of just four tumultuous years, the United States had retreated so far from its progressive high-water mark, that Richard Nixon was able to re-take the White House for the Republican Party. Nothing in politics is ever “settled”. The hands of History’s clock can go backwards, as well as forwards.

Nor are such dramatic political reversals peculiar to the United States. In 1972, the New Zealand electorate swung sharply left, propelling the Labour Party into power with 48.4 percent of the popular vote and a whopping 23-seat majority. The professors and the pundits of the time were unanimous in their opinion that a majority of 23 could not be overturned in the space of a single term. Labour, they insisted, was good for at least six years.

They couldn’t have been more wrong. Between 1972 and 1975, the mood of the New Zealand electorate soured to the point where National’s right-wing populist leader, Rob Muldoon, was able to exactly reverse the 1972 election result. Politically and socially, New Zealand voters had swung as sharply to the right as, only 36 months before, they had swung to the left.

Fear was the key: fear and its associated need for reassurance and protection. Muldoon’s success was built on the sudden failure of the New Zealand economy. Rampant inflation, rocketing petrol prices, and the widespread conviction that something very serious had gone wrong with the stable (some might say smug) New Zealand so gently mocked in Austin Mitchell’s in/famous bestseller The Half-Gallon, Quarter-Acre, Pavlova Paradise.

Which is why, when professors and pundits glibly reassure us that there is no way New Zealanders could turn against a woman’s right to choose an abortion, we are entitled to a small snort of derision.

Four years ago, approximately 65-70 percent of New Zealanders were in favour of legalising cannabis. That’s roughly the same percentage of the population that supports the current abortion law. After 18-months-to-a-year of extremely sophisticated campaigning by the anti-cannabis lobby, however, the percentage of voters supporting marijuana law reform had plummeted to just under 50 percent – a fall sufficient to cost the reformers the 2020 referendum. Public opinion doesn’t just change, it can be made to change.

With most economists predicting an imminent recession, many New Zealanders will enter 2023 in fear of what lies in store for them, and resentful of a Labour Government they believe has let them down. If extra-parliamentary forces like the Family First organisation are able to associate Labour’s political leadership with an ideology that despises and derides the beliefs and values of ordinary people, linking their lack of empathy with New Zealanders’ declining economic fortunes, then the chances of them producing a dramatic shift in the electorate’s thinking are relatively high.

In a commentary-piece written for The Conversation, the Auckland academic Suze Wilson warns New Zealanders against placing too much stock in Opposition Leader, Christopher Luxon’s, reassurances that National would not pursue a change to this country’s abortion laws should it win government.

“Even if Luxon’s current assurance is sincerely intended,” writes Wilson, “it may not sustain should the broader political acceptability of his personal beliefs change. And on that front, there are grounds for concern.”

Wilson draws particular attention to the sharp rightward drift set in motion by the Covid-19 Pandemic and the measures adopted by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-led Government to protect New Zealanders from its worst effects. The early success of those measures, sufficient to secure Labour’s landslide victory in 2020, has not been maintained. Voters who, just 18 months ago looked upon “Jacinda” as a national hero, are daily falling prey to extreme right-wing conspiracy theories depicting her as a power-crazed tyrant.

“If these kinds of shifts in public opinion continue to gather steam, it may become more politically tenable for Luxon to shift gear regarding New Zealand’s abortion laws”, Wilson warns.

The same America that gave us JFK, also gave us Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. The same New Zealand that gave us Norman Kirk, also gave us Rob Muldoon. Except they weren’t really the same countries, were they? Because, when Prosperity leaves the building, Empathy is seldom very far behind.

Nothing in politics is ever settled.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 4 July 2022.

What’s Sauce For Monroe’s Goose, Is Sauce For Putin’s Gander.

Not In My Back Yard! If the American President, Joe Biden, has forgotten the lessons of 60 years ago, then the Russian Federation President, Vladimir Putin, has not. Unacceptable in 1962, the stationing of military resources (including tactical nuclear weapons) along Russia’s borders remains unacceptable in 2022.

IT WAS BURIED DEEP in his State of the Union address to Congress. A warning to the great powers of his day that any attempt to once again colonise the Western Hemisphere would be regarded as a direct threat to the national security of the United States of America. The year was 1823. The President delivering the State of the Union address was James Monroe. And the declaration that the entire Western Hemisphere of the globe was an American sphere of influence became known as “The Monroe Doctrine”. It remains a core principle of US foreign policy to this very day.

What amazes historians about the Monroe Doctrine is the sheer affrontery of the United States in declaring half the world off-limits to powers in possession of considerably more wealth and military strength than itself. One can only imagine the lips of the rulers of Great Britain, France, Russia and Prussia curling in contempt at this jackanape of a republic presuming to teach the world its business.

Not that the great powers of the day misunderstood the reasoning motivating President Monroe and his advisers. The Spanish Empire: which had once embraced the whole of the South American continent (except Brazil) Central America and what is now Mexico, the South-Western states of the US and California; had just lost, or was in the process of losing, her American possessions – just as, forty years earlier, Great Britain had lost her thirteen North American colonies. Monroe’s Doctrine warned Europe’s rulers: “Don’t even think about trying to take them back!”

Why, then, is it so difficult, one year from the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, for the United States to comprehend why the Russian Federation might want to declare Eastern Europe, the Ukraine in particular, off-limits to the NATO alliance?

Twice, in just over a century, vast armies have swept eastward across the Great European Plain to wreak havoc upon the peoples of, first, the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union. In the last invasion, led by Nazi Germany (in alliance with Romania, Hungary and Italy) more than 20 million Soviet citizens lost their lives. Had the Nazis won, it was their plan to starve as many again to death, emptying the broad wheatlands of the Ukraine of human inhabitants in preparation for their permanent “Germanisation”.

It is a melancholy fact that the only American president who truly appreciated what had happened to the Russian people was John F. Kennedy. Hardly surprising, really, since his refusal to tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, which he deemed to be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, had brought him face-to-face with the certainty that casualties numbering in the scores-of-millions would be America’s fate if he and General-Secretary Khrushchev did not step back from the brink of Armageddon.

In his famous 1963 speech to the students of the American University, in Washington DC, Kennedy described the Soviet Union’s experience in terms these young Americans could understand:

“[N]o nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland – a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis was, of course, sparked by the United States decision to install Jupiter nuclear-tipped missiles along the Soviet Union’s border with Turkey – a NATO ally. The quiet withdrawal of those missiles was the quid-pro-quo for Khrushchev’s withdrawal of his Cuban missile batteries.

If the United States President, Joe Biden, has forgotten the lessons of 60 years ago, then the Russian Federation President, Vladimir Putin, has not. Unacceptable in 1962, the stationing of significant military resources (including tactical nuclear weapons) along Russia’s borders remains unacceptable in 2022.

Would the United States tolerate a hostile, Russian-backed, military alliance refusing to rule out inviting Mexico to become a member? Any US President who allowed a nuclear-armed rival to establish a puppet regime just across America’s southern border would be rightly accused of abandoning the Monroe Doctrine, and impeached.

Why, then, can’t President Joe Biden acknowledge that President Putin is asserting no more than President Monroe – and with considerably greater justification?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 January 2022.

Carrying The Torch.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage – and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. 

–  John F. Kennedy

NOTHING IN PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S inaugural address resonated in the hearts of young Americans, and the youth of the world, like the words quoted above. Asking what you can do for your country is all very well, but unless what you’re proposing elicits a sympathetic response from the seat of power; some sign that your motives are understood and your values shared, then your question will be lost on the air. It is from this rejuvenated sense of connection that generational shifts in politics acquire their transformational power.

The big question for 2018, therefore, is: what are the motives and values connecting New Zealand’s 37-year-old prime minister with the generations born after the post-war Baby Boom?

Kennedy was, of course, a member of what some have called “The Greatest Generation”. Raised under the pall of economic depression, and then thrown into the most destructive human conflict of human history, they were nevertheless determined to create the fairest and most prosperous societies the world had ever seen – and in that regard, they’d been spectacularly successful.

The full measure of that success is captured in Kennedy’s proud boast that, thanks to humanity’s technological prowess, “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

The Ancient Greeks would have called this hubris – and they would have been right.

But what of the generation for whom Jacinda now speaks? Untempered by war; undisciplined by the existential stakes attached to global ideological competition; unimpressed with their nation’s colonial heritage; and uncommitted to the universal definition of human rights for which Kennedy pledged his country’s all on that chilly January morning in 1961: for what will the Millennial Generation “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe”?

Well, for a start, they would probably refuse to be bound by such an open-ended and reckless pledge. “Any Price?”, they would respond. “No, not any price. The world has had enough of men who commit the lives of millions to the fulfilment of promises they had no right to make.”

For a great many millennial women, JFK, himself, is a problem. “If #Me Too had been around in 1963,” they ask, “how many women would have come forward to denounce the President?”

No, Jacinda’s millennials are not well disposed to big promises, all-encompassing systems and unyielding ideologies. They have grown up amidst the havoc wrought by a generation far too prone to alternating fits of selfless idealism with bouts of hedonistic excess. That all their Baby Boomer parents’ enthusiasms boiled down to, in the end, was the cold and selfish cynicism of neoliberalism, taught them all they need to know about the malleability of human aspirations. The Labour Leader’s brisk “Let’s Do This” slogan was perfectly pitched to an audience more intent on achieving small dreams than grand visions.

The two great exceptions to this rule are Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. On the face of it, their ability to draw tens-of-thousands of young people into their campaigns seems counter-intuitive. What could these two, ageing, Baby-Boomer males possibly have to say to the Millennial Voter? They had, after all, spent most of their adult lives achieving sweet-bugger-all: two old leaves swirling aimlessly in the stagnant backwaters of left-wing politics.

But that was the whole point. Unlike so many of their contemporaries, Sanders and Corbyn simply refused to surrender the hopes and dreams of their youth. While all around them lay the jettisoned ideals of former comrades, they had kept on singing the hallelujah song.

Sanders and Corbyn were the proof that growing old did not have to mean growing cynical and cruel. The Millennials looked at the career politicians of their own generation and saw far too much evidence of wholesale generational surrender. How had so many twenty-something minds been taken over by so many hundred-year-old ideas? Sanders’ and Corbyn’s bodies may have been old, but their thinking was as young as the kids who cheered them on.

This, then, is the torch which the Prime Minister is being asked to carry into 2018. The inspirational torch of authenticity which dispels the darkness of hypocrisy. If she truly wishes to change their world, Jacinda must first prove to her generation that the world is not changing her.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 2 January 2018.

Blowback.

 “Have a care when fighting monsters – lest ye become a monster yourself.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

 

 

WAS “MONGOOSE” the word that flashed through Bobby Kennedy’s brain when he received the awful news of his brother’s assassination in Dallas? Like JFK, Bobby knew all about the activities of  “Mongoose” – the top-secret CIA operation dedicated to killing the revolutionary Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Was it possible that the ruthless and criminal tactics sanctioned by “Operation Mongoose” had blown back in the Kennedy brothers’ faces?

 

The temptation to join the dots must have been very strong – especially after it became known that the man identified as President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been an active member of “Hands Off Cuba!”, a political organisation dedicated to keeping the Castro regime safe from US intervention?

 

“Blowback” is the name given to the unintended and often disastrous consequences of officially-sanctioned behaviour which crosses the line separating legitimate public policy from unethical, and, all-too-often, criminal behaviour.

 

Sometimes blowback is spectacular: as when Osama Bin Laden, the man the CIA helped to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan, turned his murderous talents against the USA. More often, however, blowback describes the insidious effects of unethical and/or criminal practices on the integrity of the people and institutions who initially gave them sanction.

 

Nietzsche’s oft-quoted aphorism: “Have a care when fighting monsters – lest ye become a monster yourself.”, sums up the dilemma very nicely.

 

When evil strikes, the temptation to “fight fire with fire” is always very strong. Indeed, to suggest anything less is all-too-easily construed as evidence of insufficient zeal, or, even worse, abject weakness. This impetuous inclination to embrace the monstrous methods of one’s enemies is nowhere more pronounced than in the institutions of national defence and security. And those leading the charge will, invariably, be drawn from the most elite and aggressive “special forces” units.

 

The great danger in these circumstances is that policy-makers begin to confuse tactical weaponry with viable strategy.

 

The whole ethos of the special forces is based upon their self-characterisation as the point of the national security spear. Not for them the ponderous deliberation of the innumerable variables that constitute a sensible and morally defensible foreign policy. A spear, and most especially, the point of a spear, is only useful if your prime purpose is to thrust something deadly into your enemy’s body. It’s usefulness as an instrument for debating and determining durable international relationships is considerably less apparent.

 

Unless, of course, the nation’s political and military leadership can be persuaded that careful deliberation and debate, far from being the solution to the problem of national security, should be counted among its principal causes. When terrorists fly airliners into tall buildings, people don’t want debate – they want action. When politicians are being pressed to exact vengeance upon “evildoers”, their first instinct is not to reach for the compendiums of international law, or to consult the history books. Their over-riding priority is to close their fingers around the hilt of a sword.

 

The only problem, of course, is that, to a sword, every problem looks like an exposed belly, or a vulnerable neck. In the eyes of special forces personnel: their intelligence gatherers and the officers who plan their special operations; the only thing that matters is the mission. If the mission is to defeat terrorism, then anything, or anyone, who gets in the way risks being lumped-in with the terrorists.

 

In the context of a working democracy, this sort of professional tunnel-vision can lead to catastrophe. Independent journalists, for example, investigating in-theatre and asking too many awkward questions, are not seen as symbols of the democratic institutions that soldiers are sworn to protect, but as persons capable of compromising the mission. To “neutralise” these actual or potential enemies, special forces will not hesitate to deploy all the weapons of psychological warfare: misinformation, rumour-mongering, false allegations, fake news.

 

And if a particular operation fails? Or something terrible happens in the course of carrying out that operation? Well then, in order to prevent outsiders from interfering or (worst case scenario) cancelling the mission, it may prove necessary to withhold potentially compromising information from unfriendly eyes. That those “unfriendly eyes” might belong to Members of Parliament, Cabinet Ministers, or even the Prime Minister, matters much less than safeguarding the mission from any and all external “threats”.

 

This is how a “sword” thinks. And, perhaps, it would be unreasonable to expect our sword, The NZ Special Air Service, to think in any other way. What we, as a democratic people, cannot allow, however, is for sword-like thinking to take over the mind of the NZ Defence Force, or to deflect our political representatives from the responsibilities and duties of democratic government.

 

Attacking journalists, suppressing evidence of civilian deaths, misleading the civilian power: such behaviour would confirm the serious moral degeneration of our armed forces. The blowback from that could be devastating.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 March 2017.

The Choice of Hercules

The 44th President of the United States of America - Barack Hussein Obama.

IT was moving – how could it not be? To see an African-American standing on the steps of the Capitol Building, fulfilling the dream enunciated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, just two-and-a-quarter miles distant, but forty-six long years ago, was a sight to gladden the heart of all but the most convinced cynics.

And yet … and yet … there was something missing from the inaugural address which Barack Obama delivered to the million-and-a-half Americans who had gathered in Washington’s winter sunshine to bear witness to their new president’s historic triumph.

What was it – this absent, but crucially important, element? It was only after downloading the address from the Internet and reading it through several times that I realised what was missing. Change. Where were the references to change?

In spite of running on the slogan "change you can believe in", in the nearly two-and-a-half thousand words of Obama’s inaugural address the word "change" appears only once. And the context in which the word appears hardly celebrates the power of the human will to transform and/or transcend the circumstances which constrain it. On the contrary, when Obama declares: "For the world has changed, and we must change with it", he is telling his people that when it comes to change they have no choice. A case not so much of "yes we can", as "yes we must".

Why this reluctance to promote the cause of radical change in America – Lord knows if anyone has a mandate to transform the United States of America it is Barack Obama. And who can doubt that a man of his oratorical power could have had that record crowd of citizens chanting "Yes we can!" until the marble halls of the Capitol building echoed with the people’s voice.

The answer, of course, is because a President cannot always have 1.5 million supporters standing ready to endorse his every word. The American republic is a representative democracy like our own, and in practice that means the executive power, when determining policy, is obliged to balance the many and often competing interests of a large and complex society. One can govern neither effectively nor democratically by heeding only your own echo – your opponents have rights too.

And Obama has many opponents – among both the people and the elites – whose opinions and likely reactions need to be carefully weighed and factored into his administration’s decision-making. In this respect the burden Obama has assumed is every bit as great and no less daunting than the one assumed by John F. Kennedy on the Capitol steps 48 years ago.

The man against whose formidable rhetorical skills Obama’s are most frequently compared was sworn in as president at the very peak of the ideological, military, scientific and economic competition between the capitalist and communist blocs. As the leader of the "Free World", Kennedy was required to demonstrate that the USA remained committed to the "revolutionary" ideals of its founders (the words ‘revolution’ and ‘revolutionary’ appear over and over again in his inaugural address) and to reassure the post-colonial regimes of the Third World that America was on their side. Indeed, the bulk of Kennedy’s address is directed not at his domestic, but at his foreign audience. At home the economy was booming, and the great post-war economic and social consensus had never been stronger. The most famous line from Kennedy’s speech: "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" acknowledges this rampant materialism even as it summons America’s youth to the ideals of public service and personal sacrifice.

Obama takes up the office of president at a time of acute economic crisis and ideological uncertainty in America. The great republic’s military power – vast and unchallengeable – has been revealed as an altogether inadequate substitute for intelligent and solidaristic global conduct. At the same moment, the hitherto triumphant dogma of the free market has been revealed as a tawdry exercise in untrammelled individual greed and rampant social irresponsibility. As President, it falls to Obama to lead his people out of this Slough of Despond and back into the light. If his oratory lacked the snap and sparkle of Kennedy’s, it was only because his task was not to prove that the United States was as vital and vigorous as the young man who delivered it, but to bring home to Americans the sombre realities of the crisis their years of heedless narcissism have unleashed upon themselves – and the world.

My old comrade and occasional mentor, Rob Campbell, sensing the magnitude of the task Obama faces, forwarded to me a posting from "The Epicurean Dealmaker" blogsite, based on a classical fable entitled "The Choice of Herakles". Written more than 2,000 years ago by the philosopher Xenophon, the choice which Herakles (or Hercules, to give him his Latin title) must make is between Virtue and Vice. It is a fascinating dialogue, and be it by accident or design it’s ancient themes echo powerfully through Obama’s inaugural address.

Lasting fame and true nobility come not to mortals save through pain and labour. If thou, O Hercules, seekest the gracious gifts of Heaven, thou must remain constant in prayer; if thou wouldst be beloved of thy friends, thou must serve thy friends; if thou desirest to be honoured of the people, thou must benefit the people; if thou art anxious to reap the fruits of the earth, thou must till the earth with labour; and if thou wishest to be strong in body and accomplish heroic deeds, thou must teach thy body to obey thy mind. Yea, all this and more also must thou do.

Thus wrote Xenophon. Now hear Obama:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Obama knows that if he is to carry his people – supporters and opponents – with him, then he must first convince them that the foundational ideals of the American republic have found a safe custodian. More than that, he must instil in them the understanding that it is only by adhering to those ideals that their nation can grow and prosper. That is why the word ‘change’ appears only once in his inaugural address: because there is only one change that matters; only one change Americans can safely believe in – and that is the change they must make in themselves.