“No Debate!” Means No Democracy.

To The Lamp-Post With Them! Revolutionaries, along with the counter-revolutionaries they inevitably call into existence, are not disposed to engage in rational political discussion with their opponents. Their objective is not to change minds, but to crush bodies. Tragically, those who rule out the possibility of debate, almost always end up ruling out the possibility of democracy as well.

WHAT DOES A POLICY of “No Debate!” produce? What is the nature of the politics that emerges from such a context? When at least one side of a contentious issue acknowledges absolutely nothing in the arguments of its opponents that is worthy of any other response but vituperation and violence – what happens?

As is so often the case, the Weimar Republic offers us some grim lessons. Its very name tells a story. Born in 1918 amidst the chaos that followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the recently proclaimed republic drew up its new constitution in the ancient Thuringian city of Weimar. Why? Because in the German capital, Berlin, running street battles between the Left and the Right made it an unsuitable locale for rational debate.

Extremism also stalked the streets of Bavaria’s largest city, Munich. Students of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich will recognise Munich as the “home” of National Socialism: the city where the Nazi Party’s “Brownshirts” brawled in the beerhalls and roughed up socialists in the streets. Less understood, however, are the political dynamics that made the formation of the Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers) necessary.

Before it became a bastion of the extreme German Right, Munich had, briefly, been in the hands of the extreme German Left. The city was polarised in ways most New Zealanders living in the twenty-first century would struggle to imagine. Those of us old enough to remember the tensions of the 1981 Springbok Tour might have some inkling but, given that no one was killed in those disturbances, not enough. In short, Munich was a city in which “No Debate!” was the rule – on both sides of the barricades.

It was in response to the standard communist tactic of breaking-up the meetings of their ideological opponents that Hitler and his right-hand man, Ernst Rohm (a former soldier and military adventurer with close ties to the upper echelons of the German Army) took steps to recruit young war veterans to guard Nazi venues and beat-off left-wing attackers. (Their trade-mark brown shirts were purchased as a job-lot by Rohm when Germany, having lost its African colonies, found itself in possession of a warehouse full of useless colonial uniforms.)

As the Nazi Party grew in strength, and the Stormtroopers in number, the tables were turned on Munich’s left-wing extremists. Now it was the Brownshirts who were breaking-up the meetings of communists and social-democrats, or gathering outside left-wing venues to menace and harass anyone foolhardy enough to attempt entry. The extreme Left, which had pioneered the “No Debate!” tactic against “reactionaries”, now found their earlier disruptions repaid, with interest, by the pistol-packing bully-boys of the extreme Right.

Weimar’s judgement on the extremist policy of permitting “No Debate!” with ideological opponents is a harsh one. It drives political groups further and further apart, and makes any kind of resolution of political differences impossible. Deployed against one side, it will be taken up with vengeful alacrity by the other. Political polarisation deepens, and the civil political discourse upon which democracy depends retreats ever further from the public square. Moreover, as the fate of the Weimar Republic makes tragically clear: what the Left starts, the Right is happy to finish.

And the point of this history lesson is – what?

Simply, that the current policy of trans-gender activists to countenance “No Debate!” with feminists apprehensive about how the proposed amendments to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act might impact on the rights of women and girls, has generated an astonishing level of political vituperation – up to and including repeated efforts to deny their opponents both the freedom of expression and the freedom to assemble peacefully.

Just how vicious this “No Debate” fight has become was illustrated when the Otago Daily Times published an advertisement submitted by the Stand Up For Women group. By agreeing to carry SUFW’s message – the dictionary definition of “woman” – the newspaper exposed itself to bitter and sustained attack from trans-gender activists on social media. By allowing their enemies (for that is how “trans-exclusionary” feminists are perceived) to define the meaning of woman, the ODT was accused of taking up position on the wrong side of history.

By upholding freedom of speech and facilitating civil democratic debate, however, the ODT has shown its understanding of history’s “wrong side” to be both deeper and stronger than its critics’.

This essay was originally published in the Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 September 2021.

The Cost Of Compromise.

Not Brownshirts, Greenshirts: If you believe yourself to be in the midst of an existential struggle; and that every day which fails to bring you closer to absolute victory brings you one day closer to absolute defeat; then compromise isn’t just ill-advised, it’s morally indefensible. The goal must be power. Not power in combination with others, but power alone. Power that can be wielded without reference to anybody else. Absolute victory – the salvation of the biosphere – can only be secured by winning absolute power.

IF THE GREENS are to survive 19 September, they’ll need to draw inspiration from – of all people – the Nazis. Preposterous? Only if you refuse to understand that both the national-socialist and green movements have at their core an unwavering conviction that if they fail, then everything they hold dear will be lost. What separates the Greens from the Nazis is, of course, what they hold dear. Hitler and his followers were fighting for a myth – the German volk. The Greens are fighting for the survival of a very real and very vulnerable biosphere.

But what sort of inspiration could possibly be drawn from the political tactics of the most evil political party in human history?

The answer can be summed-up in a single word: compromise. If you believe yourself to be in the midst of an existential struggle; and that every day which fails to bring you closer to absolute victory brings you one day closer to absolute defeat; then compromise isn’t just ill-advised, it’s morally indefensible. The goal must be power. Not power in combination with others, but power alone. Power that can be wielded without reference to anybody else. Absolute victory – the salvation of the biosphere – can only be secured by winning absolute power.

This was Adolf Hitler’s crucial insight. He looked at the Weimar Republic, with its pure system of proportional representation, its multitude of competing parties, its fragile and ineffectual coalitions, and he bet his entire movement on the German electorate growing increasingly impatient with the political paralysis in Berlin. For a few years, from the mid-1920s until the onset of the Great Depression in late-1929, it looked as though he would lose his bet. But the collapse of the German economy, the descent of millions into poverty and despair, and the complete failure of “democratic” politics to meet the crisis, saw the Nazi’s share of the vote skyrocket.

Hitler’s contemporaries expected him to do what any other party leader would do in the face of such unanticipated electoral success: cut a deal. But the Nazi leader wasn’t interested in deals. Why would he enter into a coalition with the very parties who had proved themselves so incapable of doing anything to alleviate Germany’s suffering? Openly contemptuous of his electoral rivals, he didn’t promise to work with them, he promised to abolish them. Only one party, he said, could rescue Germany: the National Socialist German Workers Party. It would govern alone, or it would not govern at all.

As conditions in Germany grew steadily worse, and as the political centre crumbled and fell apart, it became clearer and clearer to the state bureaucracy, the army and the large capitalists, that if the Nazis were not given what they wanted, then an increasingly desperate German electorate would shift its support to the Communist Party. Rather than make a red revolution inevitable, the powers-that-be made a brown revolution possible. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Within six months his National Socialists were wielding absolute power. It was given to them to save Germany, but tragically they came close to destroying it. The human cost of Nazism’s fanatical pursuit of racial purity was colossal and its ultimate failure inevitable. Why? Because the German volk wasn’t real.

But anthropogenic global warming – climate change – is very real. And every day that is lost to compromise and drift does indeed bring global ecological catastrophe closer. Whether they are willing to admit it or not, everything human-beings hold dear is at risk of being overwhelmed by a disaster greater than any which has hitherto confronted human civilisation. To avert this impending global tragedy an international political movement is required. A global movement which absolutely refuses to compromise with the political, bureaucratic and corporate entities whose failure to take decisive action to combat climate change imperils human survival – along with that of just about every other life form on the planet.

The leaders of green parties around the world have largely chosen to turn their faces from this most urgent of political priorities. Rather than take a bet on the peoples of the world growing increasingly willing to throw their support behind an uncompromising international movement dedicated to radically reducing greenhouse emissions and implementing a “Green New Deal” to redirect the world economy away from fossil fuels and exploitative industrial production, these green leaders have opted to “do a deal”. They have joined hands with the very people who created the crisis and who have consistently declined to end it.

New Zealand’s Green Party has proved to be no exception in this respect. Its co-leader, James Shaw, not only refuses to bet on the people coming round to the need for urgent and ruthless change, but he has also fetishized “compromise” to the point where any attempt to draw a line in the sand is met with a rolling of eyes and statements like:

“Finding the path of least resistance. There’s that horrendous phrase about politics being the art of the possible, which can be read two ways.

“You can do things, it’s a really expansive notion. And there are some moments where we have changed things.

“And then there are others where you can only do what is possible. Maybe moving from naivety to experience is being able to live in both those worlds at the same time.”

Unfortunately for Shaw, humanity has only one world to live in, and it is running out of time. As the climate crisis deepens, and the failure of democratic politics to adequately address the need for radical change opens the way for more uncompromising parties, the politicians who continue to throw in their lot with the problem, rather than the solution, will be swept aside. For Shaw and his increasingly irresolute colleagues the electoral broom is approaching with unnerving speed.

Over the past three years, all the voters have received from the New Zealand Greens are pallid non-solutions. These, the fruit of the party’s craven unwillingness to call Labour and NZ First’s bluff, have been justified as the best outcomes available from a dispiriting range of “realistic” options. Together, they have brought the Greens’ nothing but a steadily declining share of the Party Vote. Political “realism” is Labour’s brand. If all they are offered in September is a choice between compromises of ever-decreasing effectiveness, then many Green supporters may elect to make no choice at all.

The only virtue to which the Nazis may lay claim is their willingness to risk everything for the opportunity to put their ideas to the test. Their unwillingness to compromise with reason cost humanity dearly. How supremely tragic (and ironic) it will be if the Greens’ willingness to compromise with greed and selfishness ends up costing humanity everything it’s got.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 June 2020.

The Sixteenth Point

Small Business Friendly: The manifesto of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) or "Nazis" promised fulsome state support for the small businessperson against the depredations of monopoly capitalism. Department stores, in particular, were singled out. Had they existed at the time, supermarkets would undoubtedly have been similarly targeted for their sins against the "little guys".

IT WAS THE SIXTEENTH POINT of the Nazi Party’s 25-point programme. Adolf Hitler and his comrades, in the interests of creating and conserving a “healthy middle class”, demanded “the immediate communalisation of the great warehouses” [today we’d call them department stores] “and their being leased at low cost to small firms”. Nor was the Nazi Party’s concern for the survival of small businesses limited to the forcible break-up of their largest competitors. Point 16 of the party programme also insisted that “the utmost consideration” be given to all small firms “in contracts with the State, county and municipality.”

 

All of which goes to show how mistaken Shane Jones was in his choice of historical metaphors when he described New Zealand’s supermarkets as: “the brown-shirts of the food industry”. There can be little doubt that had supermarkets existed in Weimar Germany, Hitler’s sturmabteilung (brown-shirts) would have been found on the outside picketing, not on the inside panicking.

 

Which is not to say that Mr Jones’ extraordinary attack on Progressive Enterprises is evidence of anything other than inspirationally populist political instincts. His superbly crafted attack, delivered under parliamentary privilege during last Wednesday’s “General Debate”, certainly ticked all the populist boxes.

 

First, it tugged at our nationalist heart-strings by pitting ruthless Australian supermarket owners against hard-pressed Kiwi suppliers. New Zealanders were already smarting from the two largest Australian supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, decision to remove New Zealand products from their shelves as part of the “Buy Australian” campaign.

 

Mr Jones sensed that for his Kiwi audience this was just one more poke in the eye with a sharp stick. One more undeserved insult to add to all the others we’ve copped from our cobbers across the ditch.

 

No vote. No superannuation. No dole. Yeah, cheers mate!

 

And now we hear that these Aussie bastards are negotiating “robustly” with acutely vulnerable Kiwi battlers. To hell with that!

 

Second, Mr Jones’s speech was directed at the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) sector. The place where so many of Labour’s erstwhile working-class voters have ended up. There’s upwards of quarter-of-a-million going concerns in New Zealand and more than four-fifths of these are small-to-medium. Many are family-based businesses. Others owe their existence to a fat redundancy cheque and the working man’s long-cherished dream of becoming his own boss. All of them are fragile economic entities. None of them enjoy being squeezed.

 

But squeezed they have been – ever since the consolidation of capitalism in the fourth quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The period 1875-1900 was the age of Carnegie and Rockefeller in the United States; the age of octopus-like monopolies and price-fixing trusts; the age of cut-throat competition and conspicuous consumption; the age of capitalist “Robber Barons”. It was not the age of the small-to-medium business owner. As capitalism got bigger, being the owner of a small business got harder.

 

Hitler’s contempt for this sort of capitalism is clearly expressed in the pages of his autobiography, Mein Kampf:

 

“The various nations began to be more and more like private citizens who cut the ground from under one another’s feet, stealing each other’s customers and orders, trying in every way to get ahead of one another, and staging this whole act amid a hue and cry as loud as it is harmless.

 

This development seemed not only to endure but was expected in time (as was universally recommended) to remodel the whole world into one big department store in whose vestibules the busts of the shrewdest profiteers and the most lamblike administrative officials would be garnered for all eternity.”

 

That the Nazi leader’s preference was to remodel the whole world into one boundless slaughterhouse was, of course, the measure of his madness. But the passage quoted above does demonstrate the ease with which nationalist demagogues like Hitler could whip up animosity against big business. Nor should we forget how appealing was the vision they presented of the volksgemeinschaft – the people’s community. In a world from which all class distinctions had been eliminated and where the people’s welfare had become the greatest good, the depredations of big business would have no place.

 

That even as they prattled this pretty fairy tale to the German masses, the Nazis were accepting huge donations from some of Germany’s largest and most ruthless capitalist enterprises, indicates the futility of trying to halt the relentless advance of capitalism grown large.

 

Mr Jones undoubtedly struck a nerve with his attack upon Progressive Enterprises. But is he really suggesting that our supermarkets cease securing the lowest possible prices for their customers? Is he willing to promise their suppliers a minimum price for the produce on offer – effectively a pledge to subsidise the supermarkets’ profitability?

 

It is never wise to expose the blood on capitalism’s teeth and claws unless you are equally willing to pull them out.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 18 February 2014.