Whose Gemstones?

The Paranoid Style in American Politics: Ralph Steadman's illustration captures perfectly The Gemstone File's fear and loathing of corporate America. The National Government's mining policies have reawakened fears, first voiced in the 1980s, that New Zealand politics is being driven by a very similar cabal of secret corporate manipulators.

ON TUESDAY MORNING I got a call from an old friend of mine. "This plan to mine our national parks," he said, "doesn’t it all sound a bit like a real-life version of The Gemstone File?"

I laughed out loud. Because he was right – it does.

The Gemstone File???

"Tell me what it is, dear editors, before I get into it" runs the first sentence of a collection of papers sent to the Otago University Students Association way back in the mid-1970s.

"My dear, it’s heavy. What is its history? It’s an anonymous manifestation mailed from Tucson, Arizona to a fanatical friend of the Fanatic, who insisted it should be published for the good of the North Indies – that radiated land improperly referred to by trivialists as America. What does it mean? It’s mean. It names names, and pushes punches right back where they came from."

Today, in the Age of the Internet, we’d have no difficulty in recognising the conspiratorial style – and dismiss it accordingly. But, back then, in the Age of Nixon and Watergate, it all sounded ominously plausible.

At the heart of The Gemstone File lay its anonymous author’s deep paranoia about corporate America and what he saw as its gangster-politicians. As the file unfolds, the reader is inducted into a vast, parapolitical history of the forty-two years 1932-1974. A history which "exposes" the generally accepted narrative of those four decades as an elaborate fiction concocted to mask and/or explain-away the dark crimes of the men who helped to shape them.

Heady stuff for the student activists and journalists of the mid-70s – not so remarkable now.

But wait … there’s more.

In the early 1980s a new document, now referred to as The Kiwi Gemstone, began circulating in left-wing and trade union circles.

Like its American counterpart, The Kiwi Gemstone fundamentally recast our recent history as a grisly narrative of unseen and unpunished crimes. At the heart of which, among the file’s tangle of intricate and interlocking conspiracies, lay a mighty secret: a discovery which could transform New Zealand:

"18th May 1967: Texas oil billionaire [Name Deleted] using a sophisticated satellite technique to detect global deposits, discovers a huge oil source near Aotearoa in the Great South Basin.

"12th October 1968: [Names Deleted] announce confirmation of new oil source comparable to the Alaskan North Slope – gas reserves estimated at 150 times larger than Kapuni Field."

And now, thirty years after The Kiwi Gemstone’s startling "revelations", we discover that beneath New Zealand’s national parks lie quantities of what Resources Minister, Gerry Brownlee, describes as "Rare Earth Elements", potentially worth billions of dollars.

One of these rare metals, "Neodymium" is used in the manufacture of hybrid cars (there’s a kilogram of Neodymium in every Toyota Prius, for example). Other "Rare Earths" feature in the production of high-temperature superconductors – a technology pioneered by Kiwi engineers.

As my old friend put it to me: "So the Rare Earths could be central to a New Zealand clean technology industry that could turn this country completely around, the ‘Nokia’ we’ve been looking for, or, alternatively, we could export them to the USA so that they don't have to go cap-in-hand to China. What will National do? What Comalco [style] deal are they about to sign?"

Hence, his reference to The Gemstone File.

It's an apt comparison, because beneath the wild conspiratorial fiction that fills both the American and Kiwi versions of Gemstone, there lies a common, indisputable, truth. The history of the past eighty years: the slow but relentless appropriation of public goods for private profit; has been one vast swindle. And larceny on such a scale does require "gangster politicians": ruthless men dedicated to keeping the public in the dark, and willing to destroy anyone who threatens their conspiracies with the "disinfectant of sunlight".

"To mine, or not to mine?" That will be the question New Zealand debates between now and 3 May.

But if we do decide to find out what lies beneath our national parks, we should also take care to decide something else: "Cui bono?" – Who benefits?

Us, or Them?

Because, in the words of The Gemstone File:

"If this planet’s a corporation – it’s a corpse."

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 26 March 2010.

Holding the Line

A Bully Pulpit: Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, makes it on to the BBC's "Question Time" programme despite the best efforts of the British Left to ensure the state broadcaster provided "No Platform for Fascists".

THERE’S A SPECIAL FRISSON that runs through even the most conservative citizens when they see a police line buckle and break. The image of authority giving way, quite literally, before public pressure stirs people in ways they struggle to explain. Perhaps it’s the upwelling of deep memories from the historical past – proof that nine-out-of-ten of us are descended from serfs.

A police line outside the headquarters of the BBC in London buckled and broke last week. The flimsy human-chain of constables guarding the "Beeb’s" surprisingly forbidding gates collapsed beneath the weight of hundreds of angry anti-fascist protesters. Around twenty-five of their number actually made it into the building, along the corridors, and up to the very doors of the studio where Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party (BNP) was appearing on the BBC’s "Question Time" programme.

It was "Question Time’s" decision to offer a "platform" for Griffin and his party, that ignited the protesters’ rage. In the eyes of the British Left, allowing Griffin to appear was tantamount to giving Adolf Hitler access to a vast television audience.

Adding to their fury was the decision of the Labour Government’s Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, to appear alongside Griffin. By taking part in the programme, they said, Labour was in breach of the British Left’s informal agreement that there should be "No Platform for Fascists". Sharing the political stage with the BNP, they argued, was the surest way of giving it the legitimacy it craved, and which, as the enemy of tolerance and democracy, it did not deserve.

Watching the programme, it was hard to understand why the protesters bothered. The BBC had assembled a studio audience that appeared to be unanimous in its detestation of Griffin and the BNP. Questioner after questioner delivered stinging criticisms of the party and its leader – criticisms which were picked up and reinforced by the show’s host, David Dimbleby.

Griffin acquitted himself with surprising aplomb in this hostile environment. Responding to criticisms of the BNP’s anti-immigration policies – designed, he said, to protect "indigenous Britons" – Griffin challenged Straw to go to New Zealand and tell a Maori he was not "indigenous". Colour, said the BNP leader, was irrelevant: "We are the aborigines here".

Though the studio audience clearly rejected the BNP’s stance on immigration, and warmly applauded all those who defended the government’s "multicultural" policies, Griffin must have known that in the world beyond the television studio his words were being received very differently.

As the BBC’s own Europe editor Gavin Hewitt discovered during his 2006 foray into the London borough of Dagenham (a BNP stronghold) ordinary, deeply-disillusioned, white working-class voters make up the bulk of the party’s electoral base.

"The mood of the club was one of sullen resentment", recalled Hewitt. "The neighbourhood around them was changing rapidly. Their known world was gone. I remember one of them had got hold of the Labour manifesto from 1997. There was only a brief reference to immigration but the man read out the words ‘every country must have firm control over immigration and Britain is no exception’. They felt betrayed and voiceless. In their view Labour had not been straight and no-one had asked them whether they wanted a sharp rise in immigration."

Like the French Communist Party, whose formerly rock-solid working-class supporters from the inner suburbs of France’s great cities abandoned Marxism for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s xenophobic nationalism in the 1990s, the British Labour Party is paying the inevitable price for its embourgeoisment.

The multicultural dreams of the middle-class idealists who over-ran the mainstream Left in the 1970s and 80s, have turned into the racially and culturally-charged nightmares of the economically-stressed suburbs and towns in which desperate immigrant communities inevitably took root and grew.

Rightly or wrongly, working-class Frenchman and Englishmen regard the loss of their well-paying jobs, the rapid rise in immigration, and the relentless advance of economic globalisation as being all of a piece. That "their" parties – the CPF, Labour – had participated in governments responsible for the imposition of all three "evils" is impossible for many of them to forget – or forgive.

Pakeha New Zealanders’ experience of mass immigration has been very different. Their country’s colonial history precluded any claim to indigeneity, and the careful timing of successive waves of post-war immigration meant that there was little direct economic competition between themselves and the rural Maori and Pasifika immigrants who picked up the low-paid jobs Pakeha workers had left behind them.

With the brief but unpleasant exception of the "dawn-raids" period of the late-1970s, such "immigration politics" as did exist in the New Zealand was fuelled largely by the competition for low-skilled jobs between the urbanised Maori and immigrant Pasifika communities – not Whites and Browns.

That all changed in the 1990s with the very sudden and rapid influx of immigrants from China, Taiwan and the Indian sub-continent. Rather than compete directly with the unskilled and semi-skilled Maori and Pasifika communities, the so-called "Asian Invasion" collided head-on with the Pakeha middle-class.

Possessing substantial capital reserves, and high levels of professional and commercial skill, immigrants from Asia swiftly colonised large tracts of Pakeha suburbia and made significant inroads into the property and services sector of the economy. Thousands of young Asians purchased places in New Zealand’s secondary schools and universities. In Auckland particularly, Asian immigration has wrought an economic, demographic and electoral transformation.

While the New Zealand Labour Party had been highly successful in incorporating the rural Maori migrants of the 1950s and 60s and the Pasifika immigrants of the 1970s and 80s into its predominantly working-class base, it was the National Party which proved to be the more adept at drawing the economically self-reliant Asian immigrants – especially the ethnic Chinese – into its political orbit. With the latter’s numbers threatening to eclipse those of the indigenous Maori by 2025, a whole set of new racial, cultural and ideological calculations must now be made.

New Zealand’s equivalent of the BNP, NZ First, and our own Nick Griffin, Winston Peters, may be temporarily becalmed, electorally, but the chances of both reclaiming their roles as the prime oppositional voices against Asian immigration cannot be discounted. With the nation rapidly devolving into an economically-marginalised Maori/Pasifika underclass; an economically-compressed Pakeha middle class; and an economically-dominant Pakeha-Iwi-Asian upper class – who knows how much longer New Zealand’s multiculturalists will be able to hold the line?

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 29th of October 2009.

Seventies Pessimism (Fragment of a letter from December 1977)

LATE Thursday evening, approaching midnight, though Fergusson Drive still crowded with cars. This island never sleeps. Full moon giving the sky an unnatural brightness. Not a breath of wind.

This street on the right side of the road. Heretaunga, twenty miles out of Wellington. Old, established, oozing money and self-satisfaction. Home of businessmen industrialists and their whores, the lawyers and accountants.

Been here now for over a month. A lonely bird in a gilded cage. Miss the old town and the faces in it. Aching for A.

Writing to you now. Doesn’t do to neglect old friends. Caught up in the ego-race last year – kinda lost touch. We all make mistakes.

Your ideas are old-fashioned, definitely not hep, but sorta admirable in the burned out remains of our culture. Time for a prophet, no doubt. Someone to throw the money-changers out of the temple. Sure. But whose got that sort of magic up his sleeve these days?

We are dealing with forces beyond our comprehension.

The Lord of the Night has spread his cloak wide and the Sun itself is on the defensive. Black holes sucking the light out of the universe. The Powers of Darkness definitely on the offensive. Arab/Japanese cloak-and-dagger deals behind closed doors. Baader-Meinhoff unleashing fire and slaughter, even as they die.

Bad magic W. Powerful spells.

The Wizard must know – but what are we to do?

Back in the dark days of 1940 the witches and wizards of England met in the New Forest and raised the Cone of Power to repel the German invaders. The spell succeeded, but in casting it the Keepers of the Power destroyed themselves.

For, you see, there is no contest between Good and Evil. Evil has all the cards in his hands. To throw back the Nazis, English wizardry had to use its entire strength. Now the power of England is broken. Those that protected and fed the English flame for so long are spent, and the continent of Europe has finally retrieved her wayward islanders. Long live the EEC and German social-democracy!

You catch glimpses of it sometimes. The Plan. Unfolding itself with all the inevitably of Death, the Grim Reaper, striding heaven-high between clouds, and laughing like a thunder-storm.

On the journey North I travelled by night across the Canterbury Plains. And all along the spine of the island, flashing off the faces of the Alps, burned wildfire - leaping and flickering from mountain-top to mountain-top, shattering the darkness in glaring white bursts.

Fantastic!

Sent me back to my childhood in North Otago. Past and present running together. A living continuum.

And me, watching this awesome display, my nose pressed to the window of a Datsun 120Y. (Japanese car, Arab oil!) On my way North in the middle of the night. Heading for what is now my past. Towards this letter which will travel the path I followed backwards to you.

All linked W.

Everything.

Nothing done in isolation.

We’re all assigned our role. All play our parts.

And the Plan unfolds.