What The State Keeps Hidden.

You Don’t Want To Know: In the end, our collective aversion to disreputable realities is what all states rely upon. Loyalty and obedience are guaranteed not by what the state reveals to us, but by what its servants keep hidden.

AMONG THE MANY QUESTIONS raised by the Abuse in Care inquiry is the cruel nature of the state’s responses. Among the worst examples of this official cruelty is the way in which, over many years, Crown Law impeded the timely compensation of victims. There is something deeply troubling about the state’s legal division, with its effectively inexhaustible resources (at least when compared to those available to the victims of abuse and their legal representatives) waging a war of financial attrition against these extraordinarily vulnerable citizens. What is it that makes public servants so determined to prevent the state from acknowledging liability for even its most egregious sins? Why is the state so vicious in its own defence?

The best place to start looking for answers is in the psychological realm of human solidarity and institutional pride. One has only to think of military units and the esprit de corps so crucial to their effectiveness. In a social environment where loyalty is identified as the supreme virtue, anything threatening that loyalty must be confronted and destroyed. All other virtues, such as justice, accountability and truth-telling, are deemed to be of secondary importance. Indeed, if the choice is between defending the unit and responding to one or more of these secondary considerations, then loyalty to the unit will always win.

Since almost every state traces its origins to bodies of armed men, it is hardly to be wondered at that state institutions place a similar premium on institutional loyalty. No less than an effective military unit, or army, the state is acutely vulnerable to anything likely to undermine its servants’ morale. Admitting to error, or, worse still, to criminal behaviour, raises fears that the loyalty of the state’s subjects/citizens will be undermined.

A state that admits to making one mistake raises instantly the possibility that it has made others. Its decisions, formerly absolute and unchallengeable, come to be seen as tentative, subject to revision, or even reversal. Such a state will find it increasingly difficult to impose its will. Certainly, it will lose the ability to inspire fear. And a state that is not feared runs a palpable risk of not being obeyed.

Paradoxically, it is the state’s power to enforce decisions that are in clear violation of both reason and morality that inspires the most fear in the minds of its subjects/citizens. The message conveyed is one of savagery and unresponsiveness. Like James Cameron’s Terminator: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop” – until it has utterly crushed its challenger/s.

That this is how the New Zealand state sees itself, or, at least, used to see itself, is revealed with particular clarity in the Arthur Allan Thomas case. No matter how much new evidence was presented; no matter how compelling the arguments in favour of Thomas’s acquittal, the Court of Appeal repeatedly upheld his convictions. Undaunted by the public’s outrage at the Court’s apparent willingness to uphold an obvious injustice, the Judiciary’s most senior representatives made it clear that they would not be persuaded to set Thomas free. The Court of Appeal simply could not be seen to have got it wrong.

To free Thomas, one part of the state was ultimately required to wage war upon another. The Executive, in the form of New Zealand’s pugnacious Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, simply outmanoeuvred the Judiciary by convening a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Thomas conviction. Significantly, this was not headed by a member of the New Zealand Judiciary, but by an Australian judge known for his independence of mind.

No longer protected by the courts, furious members of the New Zealand Police (which did not emerge well from the Inquiry) would regularly turn up to the Royal Commission’s hearings and hurl abuse at the Aussie interloper. The cops never did accept their culpability in the false conviction and imprisonment of Thomas, and the Court of Appeal never forgave Muldoon for effectively over-ruling its judgements. Second-guessing the New Zealand state is not a game for the faint-hearted!

But, if the injustices meted out to Arthur Allan Thomas (as well as, twenty years later, Peter Ellis) left an abiding unease in the public’s mind about the trustworthiness of its justice system, then its response to any confirmation that thousands of young New Zealanders had been terribly abused whilst in the custody and under the supervision of the New Zealand state would presumably be several orders of magnitude greater than simple “unease”. No rational citizen could ever again repose the slightest trust in the wisdom and benevolence of state institutions.

Small wonder then that so much was done for so long to prevent the awful truth about abuse in care from penetrating the public’s consciousness. The resistance of Crown Law, no matter how outrageous, was, in purely legal terms, entirely understandable. To acknowledge the state’s responsibility for decades of abusive behaviour would carry the not insignificant risk of leaving taxpayers liable for compensation amounting to billions of dollars. Drawing out the process to the maximum extent possible may not have been in the least bit compassionate – or just – but it did present itself as the most effective way of reducing the state’s liability. While the victims of its failings are all-too-mortal, the state is not. Barring bloody revolution and/or defeat in war, the state is immortal.

The other factor which the state can count on in matters such as the Abuse in Care inquiry is the degree to which so many of its citizens identify themselves with its interests. Imperfect though it may be, New Zealand’s democratic system of government makes it relatively easy for the state to present itself as the servant of the people it purportedly serves.

Like the soldiers of a regiment, many New Zealand citizens offer their country an inexhaustible quantum of loyalty. Like the regimental colours, New Zealand’s flag is seen by patriots as quasi-sacred. Whistle-blowers seeking to besmirch the honour of the nation for which it stands should expect no mercy.

Those dumfounded by the quietude of the New Zealand public’s response to the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care shouldn’t be. Quite apart from the fact that the Inquiry’s most disturbing evidence is buried away in the millions of words printed in the Report’s sixteen volumes, the half-century inquired into (1950-1999) is now at least a quarter-of-a-century removed from the New Zealand of today. That said, at some place, buried deep in the Kiwi Collective Conscience, lies the realisation that abuse on such a scale couldn’t have happened had generations of New Zealanders not quietly decided to look the other way.

In the end, this collective aversion to disreputable realities is what all states rely upon. It is not what the state reveals to us that guarantees our loyalty and obedience, it is what its servants keep hidden.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Thursday, 8 August 2024.

Default Settings.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The institutionalised had few friends and no respite from the abuse that persisted, unreported and unpunished. Behind the barbed wire and inside the locked wards, the hunger of those who feed on pain and violence continued to be sated.

LET IT BE KNOWN that appalling behaviour will not be prevented, or punished, by the authorities, and watch it flourish.

To confirm this grim assertion, one has only to consider the example of the former Yugoslavia. Families who had lived next to one another for decades, whose children had played together, grown together, married one another, suddenly found themselves sucked into a maelstrom of horrific communal violence. Overnight, a murderous, state-sanctioned nationalism began portraying one’s neighbours as deadly enemies, whose destruction, far from being punished, would be rewarded. How quickly former friends became rapists, torturers and murderers was chilling.

The same terrifying spectacle unfolded in Rwanda.

That these examples point to a terrible hunger for pain and violence lodged deep in the human psyche is profoundly confronting.

That these destructive urges do not tear our society to pieces cannot be wholly explained by the ordinary citizen’s fear of retribution. From an early age we are schooled in the virtues of kindness and consideration. These, we are assured, are the default-settings of humankind, and those who behave otherwise are portrayed as dangerous deviations from the norm.

That unkind, often brutal, treatment is meted out to our fellow citizens by persons we regard as perfectly normal, is explained by the recipients’ actual or alleged propensity to harm the communities in which they live. Convince people that any given individual, or group, constitutes an existential threat to their wellbeing, and you can do pretty-much anything you want to them – and not be punished for it.

The multiple reports of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care reveal in excruciating detail how this stigmatising of individuals and groups played out in New Zealand between 1950 and 1999. Our empathy for the victims of the policies and practices of that half-century is so strong that it has left us curiously uninterested in identifying what it was that permitted so much pain and violence to be inflicted on so many mostly young New Zealanders for so long.

The brutally straightforward explanation for those 50 years of abuse is that, for at least the 50 years that preceded 1950, persons categorised as: “alcoholics, imbeciles, illegitimate children (and their mothers), prostitutes, criminals, the feeble-minded, lunatics, epileptics, deaf-mutes, the unemployable, the tubercular, the immoral (e.g. homosexuals), anyone from another race” were branded by credible authority figures – senior public servants, academic experts, medical professionals, political leaders – as threats to the moral, social and racial “hygiene” of the nation.

To safeguard the nation’s genetic health, argued the promoters of the new “science” of Eugenics, “unfit” and/or “defective” individuals must be isolated from the rest of the population in closed institutions. The most extreme eugenicists went further. Those declared “unfit” in the United States and Sweden were subjected to forced sterilisation. In 1928, New Zealand eugenicists were poised to do the same, but, to their eternal credit, the parliamentarians of the time refused to oblige them.

Nowhere did the eugenic ideology take firmer hold than in Nazi Germany, where tens-of-thousands of “useless mouths” were murdered with the blessing of the state and its professional servants.

The horrors perpetrated in the name of social and racial “hygiene” by the Nazis turned Eugenics into a dirty word, but the ideas at its core – that the different were dangerous – lingered on in the state institutions erected in its name.

And it wasn’t just the medical superintendents and senior bureaucrats who continued to treat the different as dangerous, the overwhelming majority of “normal” New Zealanders concurred. Out of sight and out of mind, the institutionalised had few friends and no respite from the abuse that persisted, unreported and unpunished. Behind the barbed wire and inside the locked wards, the hunger of those who feed on pain and violence continued to be sated.

It is estimated that upwards of 200,000 young New Zealanders were abused in institutional settings during the second half of the twentieth century. Such massive and prolonged mistreatment cannot be perpetrated, or successfully hidden, unless its victims are first reduced to something less-than-human.

In Yugoslavia and Rwanda that dehumanisation was achieved by making them enemies of the nation, of the tribe. In New Zealand, by presenting them as a challenge to our tragically narrow definition of “normality”.

Leaving us with just two questions: What appalling behaviour goes unpunished today? And against whom?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 August 2024.

The Why And The How Of Abuse In Care.

Please Explain: Victims of abuse in care are now, at last, receiving recognition, apologies and compensation, but have they been given a credible explanation as to why their suffering was inflicted, and how it was able to go on for so long?

READING THE ABUSE IN CARE REPORTS, two questions requiring clear and compelling answers remain unanswered: Why? and How? Why were so many children and young people abused in such awful ways? How was it possible for so much and such appalling abuse to continue unchecked for so long? Without satisfactory responses to these two critical questions, the chances of history repeating itself must remain unacceptably high. For some reason, however, the Why and How of Abuse in Care were not made the prime focus of the Royal Commission’s investigations. Its reports tell us the Who, When, Where and What of this horror story, but, those two key questions, Why? and How?, are not adequately addressed.

This failure is, in part, explained by the time period under examination – 1950-1999. Narrowing the Inquiry’s scope to the second half of the twentieth century made it possible for the dominant ideologies relating to physical and mental disability, social deviance, and race, the ideologies that drove official and institutional policy-making for most of the 100 years between 1850 and 1950, to escape the Royal Commission’s scrutiny.

At the heart of the world view that gripped the imaginations of Western intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century was Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution – summarised as the ‘survival of the fittest’. In an unlikely alliance, not unfamiliar to those living in the twenty-first century, captains of industry and “progressive” social-reformers, alike, observed the condition of contemporary humanity and arrived at strikingly similar conclusions. Evolution, it seemed, was in urgent need of a helping hand. It was Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton, who founded what was very soon feted as “Eugenics” – the new “science” dedicated to the systematically improving the human species.

Anti-democratic, elitist and profoundly authoritarian, Eugenics proceeded from the assumption that humanistic civilisation was, paradoxically, undermining itself by defying Darwin’s immutable law of the survival of the fittest and allowing the physically and morally “defective” to survive and procreate. Left unchecked, the survival of this inferior human stock would very quickly overwhelm and dilute the effectiveness of the superior human material upon which all successful civilisations depend. In short: by being kind to “unfit” human individuals, soft-hearted humanists were being cruel to the collective human species.

The ease with which social reformers, generally, and socialists, in particular, succumbed to the eugenicists’ argument that a kind future requires a cruel present is disconcerting. Preventing the reproduction of the “unfit” may leave us appalled, but at the turn of the nineteenth century the old excuse about the end justifying the means came with a scientific seal of approval.

It is at this historical juncture that New Zealand enters the story. Since the election of the Liberal Government in 1890, this country had earned the reputation of being the “social laboratory of the world”. Reformers around the world thrilled to the spectacle of a society in which socialists and progressives seemed to be in charge. Entirely predictably, eugenic science was forcefully espoused by New Zealand institutions as diverse as Sir Truby King’s Plunket Society and the Women’s Division of the Farmers Union.

As Hilary Stace, writing for the New Zealand Catholic Bioethics Centre, puts it in her essay “Eugenics in New Zealand”:

“The ‘unfit’ encompassed a whole range of ‘other’ including the following groups described in the language of the time: alcoholics, imbeciles, illegitimate children (and their mothers), prostitutes, criminals, the feeble-minded, lunatics, epileptics, deaf-mutes, the unemployable, the tubercular, the immoral (e.g. homosexuals), anyone from another race, those with incurable diseases such as Syphilis or tuberculosis, and even ‘mouth-breathers’.”

In “God’s Own Country” these categories had very few defenders. Many hoped that the settlement of New Zealand would produce a race of “Better Britons”. In a new country, these settlers hoped to perfect a new kind of human-being. Sir Truby King introduced his celebrated child-rearing regimen by declaring that: “The destiny of the race is in the hands of the mothers.” He was not referring to people of colour!

Always, at the heart of every eugenics project, lay the call for a comprehensive winnowing-out of the species’ “unfit” breeding-stock. Debate raged about how this could best be accomplished. Mandatory sterilisation was favoured by many eugenicists, and widely practiced in the United States of the 1920s and 30s. The compulsory sterilisation of “unfit” New Zealanders was advanced forcefully in 1928, but Parliament balked at legislating it into existence. The politicians of social-democratic Sweden were not so squeamish. Their eugenics programme, launched in the 1930s, was only brought to a close in the 1970s.

Those who think that selective human breeding and the compulsory “euthanasia” of “useless mouths” were crimes against humanity committed exclusively by Germany’s National-Socialist regime during the 1930s and 40s, should think again. The Nazi’s drew much of their inspiration, and received much helpful advice, from the eugenicists of Britain and the United States. The extremity of the German “solutions” may have been unique, but the deadly implications of eugenics were conceived in English.

Though eugenics may have been implemented with varying degrees of severity across the globe, on one strategy all those concerned with the “social hygiene” of their respective nations were agreed: the unfit must be separated from the “healthy” population – hidden away in institutions from which release, let alone escape, was to be made as difficult as possible.

Although the famous words from Dante’s “Inferno” – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” were not inscribed above the entrances to these terrible places, the findings of the Royal Commission indicate unequivocally that they should have been.

Significantly, it wasn’t just the state that found its institutions and resources given over to the high-minded advocates of eugenic perfectionism. Before there were secular progressives determined to populate a flawless paradise on earth, there were religious institutions determined to make Hell’s spawn fit for Heaven. State and Church, alike, believed their lofty goals were best pursued away from the prying eyes of those who struggled to grasp both the importance and the difficulty of their scientific/spiritual work.

It was this perceived need for secrecy that sealed the fate of so many (one in four) of the young New Zealanders who fell into these institutions’ clutches. There is a distressingly large number of predatory human-beings for whom the information that places exist in which abuse can be carried out without significant risk of retribution will always be irresistible.

Installed within New Zealand’s “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” mental hospitals, orphanages and boys’ homes, with their patterns of abuse well established, these predatory sadists were kept safe by the sheer enormity of their offending. The bureaucrats and medical staff ostensibly in charge of these institutions were in thrall to the idea that, when it comes to the “unfit”, the “fit” population would rather not to know what is happening behind the barbed-wire fences and inside the locked wards. Aware of how disturbing it would be for ordinary citizens to be confronted with the unceasing and unpunished abuse of vulnerable and friendless youngsters, the state said and did nothing – for decades.

This is the Why and the How of the abuse that took place under the auspices of administrators, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, orderlies, priests and pastors. It is crushing to discover that the number of children and young people victimised between 1950 and 1999 is officially estimated at 200,000. God alone knows how many suffered between 1900 and 1949!

Yes, a fraction of those victims are now, at last, receiving recognition, apologies and compensation, but have they been given a credible explanation as to why their suffering was inflicted, and how it was able to go on for so long?

In the end, it took a generational changing of the guard to finally bury the eugenicist impulses of the New Zealand officials who, even after the horrors of Nazism’s social and racial “hygiene” were made known in 1945, continued to oversee their closed world of incarcerating and coercive pseudo-medicine.

The idea that difference equals danger is embedded deep in the human brain, and the differences that make human-beings feel uncomfortable, even fearful, are all-too-easily transformed into suitable cases for treatment. Perhaps only those who had made a fetish out of their own differences with the generations that had come before them were sufficiently deprogrammed, ideologically, to see the “unfit” as people like themselves – imperfect but still precious vessels deserving of freedom and respect.

Sadly, and in spite of the Royal Commission’s best efforts, there is no happy ending to this story. Though the mental hospitals and boys’ homes are now derelict and empty of all but the ghosts of the unrecorded dead, New Zealanders are still unwilling to embrace the “other” as a fellow person and citizen. Those whom the eugenicists once condemned as “unfit” are now dismissed as “undeserving”. With a Social Darwinist sangfroid that would put last century’s eugenicists to shame, New Zealanders have learned to look through and walk around the homeless and jobless, the hopeless and friendless.

This country no longer needs to hide what it has taught itself not to see.

A version of this essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 29 July 2024.

The Many Faces Of Racial Terror.

Tulsa's Greenwood District Burning, 1 June 1921. In a frenzy of race hatred, a veritable army of whites descended on the prosperous African-American neighbourhood of Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and laid it waste. As many as 300 African-Americans were murdered by the rampaging white mobs, who came against their fellow citizens with pistols, rifles, machine-guns and even aircraft. Upwards of 30 city blocks were burned to the ground.

WHEN IT COMES to racial terror, it’s easy to feel superior to Americans. Certainly, New Zealand has nothing in its colonial history to match what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 31 May/1 June 1921 – exactly one hundred years ago this week.

In a frenzy of race hatred, a veritable army of whites descended on the prosperous African-American neighbourhood of Greenwood and laid it waste. As many as 300 African-Americans were murdered by the rampaging white mobs, who came against their fellow citizens with pistols, rifles, machine-guns and even aircraft. Upwards of 30 city blocks were burned to the ground.

The Greenwood community, so full of black expertise and entrepreneurship that journalists dubbed it “The Black Wall Street”, never recovered. The story of the massacre, one of the most deadly and destructive race riots in US history, was buried by the Tulsa authorities for decades. Only in the last 20 years have the efforts of African-American historians and activists succeeded in forcing White America to confront this dreadful incident from its bloody past.

What made them do it? The story put about at the time was all-too-familiar: a young black man had ‘disrespected’ a young white woman. That’s all it took. The findings of an official commission of inquiry, convened three-quarters-of-a-century after the massacre, told a different story. Released in 2001, the final report stated that “the city had conspired with the mob of White citizens against Black citizens”. Why did they do it? The screenplay of the movie Mississippi Burning offers a powerful insight into the mindset of the sort of Whites who burned down Greenwood:

You know, when I was a little boy, there was an old negro farmer that lived down the road from us, name of Monroe. And he was... well, I guess he was just a little luckier than my daddy was. He bought himself a mule. That was a big deal around that town. My daddy hated that mule, ‘cause his friends were always kidding him that they saw Monroe out plowing with his new mule … One morning, that mule showed up dead … After that, there wasn’t any mention about that mule around my daddy … I knew he done it. He saw that I knew. He was ashamed … He looked at me and said, ‘If you ain’t better than a n*****, son, who are you better than?’

Still, those 300 Greenwood deaths require some context, because, appalling as that number is, it represents barely 5 percent of the estimated 6,500 African-Americans who fell victim to racial terror between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and 1950.

Before we Pakeha New Zealanders start feeling too smug, however, we should give some thought to what our Settler State did to thousands of young Maori – especially young Maori males – in the decades following World War II.

These were, of course, the years of the great internal migration of Maori: from the rural margins of New Zealand into which they had been shunted by the settler economy; to the cities, where their unskilled labour was urgently needed by employers who had run out of unskilled Pakeha to exploit.

For the New Zealand state, this huge demographic shift was fraught with potential problems. Would Maori be able to adapt to the new and profoundly different lifestyle that awaited them? And, what should be done with those who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – behave themselves?

Part of the answer came in the form of the special “boys’ homes” established by the state to corral the wayward offspring of Maori families in transition. Young people in general were widely perceived as problematic in post-war New Zealand, but young Maori males provoked all manner of racially-charged fears.

The callous, indeed almost frivolous, incarceration of young, brown people in out-of-sight, out-of-mind state institutions, where all too frequently they were victimised and abused, must stand as one of the most scandalous misapplications of state power in New Zealand history. The Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Abuse in Care has calculated that upwards of quarter-of-a-million young New Zealanders – most of them Maori and Pacifica – suffered horribly in the course of what some might call these slow-motion lynchings.

The Tulsa Massacre represents race hatred at its most vicious and unequivocal. New Zealand’s racial terror has always been inflicted with considerably more discretion.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 June 2021.