Support Your Local Chiefs.

Support Your Local Sheriff: It is easy to imagine a host of witnesses lining up to perjure themselves in the name of White Supremacy. Why, then, is it so hard to imagine a host of “independent” witnesses hurrying forward to defend the honour of their macho code by denying that anything untoward happened to Scarlette at that infamous Matamata spa?

 

PAUL REED’S ICONIC PHOTOGRAPH, often subtitled “Support Your Local Sheriff”, appeared in Life magazine in 1967. Lawrence A. Rainey, oozing the in-your-face belligerence of a crooked southern sheriff, was on trial for violating the civil rights of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, three young civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964.

 

Rainey’s easy confidence was not misplaced. In Mississippi, in the early 1960s, the chances of an all-white jury convicting a white law enforcement officer for the murder of an African American were practically nil. Men like Rainey were elected by their white neighbours (the sort of men captured grinning at the camera in Life’s famous photograph) and adhered to exactly the same viciously racist beliefs.

 

Since the 1880s, virtually the entire law enforcement and judicial infrastructure of the South had been dedicated to the preservation and enforcement of white privilege. If the Klan was there to terrorise and murder southern blacks, the role of sheriffs and judges was to make sure that the persons responsible were never brought to justice.

 

In this endeavour law enforcement and the judiciary could rely upon the willing co-operation of white juries. In the rare event that a district attorney brought a white person to trial, jury members could be relied upon to ignore the prosecution’s evidence. By contrast, the testimony of defence witnesses – no matter how outlandish – was taken as gospel. For an accused Klansman, acquittal was practically certain.

 

That the Jim Crow South of the 1950s and 60s was a hotbed of white racism and violence is hardly news. In 2016 we have no difficulty whatsoever in understanding how the racist communities of the southern states banded together to protect their racial privileges. We certainly know better than to believe them capable of delivering justice to their black neighbours.

 

Why then are we surprised and offended when the NZ Rugby Union produces a report which utterly fails to deliver even the most rudimentary justice to the young woman whose experiences called it forth? If we can understand how the deeply racist culture of the American South consistently failed to deliver justice to its black victims; why couldn’t we anticipate how the viciously misogynistic attitudes pervading New Zealand’s Rugby culture would similarly fail to deliver justice to Scarlette?

 

It is easy to imagine a host of witnesses lining up to perjure themselves in the name of White Supremacy. Why, then, is it so hard to imagine a host of “independent” witnesses hurrying forward to defend the honour of their macho code by denying that anything untoward happened to Scarlette at that Matamata spa?

 

It’s a pity there was no Life photographer present when these good ole boys were giving their “evidence” to the Rugby Union’s lawyer. What are the odds that their faces all wore expressions very similar to Sheriff Rainey’s?

 



 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 10 September 2016.

Tolerance In Arms

Asserting The Right: To say 'I am!' When all around you are saying 'You are not!', is the true definition of power. As Thomas Mann so rightly said: "Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil."

IT HAS BEEN a hell-week for Tolerance. Tragic events in France and unspeakable atrocities in Nigeria have tested her followers’ fidelity to the limit. The temptation to condemn; to lash out in righteous anger; has been overwhelming.

 

“What kind of people”, we ask, “can justify gunning down a roomful of grandfatherly journalists and cartoonists? Or strap a bomb to the body of a ten year old girl and send her into the middle of a crowded marketplace?”

 

In responding to such questions others demand to know what kind of people could crowd grandfathers and ten-year-old girls into “showers” and drop deadly poisonous pellets of Zyklon-B on their heads?

 

Such responses are intended to remind us that cruelty and violence are not the sole preserve of Al Qaida, Islamic State or Boko Haram jihadists. That, within living memory, highly-educated Europeans set a bench-mark for cruelty and violence that has yet to be exceeded.

 

They should also remind us that fighting for and defending Tolerance is no job for pacifists.

 

Our fathers and grandfathers did not hesitate to condemn or lash out in righteous anger against the Nazi regime. On the contrary, they made war upon it until little was left of its German birthplace except bloody piles of rubble. At Nuremburg, in the name of Humanity itself, they put Nazism on trial and hanged its guilty leaders by their necks until they were dead.

 

There are some (thankfully a small minority) who compare the Islamic religion in toto with Nazism and demand from the nations of the West the same uncompromising determination to rid the world of a malign influence that was displayed between 1939 and 1945.

 

Fortunately, Tolerance’s grip upon the vast majority of Westerners is still strong enough to reject such annihilationist solutions. Simple common-sense tells us that the murderous jihadists whose crimes have dominated the headlines for the past ten days have as much to do with Islam as the cross-burning members of the Ku Klux Klan had to do with Christianity.

 

Every bit as much. Because isn’t it true that even though only a handful of white southerners actually wore the Klan’s hoods and robes, its terrorist exploits (most of which, right up until the late 1960s, went unpunished) could only take place in a social environment that made both the moral condemnation and/or legal conviction of the perpetrators unthinkable?

 

Those southern towns were as full of churches as the cities of the Middle East are filled with mosques. The hard truth remains that the Klan was only defeated as a powerful terrorist force when the people among whom it operated were no longer willing to justify its crimes or shield its members from the claims of justice. When those churches finally stopped turning a blind eye to terrorism, and their congregations finally stopped turning up to lynchings.

 

Tolerance is a militant goddess – never to be confused with acquiescence or clever apologetics. To end the reign of the Ku Klux Klan required not only the courage and sacrifice of Dr Martin Luther King’s non-violent civil rights campaigners; not only the steadfast support of defiant African-American communities; not only the solidarity and assistance of progressive Americans from all over the USA; but also the relentless interventions of the Department of Justice and the covert operations of the FBI.

 

Tolerance rejects the racist suggestion that the Islamic peoples are incapable of responding to the moral challenge of terrorism in the same manner as White Christians in the South eventually responded to it.

 

Tolerance charges us to not only familiarise ourselves with the fundamental tenets of Islam, but also to challenge openly the ways in which the message of the Prophet has been distorted and defiled by the murderous blasphemers and heretics who dare to march beneath his banner.

 

Tolerance knows that it is only when the body of the faithful rises in revolt against the Kings and Ayatollahs, the Presidents and Generals, whose personal and profane interests are served by the dissemination of a creed that knows nothing of submission or penitence or charity, that the true voice of the Prophet will once again ring out clearly across the lands of the faithful.

 

But, most of all, Tolerance knows that her great enemy, Intolerance, only ever triumphs when ordinary, decent people confuse doing the right thing with doing nothing.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 January 2015.

Lovers And Haters: Further Thoughts On The Hobbit Dispute

Enforcing Difference: In the American South, during the "Jim Crow" era, it was as vital for whites to engage in discrimination as it was for blacks to suffer it. In New Zealand, during the Hobbit Controversy, it was vital that most Kiwis be seen to be backing Sir Peter Jackson and his anti-union allies. "Hobbit Hater!" - like "Nigger Lover!" - is an insult designed to both discipline and isolate the dissenting minority from the assenting majority.

“NIGGER LOVER!” No accusation was more feared by white citizens of the old American South. Upon its recipients’ shoulders descended – with the sting of an overseer’s stock-whip – the entire, obdurate and unyielding expectations of Dixie’s racially-defined culture.

 

Following the withdrawal of the federal government’s army of occupation in 1877, a “Nigger Lover” was any Southern white who dared to deviate from the brutal racist consensus which,  vote by vote, law by law, lynching by lynching, was rebuilding white supremacy in the states of the shattered Confederacy.

 

It is a fact easily forgotten that the “Jim Crow” segregationist regimes of the South were as dependent on the willingness of whites to enforce their will, as they were on the legally engineered incapacity of blacks to defy them.

 

Securing the full co-operation of Southern whites in the grim business of exploiting Southern blacks, required constant and unrelenting ideological effort. The beneficiaries of segregation had to be reassured that the racist rules of their society represented not simply the most practical answer to the “race question”, but also constituted its best, self-evidently moral, resolution.

 

To ignore or openly defy the Jim Crow Laws of the South, by reaching out to one’s black neighbours, workmates or employees was, in effect, to engage in an act of brazen subversion. To treat African-Americans as equals was to concede their full constitutional status, both as human-beings and citizens, and thus to acknowledge their right to all the opportunities and services denied by segregation.

 

“Nigger Lover!”, therefore, wasn’t merely a declaration of racist scorn, it was a reminder – a very sharp reminder – of the white individual’s obligation to maintain solidarity with every other beneficiary of racist bigotry. The whole socio-economic and political order of the South, and their status within it, required whites (either passively or actively, as the situation dictated) to hate and oppress their black neighbours.

 

THESE MUSINGS on the most devastating disciplinary insult of the Old South were prompted by the past week’s recapitulation of the so-called “Hobbit Crisis” of October 2010.

 

The release by both the National-led Government and the Council of Trade Unions of hitherto withheld documents and e-mails has confirmed the reportage of that very small number of journalists who refused to accept the “official version” of events which so inflamed New Zealanders at the time. (Again, I raise my hat to Radio New Zealand’s Brent Edwards and Scoop’s Gordon Campbell.)

 

We know now that the “official version” of events, the version scripted by Sir Peter Jackson and the National Government, and relayed almost verbatim to the public by a distressingly large section of the news media, bore very little relation to what was actually happening.

 

Being wrong, however, in no way reduced the “official version’s” effectiveness. Sir Peter is a master story-teller and the tale he wove around the hapless Actors Equity Union was one from which it could not escape.

 

Hobbit Lovers: Even children were enrolled in the campaign to prevent the New Zealand film industry from being unionised.

 

Because Actors Equity wasn’t simply the villain of Sir Peter’s particular story. His admirers were encouraged to see it as something more: a generic enemy which threatened not only The Hobbit and the local film industry to which it was so important, but also the whole way of doing business in Twenty-First Century New Zealand.

 

It is important to recall the context in which the Hobbit Crisis took place. The world remained in the grip of the Global Financial Crisis, the Labour Party was moving to the left, and the trade union movement had just held a series of mass rallies around the country. On the right of politics there was a sense of unease – a feeling that, after thirty years of steady advance, its ideology was in retreat.

 

Sir Peter’s genius allowed him to transform the question of whether The Hobbit would be filmed in New Zealand, and under what sort of labour relations regime, into a litmus test of people’s allegiance to the social, economic and political realities of the “new” New Zealand.

 

The actual provenance of the epithet used by those opposing the efforts of Actors Equity and the CTU to unionise the New Zealand film industry is unclear. What cannot be disputed, however, is its impact. “Hobbit Hater” – like “Nigger Lover” – branded the recipient as someone hostile to the objectives of national revitalisation. Someone who still saw ordinary workers – even actors – as people with a legal right to bargain collectively for higher wages and improved conditions.

 

“Hobbit Haters” were the sort of people who wanted to return New Zealand to the bad old days of unbridled union power. “Hobbit Haters” had no respect for Weta Workshop’s Sir Richard Taylor or his army of “independent contractors”. “Hobbit Haters” were people who stood in the way of jobs and prosperity – like Labour and the Greens.

 

“Hobbit Haters”, like “Nigger Lovers”, refused to recognise what was good for them.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 March 2013.