Cry The Beloved Country: Is this really where we are, 100 years after Gallipoli? Is this how far we’ve come? From a bigoted British Israelite and union-buster; to a “relaxed” golfing partner of the US president and a “playful” hair-fetishist? From dispatching troops to Gallipoli in the name of the King-Emperor; to dispatching troops to Iraq in the name of the “Five Eyes Club”?
THERE ARE TIMES when it’s heart-breaking being a New
Zealander. This past week has been one of those times.
The week began with the deafening drumbeat of ANZAC-related
patriotism. Having already alienated a huge number of Australians, the almost
obsessive memorialisation of the First World War is beginning to do the same to
a growing number of New Zealanders.
Among all the individuals responsible for planning the
centennial “celebrations” of the ANZAC landings, there was, apparently, no one
whose job it was to make sure, one hundred years on, that New Zealanders had a
clear idea of the political and economic motives that drove so many human
lambs to the slaughter.
The historical context out of which some young men
volunteered for “the adventure of a lifetime” and some did not (let’s not
forget that by 1916 it had become necessary to start conscripting replacement
soldiers) has been almost completely elided from the official narrative. Likewise
the extraordinary curtailment of civil and political rights that followed
almost immediately upon New Zealand entering the conflict.
To hear someone like Lieutenant-General Tim Keating, Chief
of Defence Staff, couch New Zealand’s participation in the First World War in
terms of standing up for the right and the good (just like today in Iraq!) was
quite sickening. More than 18,000 young New Zealanders died on the battlefields
of that terrible war – not for the right and the good, but for the greater glory
and profit of the British Empire and its principal investors.
I wonder if Lt-General Keating even knows that William F.
Massey, the unelected Prime-Minister of New Zealand in August 1914 (his Reform
Party had won a No-Confidence vote against the Liberal’s in 1912) was a member
of the British Israelites.
This bizarre sect was a curious mixture of religious and
patriotic enthusiasm which believed that the British race was descended from
one of the lost tribes of Israel, and that the British royal family’s bloodline
extended all the way back to King David and King Solomon. The British
Israelites were adamant that the English-speaking peoples were divinely
ordained to rule the entire world.
Born in Ulster, Massey was also a member of the Orange
Order, whose compatriots back in Northern Ireland, even as Gavrilo Princip was
assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, were actively plotting
mutiny and rebellion against the pro-Irish Home Rule Liberal Government of
Herbert Asquith.
Massey’s religious and political bigotry would be drawn into
sharper focus as the war drew towards its end and the Reform Party linked up
with the newly-formed Protestant Political Association to mobilise voters
against the large number of Irish Catholics who had swung in behind the nascent
Labour Party.
Massey’s hostility to organised labour was prodigious. The
crushing of the Waihi Miners’ Strike in 1912, and of the Great Strike in 1913,
were among Massey’s first and most enduring contributions to New Zealand’s
political history. Working-class Kiwis didn’t call the mounted special
constables (drafted in from the countryside to smash the unionists of the “Red”
Federation of Labour) “Massey’s
Cossacks” for nothing.
I could go on, but hopefully you’ll have some idea already
of how little that was “good” or “right” lay behind New Zealand’s participation
in the First World War. Indeed, it was only after the outbreak of revolution in
Russia in 1917 (and the mutiny of the French army in the same year) that the
imperial establishment decided it might be wise to shift its rhetorical
emphasis from protecting innocent women and children from the bestial Hun to
“defending freedom” and “making the world safe for democracy”.
So many lies – and how old they’ve grown! It is nothing less
than shameful that so little of the history of the period leading up to the
First World War is known to the young New Zealanders who turn out in their
thousands to honour the sacrifice of those who they naively believe “died for
our freedom”.
And what, I physically cringe to think, do those same young
New Zealanders now make of their 53-year-old Prime Minister, who has admitted
to repeatedly tugging on the ponytail of a 26-year-old waitress?
Is this really where we are, 100 years after Gallipoli? Is
this how far we’ve come? From a bigoted British Israelite and
union-buster; to a “relaxed” golfing
partner of the US president and a “playful” hair-fetishist? From dispatching
troops to Gallipoli in the name of the King-Emperor; to dispatching troops to
Iraq in the name of the “Five Eyes Club”?
And what about the likes of your humble correspondent? That
endangered species known as the “Fourth Estate”? Are New Zealand’s journalists,
commentators, newspaper columnists and bloggers to be guided now, in the fulfilment
of their professional ethical obligations, by the shining example of Rachel
Glucina?
As I said: These are heart-breaking times.
Weep, Zealandia, weep!
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 24 April 2015.
