The Deposition Of "Mad King Donald"?

Heading For A Fall? Will the reign of “Mad King Donald”, the 45th American President, end as tragically as that of Ludwig II, the "Mad King of Bavaria"? Over the Christmas period, newspaper articles and blog postings have appeared in the US media alleging that President Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour and his refusal to accept professional guidance is placing the Republic in danger.

IT RISES like a piece of romantic confectionary from the fir trees that crowd around its base. The conical rooftops and soaring white-stone towers epitomising the fairy-tale castle. So much so that a scaled-down version became the centrepiece of Walt Disney’s “Fantasyland”. It is called “Neuschwanstein” – the new swanstone castle – and it is the most enduring legacy of Ludwig II: the “Mad King of Bavaria”.

So erratic, so spendthrift, so megalomaniacal, had Ludwig II become that in the early hours of 10 June 1886 a Bavarian Government Commission arrived at the gates of Neuschwanstein bearing a document officially deposing the King, and under orders to take the allegedly “insane” Ludwig into custody.

At first, the King resisted. Police officers loyal to Ludwig drove the Commissioners from the castle gates at gunpoint. For a few hours, the opportunity existed for the King to rouse the Bavarian people against his enemies. But, Ludwig hesitated and the moment was lost. A new detachment of Bavarian police soon relieved the King’s defenders and Neuschwanstein was sealed off. By 12 June a second Commission had taken the King into custody and Ludwig’s uncle, Luitpold, was proclaimed Regent. A day later, Ludwig’s body (and that of his psychiatrist, Dr Bernhard von Gudden) was found in Lake Starnberg, 11kms south of the Bavarian capital. Officially, Ludwig had committed suicide. Unofficially …. ?

Ludwig II's spectacular legacy - Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria.

Will the reign of “Mad King Donald”, the 45th American President, end in such tragic circumstances? Over the Christmas period, newspaper articles and blog postings have appeared in the US media alleging that President Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour and his refusal to accept professional guidance is placing the Republic in danger.

It was Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria against the advice of his Secretary of Defence, General James Mattis, that constituted the final straw for Pulitzer-Prize winning NY Times columnist, Thomas Friedman:

“It was the moment when you had to ask whether we really can survive two more years of Trump as president, whether this man and his demented behaviour — which will get only worse as the Mueller investigation concludes — are going to destabilize our country, our markets, our key institutions and, by extension, the world. And therefore his removal from office now has to be on the table.”

Accordingly, Friedman is calling upon the Republican Party to stage an “intervention”. Essentially, what he and a growing number of like-minded American opinion formers are demanding is that, for the remaining two years of his presidency, Trump becomes a mere figurehead – guided by a responsible Cabinet of the Republican Party’s own choosing. If Trump refuses, then Republicans and Democrats must join forces and impeach him.

All of which raises the question: Can Mad King Donald be removed from office (and this world) as expeditiously and bloodlessly as Mad King Ludwig?

Twitter was not available in 1886, which meant that the Bavarian Government could control the flow of information concerning Ludwig’s deposition. Such scattered resistance as did occur when rumours of the King’s predicament eventually filtered out to his faithful peasant subjects was easily dispersed. In 2019, by contrast, any attempted Republican Party “intervention” would be revealed instantly in a Presidential “tweet” – thereby mobilising tens-of-millions of Trump’s loyal followers. How easily these “peasants” could be dispersed is an interesting question. They would not be carrying pitchforks.

Much now hinges on how determined the American ruling-class is to “fire” its rogue CEO. Trump has initiated a trade war with the Chinese that is unnerving the world’s free-traders. He has openly attacked the US Federal Reserve – prime defender of the global neoliberal order. Wall Street is not impressed. Not since 1931 has the stockmarket fallen so precipitously in a single week. Bad enough, one would think, but include the strategic signal contained in the Syrian withdrawal and everything gets much worse. American markets are secured by American arms: weaken one and you weaken the other. Weaken both, and you become a “clear and present danger” to the national security of the United States.

And all those Trump loyalists bearing arms? One suspects the American military is just itching to give them a Napoleonic “whiff of grapeshot”. The Second Amendment notwithstanding, there is room for only one army in the USA.

And Mad King Donald’s legacy? Not a Neuschwanstein, certainly. Just possibly, a half-constructed Mexican border wall.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 December 2018.

The Shimmer: A Christmas Short Story.

“Flee, Joseph, flee! Turn west and travel south to Egypt. Keep the sea at your right hand. Do not wait for the sun to rise. Flee to the land from which Moses fled. Word will be sent to you when it is safe to return. You must not tarry – not for a moment. Herod’s men are searching everywhere. Go now! Save yourself! Save Mary! Save the boy!” - Painting: The Flight Into Egypt by Luc-Olivier Merson 1879

IT WAS GOOD to sit and share the flat brown loaf. Father and son, tearing off the warm chunks of bread. Passing the wineskin from hand to hand. Washing down the food with mouthfuls of rough Galilean wine. They had been working all morning on a yoke: carved from a single block of cedar; the little workshop’s specialty.

“You have a rare gift with wood, my son. It’s as if you can see already the piece that lies within; as if you’re calling it into being. And your yokes are easy – everybody says so.”

The son, smiled.

“Did I see you talking to Esau’s youngest daughter earlier today? How is she bearing her trouble?”

“All the better for the words you exchanged with her father. She told me how you sat with him the night before last. How changed he was afterwards.”

“Villages can be cruel places, son. A young woman with child and not yet wed – it brings out the worst in people. All I told Esau was that every child is a gift from God. And that it is not given to us to judge the purposes for which He brings life into the world.”

“Wise words, father.”

“Not mine, alas, my son. They were spoken to me a full score of winters ago. As now, this village was rife with rumour and spite. People looked sideways at me. Laughed in their sleeves. Hissed evil words to my back.”

“Concerning my mother?”

“Concerning your mother.”

“Who was it, then, supplied the wise counsel you shared with Esau?”

“To tell you the truth, son, I do not know. I was wrestling with the choices before me in the upper olive grove. It was dark, a new moon hovered above the trees, and he was suddenly there beside me. His tunic was of white wool and I swear it seemed to shimmer – as if masking a light of unbearable brightness.”

“And what did he say, father?”

“That I, and your mother, and you, son, were part of a story that had been written long, long ago. That you were precious beyond the measure of mortal longing. That the world would be changed, changed utterly, by your presence in it. That your mother was the vessel of humanity’s salvation. And that I must keep her safe.”

“Did you ever see him again, father?”

“Just once. It was during those dreadful days following your birth, when the King sent his soldiers to kill all the new-born male children. Those three Parthian wizards, the ones who found us in that Bethlehem stable, they’d told Herod how far they had come, from the eastern lands beyond Rome’s reach, to witness the birth of a king. Not a clever story to tell in a murderous tyrant’s court.

“Neither your mother nor I were aware of the danger. In fact, we were on our way home. I had gone into the trees to gather wood for the fire – and there he was. The same white wool, the same unearthly shimmer.”

“And what were his words this time?”

“Flee, Joseph, flee! Turn west and travel south to Egypt. Keep the sea at your right hand. Do not wait for the sun to rise. Flee to the land from which Moses fled. Word will be sent to you when it is safe to return. You must not tarry – not for a moment. Herod’s men are searching everywhere. Go now! Save yourself! Save Mary! Save the boy!”

“And, you did, father, you did – for here I stand. Safe and sound. For no grander purpose, seemingly, than to whittle yokes for the necks of our neighbour’s cattle.”

“Do you mean to test me, son? By making light of the wondrous circumstances of your birth? Or, do you mean to test the patience of that providence which delivered you? Think you that I have forgotten that your mother came to our marriage bed a maid? That all your life I have called you son and loved you as my own – though mine you are not, and never will be?

“Forgive me, father.”

No need, my boy. You are what you are. Though what that might be remains to be seen. Suffice to say that when you pray, under the stars in the upper olive grove, I cannot help noticing the shimmer.

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 December 2018.

Working Towards The Führer.

All Together Now! In terms of the inviolability of the new neoliberal establishment, it mattered very little whether Labour or National was in power. And, since cabinet ministers from both sides of the aisle clearly regarded ideological boat-rocking as being every bit as career-terminating as state sector CEOs, there was scant incentive to entertain any alternative definitions to what constituted “good governance”. In the years since 1984, therefore, it has made much more sense, personally and politically, to “work towards the [neoliberal] führer”.

AN “AFFRONT TO DEMOCRACY”, was the State Services Commissioner’s characterisation of the state bureaucracy’s decision to spy on political activists. Few would disagree. That multiple state agencies felt entitled to contract-out the gathering of political intelligence to the privately owned and operated Thompson & Clark Investigations Ltd reveals a widespread antidemocratic disdain for citizens’ rights within the New Zealand public service. The alarming revelations of the State Services’ inquiry raise two very important questions: How did this disdain for democratic norms become so entrenched? And what, if anything, can Jacinda Ardern’s government do to eradicate it?

The dangerous truth, in relation to the first question, is also painfully relevant to the second. The effective abrogation of democratic norms in New Zealand dates back to 1984 and the events which the former CTU economist and ministerial adviser, Peter Harris, characterised as a “bureaucratic coup d’état”. In was in July 1984 that elements within the NZ Treasury and the Reserve Bank, taking full advantage of the relationships they had been cultivating for at least a year with the parliamentary leadership of the NZ Labour Party, initiated the detailed and extremely radical economic policy programme which came to be known as “Rogernomics”.

This programme, set forth in “Economic Management” – the book-length briefing paper for the incoming Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas – had received no mandate from the electorate. Indeed, the ordinary voter had no inkling whatsoever that the Labour Party of Mickey Savage and Norman Kirk was about to unleash a programme considerably to the right of Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s. The authors of “Economic Management” were not, however, interested in obtaining a democratic mandate for their proposed reforms. In fact, they strongly suspected that submitting their ideas to the voters was just about the surest way of securing their emphatic rejection.

Since the mid-1970s the conviction had been growing among big-business leaders and high-ranking civil servants living in the wealthiest capitalist nations, that democracy had gotten out of hand; and that unless the scope for democratic intervention in the economy was radically reduced, then the future of capitalism could not be guaranteed. Free Market Economics, as it was called then, or Neoliberalism, as we know it today, was, from the outset, incompatible with the social-democratic principles that had underpinned western policy-making in the post-war world. It could only be imposed, and kept in place, by a political class sealed-off from all manner of pressures from below. If that meant gutting the major parties of the centre-left and right; purging the civil service, academia and the news media of dissenters; and crushing the trade unions – then so be it.

Once it became clear that the free-market “revolution” was not about to be halted in its tracks, all those with an ambition to rise within the new order made haste to learn its rules and spared no effort in enforcing them. This phenomenon: of absorbing and implementing an antidemocratic regime’s imperatives was described by British historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, as “Working Towards The Fuhrer”. Kershaw lifted the phrase from a speech delivered in 1934 by the Prussian civil servant, Werner Willikens:

“Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Fuhrer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realize sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now, everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Fuhrer. Very often and in many spheres, it has been the case—in previous years as well—that individuals have simply waited for orders and instructions. Unfortunately, the same will be true in the future; but in fact, it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Fuhrer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Fuhrer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future, one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.”

The behaviour of New Zealand civil servants and their private sector contractors conforms very neatly to Kershaw’s thesis. In terms of the inviolability of the new neoliberal establishment, it mattered very little whether Labour or National was in power. And, since cabinet ministers from both sides of the aisle clearly regarded ideological boat-rocking as being every bit as career-terminating as state sector CEOs, there was scant incentive to entertain any alternative definitions to what constituted “good governance”. In the years since 1984, therefore, it has made much more sense, personally and politically, to “work towards the [neoliberal] führer”.

Certainly, Kershaw’s “Working Towards the Führer” thesis would explain the behaviour that has so disturbed readers of the State Services Commission’s report like Victoria University’s School of Government academic, Chris Eichbaum. Namely, why so few of the people involved in this “affront to democracy” displayed any awareness that they were behaving unethically. If Neoliberalism, like the Third Reich, is not a force which can be legitimately contradicted or criticised, then obviously any person or group engaging in activities inimical to the implementation of state policy is bound to be considered an enemy of the system.

Not that the neoliberal order will ever acknowledge its political imperatives so honestly. A large measure of bad faith continues to operate within the system. It has to – otherwise the still useful façade of human rights and democratic consent will rapidly fall apart.

Ministries and other state entities reach for the private investigator rather than the police officer because the latter is still (at least in theory) accountable. By contrast, the paper and/or electronic trails left by the likes of Thompson & Clark are considerably more difficult to track than those carefully logged in an official Police investigation. What’s more, the unofficial and private aggregation of “evidence” against the State’s “enemies” opens up the possibility of their unofficial and private punishment.

That job the activist lost, or failed to get. The bank loan that was refused. Simple bad luck? Or something else?

The most sinister aspect of the “Working Towards The Fuhrer” phenomenon is that any obstacles or objections encountered along the way will be taken as evidence of forces working against the führer. Popular resistance to neoliberal objectives is never taken as a sign that those objectives might be ill-advised, counterproductive, or just plain wrong. Rather, it is taken as proof that those responsible for organising such resistance are dangerous and irrational opponents of beneficent policies to which there are no viable alternatives.

It appears never to have occurred to Gerry Brownlee, for example, that the rising levels of desperation and anger among the Christchurch clients of the state-owned Southern Response insurance company – feelings that were manifesting themselves in threats to life and property – might be evidence of massive failures on the company’s part. John Key, similarly, refused to accept that oil and gas exploration might constitute a genuine threat to New Zealand’s (and, ultimately, the entire planet’s) natural environment.

Was Simon Bridges, when he introduced legislation outlawing waterborne protests within 2 kilometres of the oil and gas industry’s drilling platforms, doing no more than working along the lines and towards the goals of his leader?

As above, so below: the law of hierarchy is immutable. Thomson & Clark may have been the tool in the hands of ruthless public servants “working towards the führer”, but the masters of those servants were the neoliberal politicians from both major parties who, ever since 1984, have been tireless in their defence of the neoliberal order against its most fearsome foe – the New Zealand people.

The question, therefore, arises: If the Coalition Government demonstrates the slightest willingness to move against the servants of that neoliberal order (as Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister, Megan Woods, by forcing the resignation of the Chair of Southern Response, has arguably done already) will the same forces that subverted Labour in 1984 set in motion the measures necessary to bring down Jacinda Ardern’s “issue motivated group” in 2020?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 21 December 2018.

An Absent Mirror: Why Can’t This Country Produce Its Own Political Television Series?

Artistic Intelligence: New Zealand’s film and television industry has produced nothing remotely like the Australians’ highly political series Secret City and Pine Gap. Under examination in both of these series is the vexing problem of how Australia should manage its relationship with the United States of America, on the one hand, and the Peoples Republic of China, on the other.

THE BEST MEASURE of a nation’s maturity is its willingness to submit its biggest challenges to the audit of art. For all their political boorishness, the Aussies can boast a much more favourable auditor’s report than we can. I can’t remember the last time this country committed significant resources to a dramatic examination of its domestic and international political relationships. Certainly, New Zealand’s film and television industry has produced nothing remotely like the Australians’ highly political series Secret City and Pine Gap.

Under examination in both of these series is the vexing problem of how Australia should manage its relationship with the United States of America, on the one hand, and the Peoples Republic of China, on the other. How deeply have the Chinese penetrated Australia’s governing institutions? Is honouring Australia’s security relationship with the USA worth the fundamental destabilisation of the Australian economy which an acrimonious break with China would entail? The first question inspires the plotlines of Secret City; the second, of Pine Gap.

Now, if these questions sound at all familiar, then well done You for keeping abreast of current events! New Zealand’s relationships with China and the United States are similarly fraught with ambiguity and risk. All the more so today, following the emphatically pro-American speech delivered yesterday (16/12/18) by Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, to a high-powered American audience assembled at Georgetown University’s Centre of Australian–New Zealand studies in Washington.

Except we Kiwis have one more player to consider than our Aussie cousins: which is Australia itself. Our countries have been so close, historically, that it is very difficult for ordinary New Zealanders to conceptualise a situation where the Australians might look upon us as something less than a mate. Sure, we spar with one another on the sports field and tell obscene jokes at one another’s expense, but the idea that the Australian political class might already have fallen out of love with their irritating Kiwi cousins would strike most New Zealanders as ridiculous.

But what if the Australian “Deep State” already regards New Zealand as an enemy? It’s a thought more likely to seize the imagination of a novelist, playwright or screen-writer than the average Kiwi citizen. Which is why a mature NZ-on-Air would be badgering this country’s writers for scripts dealing with New Zealand’s growing economic and diplomatic vulnerability in the face of the US-Australia vs China stand-off. Anywhere else but here, Professor Anne-Marie Brady’s run-ins with the Chinese would have commissioning editors salivating. The screen-play is practically writing itself in real time!

But, no, NZ-on-Air doesn’t do political thrillers dealing with the moral duty of the news media to expose the dark deeds of the state security apparatus. Nor will it commission a TV series exploring the consequences of discovering Chinese and/or American “assets” embedded at the heart of our major political parties. As for a series examining the contradictions inherent in having our indispensable security partner asking us to spy on our indispensable economic partner: Good God! What would MFAT say?

The Australians are more fortunate, because the challenges outlined above are precisely the challenges confronted and explored in Secret City and Pine Gap. (Both currently available on Netflix.) Aussie viewers can watch these dramas and argue with friends and family about the issues driving their plots and characters forward. How much room for manoeuvre do our political leaders have between China and America? How far should Australia go in honouring One Hundred Years Of Mateship? If the US fires shots in anger at the Chinese, should Australia do the same? Are we really willing to have the Chinese crash our economy in retaliation?

It’s what grown-up countries do. Think not only of the American and British film and television industries, but of the Danes, the Swedes, the Norwegians and the Irish. Think of Borgen and its international success. Think of Scandi-Noir. These are countries not much bigger than ourselves, but unlike us they have the wit to resource their film and television industries to a level where making series like Borgen becomes something more than the wistful pipe-dream of writers condemned to turning out endless variations of Outrageous Fortune.

Thirty-five years ago the Aussies commissioned a series dealing with one of the most traumatic events in their country’s history – the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government by the then Governor General, Sir John Kerr. The screening of the six hour-long episodes of The Dismissal began on 6 March 1983, the day after Bob Hawke’s Government was elected – the first Labor Government to take office since the bloodless coup d’état that toppled Whitlam’s eight years earlier.

New Zealand television was given the opportunity to perform a similar artistic service in relation to the national trauma of Rogernomics. The renowned novelist and playwright, Dean Parker, pitched a series to the networks exploring the reactions of a typical group of Labour Party members to the devastating “reforms” of the Lange-led Government. Parker’s working title was “The Branch”. The chance was there for a New Zealand audience to confront in Art’s mirror not only the moral and political choices forced upon Labour Party members, but the whole nation.

The networks weren’t interested.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 December 2018.

Lashing Back.

Right Back At You: There is a fond assumption among a great many progressive activists that, having seen their cherished social reforms enacted, they can relax – confident that they will remain in place indefinitely. History’s clock moves only forwards, they reassure themselves, never backwards. Unfortunately, that isn’t true.

SEPTEMBER-ELEVEN was a day of disaster long before 2001. Twenty-eight years earlier, another day, 11 September 1973, was seared into the memory of every Chilean as indelibly and irrevocably as 11 September 2001 burned itself into the retinas of every American.

Skyhawk jets streaked over the Presidential Palace in Santiago and battle tanks rumbled through the capital’s streets. Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist leader, died in his palace. The Chilean people would have to wait seventeen years for the opportunity to choose another.

There were countless tales of violence and oppression on 11 September 1973, but the report which stuck in my memory involved a young woman stopped on the street by a squad of young, keyed-up, soldiers.

“What do you think you’re wearing?” One of the soldiers demanded.

The young woman was at a loss. It was 1973 and she was dressed fashionably in a T-shirt and flared trousers.

“Go home and change into something more befitting a decent young woman.” The oldest of the soldiers gestured with his rifle at the young woman’s trousers. “The days of women dressing like communist whores are over.”

The overthrow of Allende was about a great deal more than his Popular Unity government nationalising Chile’s American-owned copper mines. His democratic socialist policies had generated social changes every bit as radical as the changes unleashed upon the country’s capitalist economy. Women swapping their skirts for trousers was but one of the many challenges to the cultural hegemony of Chile’s profoundly conservative social and religious institutions.

Allende’s government had fatally underestimated the political impact of its cultural challenges. He and his followers had no idea how lightly their changes rested on the popular masses they fondly believed to have been convinced and converted by their policies.

They would find out soon enough. What happened in Chile in the months and years that followed General Augusto Pinochet’s military coup of 11 September 1973 wasn’t quite on the scale of The Handmaid’s Tale, but the conservative cultural backlash it unleashed left the Popular Unity government’s emancipatory social programmes in ruins.

There is a fond assumption among a great many progressive activists that, having seen their cherished social reforms enacted, they can relax – confident that they will remain in place indefinitely. History’s clock moves only forwards, they reassure themselves, never backwards.

Unfortunately, that isn’t true.

The economic hierarchies of capitalist society are the least of progressivism’s worries. Older, and much more difficult to eradicate, are the hierarchies of race and gender. Not all Whites can be rich, but on the ladder of racial privilege they have long celebrated their “superiority” to people of colour. A black man’s path to equality may be blocked by the racial prejudices of his white brothers, but that in no way guarantees he will acknowledge the rights of his sisters.

At a post-SNCC Conference party in 1964, the black activist leader, Stokely Carmichael, infamously described the position of black women in the American civil rights movement as “prone.”

Many progressives do not appreciate how deeply these racial and gender prejudices are embedded in the minds of their fellow citizens. With the power to legislate in their hands, and a like-minded news media happy to promote their causes, progressive political parties are often tempted to overestimate the transformational power of their reforms. The embittered silence of those who feel that their most cherished beliefs have been overridden and ignored is all-too-easily mistaken for consent and approbation by progressive campaigners. It is neither.

To date, New Zealanders have been extremely fortunate in the generally benign character of their country’s dominant populist party – NZ First. Winston Peters is no Viktor Orban; no Rodrigo Duterte; no Jair Bolsonaro. And for that we should all be extremely thankful.

It is by no means certain, however, that this country will be spared the malign effects of vicious right-wing populism forever. A significant downturn in the New Zealand economy; one jarring social reform too many; and, who knows, a frightened, angry and culturally displaced mass of New Zealanders may find their “drummer”.

Nowhere is it written that such politicians are bound to observe the democratic niceties. Indeed, in circumstances where large numbers of New Zealanders believe themselves to be the victims of an arrogant and uncaring “political class”, democracy may be perceived as the problem.

Yellow Vests anyone?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 December 2018.

The Salvation Army’s Latest Report: Identifying the Sins – but not the Solutions.

Onward Christian Soldier: The Salvation Army’s Ronji Tanielu talks to The AM Show’s Duncan Garner about “The State of Our Communities” 2018 report.

THE LATEST “State of Our Communities” report from the Salvation Army exposes a worrying fragility in New Zealand’s social relationships. Behind the happy multicultural façade so beloved of politicians and bureaucrats, racial animosities fester and tensions between competing ethnic communities multiply.

The report (based on hundreds of face-to-face interviews in Kaitaia, Whangarei, Manurewa in Auckland, New Plymouth, Hornby in Christchurch and Timaru) describes rising resentment at the manifest economic inequalities afflicting the Maori population of Northland; tensions between old and new immigrant communities in Auckland; and a South Island Pakeha monoculture struggling to comprehend the meaning and purpose of diversity.

That this racial dimension to the state of our communities has been explicitly recognised in the Army’s report is itself exceptional. The preferred response of New Zealand’s core institutions is to insist that, thankfully, inter-ethnic conflict is a phenomenon alien to our society.

The wonder is, however, that an explosion of racial violence has not already torn Northland apart. Immigrants from South Africa marvel at the province’s apparently effortless separation of the races. What the apartheid system struggled to effect in their homeland, Pakeha Northlanders have achieved without recourse to anything so crude as Pass Laws. Kaikohe is poor and brown. Kerikeri is rich and white. And never the twain shall meet.

What the Army’s interviews reveal, however, is an unwillingness on the part of younger Maori to accept this state of voluntary apartheid. After all, the nation’s official ideology attributes huge value to New Zealand’s indigenous heritage. Unsurprising, then, that the impoverished Maori communities of the North are requiring these Wellington-based bi-culturalists to back their positive rhetoric with tangible resources. Upon the speed and fulsomeness of their response, the maintenance of racial harmony in Northland largely depends.

The arrival of new immigrants from East and South Asia in Auckland suburbs hitherto the preserve of immigrants from the Pacific Islands is similarly testing New Zealand’s multicultural assumptions. Cook Islanders, Niueans, Samoans and Tongans were brought to New Zealand as factory workers and labourers. The entrepreneurial traditions of immigrants arriving from India and China have not always fitted easily into communities hitherto dominated by wage workers.

Compounding these economic divergences are the sharp religious differences between the devoutly Christian Pasifika and the followers of the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim religious traditions. The rigorous secularism of official New Zealand is singularly ill-equipped to deal with the strong feelings that arise when different religious communities are required to practice their faiths in close proximity.

Pakeha living in the South Island are often bemused at North Islanders’ preoccupation with bi- and multiculturalism. In communities of overwhelmingly pale complexion, which most South Island towns and cities tend to be, it all comes across as vaguely obsessional. The racial homogeneity of provincial centres like Timaru encourages all manner of easy assumptions about what constitutes a “real” New Zealander – along with some potentially dangerous misapprehensions about how easy it is (or should be) for outsiders to “fit in”.

Southern Man’s obtuseness on matters cultural largely explains his preoccupation with the malign effects of inadequate and/or unaffordable housing in his community. There is no clearer manifestation of poverty than homelessness, and nothing breeds fear, anger and resentment faster than the obvious sufferings of the poor.

Overlay that economic distress with the even more terrifying effects of drug-dealing, and the addictions upon which the drug suppliers’ business model depends, and you have a sure-fire recipe for continuously escalating social anxieties revealing themselves in periodic outbreaks of moral panic.

The severity of these panics is accentuated by the tendency of racially and/or economically homogenous middle-class communities (in both islands) to give the manufacture, distribution and sale of illegal drugs a luridly racial cast. If it’s not the shadowy members of Chinese triads and Mexican drug cartels, it’s the scary bros from Black Power and the Mongrel Mob doing the business. That the organised criminals controlling the New Zealand drug trade – especially the scourge of methamphetamine – are, overwhelmingly, wealthy Pakeha, is a fact too frightening for their middle-class neighbours to acknowledge.

In its essence, the Salvation Army’s report contributes yet another collection of personal testimonies to the multitude already enumerating the unrelenting social cruelties of capitalism. Not that the Army couches its analysis in such godlessly Marxist terms. This is, after all, a Christian denomination determined to demonstrate the redemptive power of faith in action. “Thy Kingdom come”, enjoins the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven.” The Sallies try to do good one family, one person, one soul, at a time.

Yet even these Good Samaritans in uniform cannot ignore entirely the systemic character of the sins they are pledged to wage war against. The correlation of high numbers of Maori with high levels of poverty; of high levels of poverty with high levels of homelessness and drug abuse; is difficult to miss.

The hardest test for any Christian is to locate the source of human wickedness. Attributing the ills of society to the moral weakness of their victims is always easier than fighting those who made the wrong too strong to resist. Though they call themselves an army, the Sallies have, historically, tended to go to war against the symptoms of sin. Vanquishing the causes of human distress: imperialism, racism, economic exploitation; poverty and social despair; they prefer to leave to God.

To date, not a conspicuously successful strategy for replicating Heaven on Earth.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 14 December 2018.

Normalising The Unthinkable.

Dark Imaginings: That more and more novelists and screen-writers are reaching for the deadly virus plot-line reveals an alarming shift in the zeitgeist. Slowly but unmistakably, the mood of the world’s artists is darkening. Few now are willing to embrace the heroic hopefulness of a Tolkien. Indeed, the twenty-first century fixation with extinction-level pandemics points to an artistic community tormented by murderous despair.

NEW TO SOHO on Sky Television is the latest “Deep State” thriller, Condor. In brief, the plot revolves around a genocidal conspiracy involving a rapacious firm of military contractors* and rogue elements within the CIA. Their goal? To release a deadly virus with which they hope to wipe out vast swathes of the population of the Middle East. The second episode opens with the infamous quotation attributed to Joseph Stalin:

Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.

That more and more novelists and screen-writers are reaching for the deadly virus plot-line reveals an alarming shift in the zeitgeist. Slowly but unmistakably, the mood of the world’s artists is darkening. Few now are willing to embrace the heroic hopefulness of a Tolkien. Indeed, the twenty-first century fixation with extinction-level pandemics points to an artistic community tormented by murderous despair.

It is the privilege of artists to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. Which is exactly what so many of them are doing in response to the deepening crisis of anthropogenic global warming. Human nature being the raw material out of which they fashion their artworks, it is not difficult to understand their growing pessimism. With every passing year, and every disregarded warning from climate science experts, it becomes clearer and clearer to them that the human species is not going to make it. Unsurprisingly, their imaginative powers are being turned to the subject of how best to rescue the planet’s other life forms.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche long ago recognised the dangers of turning the human imagination towards extreme solutions. His forebodings are best expressed in two, oft-quoted aphorisms: “Have a care when fighting dragons, lest ye become a dragon yourself.” And: “Stare not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss stare back into you.”

The risk of so many artists concluding that the only solution to Climate Change is to rid the planet of its most dangerous species, is that the most talented among them possess the creative power to make it sound like a good idea. Life has a terrible habit of imitating art.

The other great hazard associated with releasing the terrifying idea of eliminationism into the intellectual bloodstream of the non-artistic community is that the idea of deliberately destroying billions of innocent human-beings will become normalised. In no time at all, the unthinkable will become thinkable. People in a position to make awful things happen will begin to ask themselves: “Why not?”

The writers behind Condor have yet to move beyond the genocidal notion of drying up the sea of the Middle-Eastern peoples in which the Jihadist fishes swim. A reprehensible enough idea in itself but falling well short of the historically unprecedented crime of eliminating 95 percent of the human species. Even so, the Condor series points to the awful probability of eliminationist thinking taking hold in the minds of Deep State actors already quite capable of ordering drone strikes on wedding feasts; deploying chemical weapons against designated enemies of the state; and hacking up the sovereign’s critics with a bone saw.

Would that the world’s artists were willing to latch on to the much more optimistic Fixing-Climate-Change scenario elaborated by Counterpunch contributor, Steve Hendricks. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/07/what-if-we-just-buy-off-big-fossil-fuel-a-novel-plan-to-mitigate-the-climate-calamity/ His eminently practical plan of simply paying the fossil fuel industry to keep their product safely in the ground; and then giving them the job of transitioning humankind to a sustainable green future; is proof of what we human-beings are capable of conceptualising when we shun the darkness and choose instead to keep our eyes firmly fixed upon the light.

*These private sector bad guys all work for “White Sands” – an insider joke aimed at those already familiar with the notorious exploits of the all-too-real military contractor, Blackwater, during the Iraq War. Black Water – White Sands. Geddit?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of 11 December 2018.