Remembrance Day 2014: The Poetry of Wilfred Owen

 

Wilfred Owen: 1893 - 1918

IF YOU'VE A SPARE HOUR, watch this excellent 2007 docudrama from the BBC, A Remembrance Tale, about Wilfred Owen, is hosted by the veteran broadcaster and author, Jeremy Paxman. The most famous of the English-speaking war poets, Wilfred Owen, spoke of "the pity of war"; and of poetry being found within that pity. It is surely no accident that World War I is remembered principally through lines of poetry. It is also fitting, for if the horrors of war - especially those of the First World War - are to be translated into words at all, then poetry is surely the only form of language equal to the task.

Video courtesy of YouTube.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Good News For The Left!

About Bloody Time! In a recent newspaper article, Stephen Mills, Executive Director of UMR Research, spells out just how well placed the Left is to reverse its current difficulties. All they need are the right policies and the right leader. Piece of cake!

 

EVER SINCE THE DEBACLE of 20 September 2014, the New Zealand Left has been hanging out for some good news. Today, thanks to Stephen Mills, the Executive Director of UMR Research, it has finally got some.

 

UMR Research has for many years been the Labour Party’s principal polling agency, so Mills’ article, The Future For Labour, based on the findings of the agency’s latest “Omnibus Survey” (posted Monday, 10 November 2014, on the Stuff website) may well have been commissioned by its principal client.

 

No matter. Good news is good news whoever pays for it – and the results of UMR’s telephone “Omnibus Survey” are very good news indeed.

 

According to Mills: “Asked to define themselves on a 1-10 left to right scale based on degree of support or opposition for Government provision of services, the need for Government to intervene in the economy and a progressive tax system, 30 percent of New Zealanders were clearly left (0-3) on the scale; 42 percent in the centre (4-6) and 25 percent clearly right (7-10). As is often observed the centre is the battleground in New Zealand politics.”

 

Thirty percent, Comrades! Thirty percent! Nearly a third of the electorate self-identifies with the precepts of New Zealand-style social-democracy. (Those seeking the “socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange” obviously constitute a much smaller subset of this larger group, although, if “socialisation” was ever properly explained to the voting public, who knows?)

 

But wait (as they say on the steak-knife commercials) there’s more! Mills and his fellow pollsters were not willing to stop at this broad-brush depiction of the electorate. They wanted to know a little more about these “Centre” voters. Suspecting that their respondents might be using the centrist designation as a safely neutral ideological haven, the pollsters pushed them just a little bit harder.

 

“If the 42 percent in the centre bloc are split up further”, notes Mills, “12 percent go left; 10 percent go right and 20 percent remain smack in the middle of the scale.”

 

That’s forty-two percent, Comrades! No wonder John Key, an inveterate poll-watcher, once conceded that most New Zealanders are socialists at heart. No wonder, too, that the National Party’s strategists are at such pains to abjure the notion that their policies cleave consistently to the Right. Without the support of that 20 percent in the middle of the scale, the National Party’s electoral prospects would be decidedly grim.

 

But, as Mills is quick to point out, there is currently no reason for National to be worried.

 

“The problem for Labour is that National is now both totally dominating the centre and winning more left votes than Labour and the Greens are winning right votes.”

 

John Key’s huge achievement as a conservative political leader has been to build out from the Right’s electorally weak position to encompass enough of what are, potentially, his political opponents to win three general elections on the trot. In the process he has driven the Left’s vote back towards its UMR-identified core of 30 percent.

 

Strategically-speaking, this tactical triumph is not without risk. As Mills notes: “Looked at another way National has moved further from its base than Labour.”

 

When Labour did this, back in the 1980s, the results were tactically spectacular but strategically disastrous. From a dizzying 47.96 percent of the popular vote in 1987 (the election in which Judith Tizard came within 407 votes of winning Remuera!) Labour would plummet, only three years later, to just 35.1 percent of the votes cast.

 

Looking back, the tactical successes racked-up by both parties over the past 30 years have depended hugely on two vital factors: a demonstrably superior party leader (Lange, Key) and the bold appropriation of some of their ideological opponent’s economic and social policies (Monetarism, Labour-Lite) which, for a short time at least, their governments gave every sign of understanding more thoroughly and implementing more effectively than their traditional sponsors. What is equally clear, however, is that such historically audacious forays into enemy territory cannot survive the loss of either the leader, or the economic and social conditions, which made such tactical audacity possible.

 

In other words, if something were to happen to Key, and/or the economic and social condition of the country was to suddenly deteriorate, National would find it very difficult to retain the support of the substantial plurality of centrist voters it currently enjoys, and would very soon be facing electoral defeat.

 

The precariousness of National’s electoral position is not the only good news contained in Mills’ article.

 

Both Labour and the Greens can also draw enormous reassurance from the clear evidence that New Zealanders ideological default position is still very solidly on the Left. Starting from a putative Centre-Left support-base of 42 percent, the two principal parties of the Left need only wrest back an additional 10 percentage points from National for electoral victory to be assured.

 

Labour, in particular, should be comforted by the fact that the UMR survey shows that a solid majority of Green Party supporters acknowledge Labour’s position as the dominant party on the left of New Zealand politics – at least for the foreseeable future.

 

Which leaves New Zealand’s oldest political party with just two vital tasks to accomplish.

 

The first is to find themselves a leader of the calibre, and who possesses the enormous cross-over appeal, of David Lange and John Key.

 

Is that person among the four candidates currently competing for the Labour Leadership? Personally, I’m doubtful. But, if Labour members were content to be guided by the logic of the UMR survey, then the choice would appear to lie between Grant Robertson and David Parker. Not because they best embody Labour’s core ideological values – they don’t – but because they undoubtedly represent Labour’s best shot at wooing and winning at least half of those crucial centrist votes.

 

As John key and Steven Joyce worked out long, long ago, this crucial fifth of the electorate contains neither the best nor the brightest of the New Zealand population. They are, for the most part, extremely lazy thinkers who draw practically all of their notions about domestic politics from the general tone of the news media’s coverage.

 

If the major media outlets’ (especially the television networks’) collective verdict vis-à-vis the Leader of the Opposition is consistently negative, then the chances of the Centre Vote going in that direction are slim.

 

It simply does not pay, therefore, to choose a leader whom the media finds it difficult, or, as happened with David Cunliffe, impossible, to accept.

 

The other crucial task is to make sure that Labour’s policy platform easily and obviously conforms with UMR’s brilliantly succinct description of what constitutes a Centre-Left, social-democratic, programme in New Zealand.

 

·         Support for Government provision of services.

·         The need for Government to intervene in the economy.

·         A progressive tax system.

 

If Labour, fed up with being scratched, opts to stroke the electoral feline from its head to its tail, nothing more is needed. Apart from a leader who’s not going to scare the bejeezus out of the cat!

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites on Tuesday, 11 November 2014.

Cooking The Medical Books: Citizens suffer in stoical silence so National can keep taxes low.

Suffering In Silence: The Government and its cash-strapped DHBs are relying upon the decency and stoicism of the average citizen to get them off the fiscal hook.

 

FUDGING THE FIGURES is what governments do when effective policy solutions are ruled off the table. According to Radio NZ News: “New research shows nearly 40 percent of patients who need hip and knee operations in at least two district health boards are not getting them because of budget restrictions. The study, published in The New Zealand Medical Journal, which looked at Northland and Hawke's Bay, found the drive to cut wait times has left 36 percent of patients with moderate to severe pain and disability untreated.”

 

Clearly, the now retired National Party Health Minister, Tony Ryall, was unable to persuade his fellow “Brat Packer”, Bill English, to appropriate sufficient funds to keep our public health service up to the job of actually serving the public.

 

One doesn’t imagine that English, an essentially decent politician, was very happy about this. But with his colleagues demanding lower taxes for the wealthiest New Zealanders (and some modest covering reductions for the rest of us) he was left with little choice. It would require a Labour-led government of more than usual fortitude and radicalism to institute the fiscal reforms necessary to ready the New Zealand health system for the influx of ageing Baby Boomers steadily falling prey to all the ills that flesh is heir to.

 

Tony Ryall’s response to his increasingly underfunded health system was, however, ethically extremely radical. According to the study published in The New Zealand Medical Journal, he simply invisiblised upwards of a third of New Zealanders in need of non-urgent surgical interventions.

 

Chairman of the Canterbury Charity Hospital Trust, Christchurch surgeon, Philip Bagshaw, told Radio NZ that focusing on the length of time people were waiting, rather than the length of the waiting lists themselves, was “a great way of hiding the scale of the problem”.

 

“It’s become smoke and mirrors”, said Mr Bagshaw. “They’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy, so they say the waiting list is only six or four months, but that’s because they only allow that many people onto the waiting list.”

 

Smoke and mirrors it may have been, but the practice permitted Tony Ryall to boast that the time spent waiting for elective surgery was steadily decreasing. According to Mr Bagshaw, haemorrhoids, cataracts, hernias and varicose veins – among a host of other debilitating conditions – are simply not being treated in the public system until such time as serious complications render them acute – and costly.

 

Allowing the condition of sufferers to deteriorate to the point where they are forced to seek emergency admission to public hospitals is, not surprisingly, a considerably more expensive proposition, long term, than providing treatment early. “Investing in health early on is not only humane but also makes good economic sense because to do things in a timely way is the cheapest way,” Mr Bagshaw confirmed. “If you deny people treatment ... they come back later with bigger complications and cost more money.”

 

As scams go, however, this is a particularly clever one, because, obviously, not all of those sufferers rendered invisible will end up undergoing emergency surgery. Most will simply go on suffering, unheard and untreated.

 

In other words, the Government and its cash-strapped DHBs are relying upon the decency and stoicism of the average citizen to get them off the fiscal hook. Their deeply cynical – but apparently accurate – expectation has been that the voters will evince little interest in how Mr Ryall’s miracle is being achieved, just so long as the waiting period for elective surgery keeps decreasing. And so it proved. On Election Day, most people accepted without demur that John Key’s government was managing our public health system with considerable skill.

 

So, it’s ‘all good’ for the Government? Well, not necessarily. As the Baby Boomers find themselves relying more and more on the public health system, they are bound to flex their still massive demographic muscles to ensure that sufficient funding is appropriated to meet their growing needs. With everything to fight for in terms of free medical care, there is nothing to suggest that the ageing Boomers will not emulate the exemplary levels of electoral participation demonstrated by older voters generally. In securing their self-interested health objectives, the Boomers will be aided by the short-sighted failure of so many young voters to participate in the electoral system.

 

The politicians of the future will respond to the medical demands of the Boomers in the way politicians always do when presented with a choice between serving the interests of citizens who vote and the needs of citizens who stay at home. If young New Zealanders want a viable public health system to still be in place when they reach their 60s and 70s, then they’d better start voting in the same proportions as their elders. Otherwise the health statistics being fudged will be their own.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 8 November 2014.

Unfortunate Sons

 

Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival 1969

 

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL's Fortunate Son stands alongside the very best of the anti-war songs to come out of the United States tragic involvement in Vietnam. Written by John Fogerty and released in September 1969 (as the B-side to CCR's runaway hit Down On The Corner) the song so accurately captured the spirit of the times that by December it had climbed to No. 3 in the pop charts. Rolling Stone magazine rates Fortunate Son No. 99 of its 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.

The accompanying video montage features some of the most iconic images of the era. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the troops pictured fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are professional soldiers and reservists - not conscripts. Uncle Sam had to learn something from Vietnam - even if it was only the unwisdom of forcing the sons and daughters of registered voters to fight and die in faraway places!

Video courtesy of YouTube

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

A Professional Engagement

Somebody's Son: There is a world of difference between deploying professional soldiers to kill the State's enemies and shipping out the conscripted sons (and nowadays daughters) of its citizens. The Vietnamese, unlike the Japanese and the Germans, posed no imminent and/or existential threat to the United States, which is why the decision to send tens-of-thousands of young conscripts to fight and die in its paddy-fields proved to be such a huge historical mistake. (Photo: Horst Faas/AP)

 

NEW ZEALAND’S PARTICIPATION in the war against Islamic State has already prompted angry criticism from the Left. This country boasts a pacifist tradition extending back at least 100 years, to the First World War and the persecution (among many others) of the conscientious objector, Archibald Baxter.

 

Less honourable, perhaps, and certainly less grounded in the pacifists’ profound ethical objection to the taking of human life, is the Far Left’s historical opposition to “imperialist wars”. Significantly, their protests against these conflicts were generally organised on behalf of “the victims of capitalist aggression” – whose victories in such “wars of national liberation” were eagerly anticipated. These were the unabashed revolutionaries, who, in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, chanted: “One side right, one side wrong. Victory to the Viet-Cong!”

 

Somewhere in the “middle” of the Left stand those who are willing to accept that in some circumstances (World War II being the most cited example) the taking up of arms is not only an urgent, but also a profoundly moral, necessity. This idea of the “Just War” goes all the way back to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, whose arguments are still drawn on by members of the UN Security Council whenever decisions have to be made about whether or not to authorise the use of military force.

 

The greatest anti-war movement of the last century was undoubtedly the international movement against the US involvement in Vietnam. All three of the great anti-war traditions: the Christian prohibition against waging “unjust war”; the revolutionary socialists’ objection to “imperialist war”; and the pacifists’ uncompromising opposition to the taking of human life; were intermingled in the global “mobilisations” against the Vietnam conflict.

 

What elevated the anti-war struggle in the United States to a cultural watershed, however, wasn’t opposition to US imperialism, or even the appalling loss of life, although both of these considerations played a part. No, what really transformed the anti-war protests into a genuine mass movement was conscription. Overwhelmingly, the young men sent to fight and die in South-East Asia were draftees – conscripts whose “number” had, quite literally, come up.

 

Not In My Place: American university students whose call-up had been 'deferred' strove to rescue their conscripted brothers by ending the war in Vietnam.

 

One of the few ways to avoid the draft was to enrol in a course of university study. It is only when one grasps the importance of “deferment” that the crucial role played by university students in the American anti-war movement makes any historical sense. As the number of American soldiers in Vietnam began to escalate, those whose service had been deferred felt an increasingly urgent obligation to bring the conscripts home. Young working-class Whites, Blacks and Hispanics were literally dying in their place – and for no good reason. The US wasn’t battling Hitler in Vietnam, it was napalming and carpet-bombing peasants whose only crime was an iron-clad determination to rule themselves.

 

America’s experience in Vietnam brought home to its leaders the huge risks entailed in fighting what came to be seen, increasingly, as an unjust war with conscripted citizens. If a government’s intention is to use its military resources for any other purpose than national defence against an imminent and existential threat, then it is best that the soldiers, sailors and air personnel employed are professionals – not draftees.

 

Doing Their Job: New Zealand's highly professional special forces personnel in Kabul, Afghanistan.

 

A professional standing army, precisely because it is not composed of the voters’ conscripted sons and daughters, may be deployed in relative political safety for any number of purposes (many of them, these days, decidedly dark). The usual left-wing suspects will complain – but with considerably less effect than during the war in Vietnam.

 

Professional soldiers look forward to war. Fighting for their country is exactly what they signed-up to do. Should they fall in battle, their families, their comrades and their country’s leaders will mourn and honour them, but at the back of everybody’s mind will be the thought: “They knew this might happen, but they weren’t deterred. They died doing the job they’d always wanted.”

 

Try making an anti-war movement out of that!

 

True pacifists are few and far between. Anti-imperialists almost always have a dog in the fight. And unjust wars, providing the “enemy” is rendered sufficiently terrifying, and providing the participating military forces are made up of highly-trained professionals just itching to get amongst it, are unlikely to cause the governments that wage them very much in the way of serious political bother.

 

Few Kiwis will march in the streets for Islamic State.

 

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, 7 November 2014.

The Men Behind The Wire

 

The Men Behind The Wire - The Wolfe Tones, 1973

WHEN JOHN KEY reassured us that any New Zealand soldiers sent to train Iraqis would be safe "behind the wire" of Iraq's army bases, it dislodged a little stone from the wall of my memory. "The men behind the wire?" Why did that phrase have such a familiar ring? And then I remembered the back bar of the Cook, in Dunedin, and men with thick Belfast accents, and learning the words to a new song born of "The Troubles".

Watch this video and struggle, as I did, with images of young men wearing balaclavas, carrying sub-machine guns and firing rockets - not from the dusty streets of Gaza or Mosul but from the terrace houses and narrow alleyways of Londonderry and Belfast. Understand that those children hurling stones at the retreating squaddies aren't stateless Palestinians from the West Bank but British subjects from the Falls Road. Absorb the fact that those gun-toting terrorists belong not to IS, but to the Provisional IRA. There are no Muslims in this footage - just good Catholic lads and lasses!

The song itself, written by Paddy McGuigan of the Barleycorn folk group, protests the British Government's decision in 1971 to "intern" (i.e. imprison) IRA suspects without charge and without trial in special camps (hence "the wire"). Recorded by Release Records in Dublin The Men Behind The Wire topped the Irish charts for three weeks in January-February 1972.

Our soldiers will not be "behind the wire" in quite the same way as the martyred Irish nationalist, Bobby Sands, and yet the phrase is curiously fitting. For the struggle in Northern Ireland, like the struggle we are about to join in Iraq/Syria, was also born out of religious schism and imperial arrogance. And so, as we watch the video, let us all recall that repression breeds resistance; that guns and bombs solve nothing; and that it is only when people finally agree to sit down and talk to one another that peace and justice become possible.

Video courtesy of YouTube

 

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Risk and Resilience: Introducing John Key’s “Free Thinkers”.

A Good idea - Or What? John Key's appointment of ten "free thinkers" to let him know what he doesn't know about national security is yet further proof of this Government's unwavering commitment to excellence in public relations.

 

FREE THINKERS! Wow! How very different this National Government is from its predecessors. Can anybody imagine Rob Muldoon appointing a group of “free thinkers” to help him identify the potential security risks confronting New Zealand in the 1980s? Crikey! Imagine what a group of “free thinkers” might have been able to do in relation to the Springbok Tour of 1981. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: this is a National Government like no other!

 

So, who are these free thinking New Zealanders? And what mix of talent and experience has Prime Minister Key assembled among the ten members of his new Strategic Risk and Resilience Panel (SRRP). If the Panel’s main function is to “imagine the unimaginable” and to inform the Government of all the things that it doesn’t know it doesn’t know, then let’s take a look at what they bring to the table?

 

Let’s start at the top with Ian Fletcher, currently the head of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). I must confess that the man responsible for maintaining the security of government communications would not have been my first choice in the free thinking stakes. Indeed, the less free such a person is with his thoughts about such matters the better – I would have thought. But, maybe the PM knows something about Mr Fletcher’s job that the rest of have yet to be told?

 

Then there’s Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Minister’s Science Advisor. This looks like a better choice – although Sir Peter’s association with what some are calling an exercise in muzzling the Government’s scientist critics – people like Mike Joy – does rather militate against freedom of thought. Doesn’t it?

 

What about Therese Walsh? Well, as the Chief Executive of the 2015 Cricket World Cup, she clearly knows a great deal about the organisation of sports fixtures. Exactly how that knowledge might usefully contribute to “imagining the unimaginable” isn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps she’s learned the knack of envisaging what the rest of us simply can’t imagine: a consistently good New Zealand cricket team! That really would be a boost to our national security!

 

Karen Poutasi, head of the NZ Qualifications Authority, was obviously chosen to improve the quality of the nation’s spies. Who could question her ability to imagine a new and improved iteration of the New Zealand SIS agent? One whose culinary sights are set slightly higher than the ordinary meat pie, and for whom the contents of Penthouse magazine holds not the slightest interest.

 

And who better than Keith Turner, the chairman of Fisher & Paykel, to anticipate the dastardly plans of Islamic State engineers to adapt the electronics of his firm’s washing machines to some devastating new purpose? The potential threat to the nation’s delicates and coloureds is huge. We could be facing terror in every laundry; mayhem on every clothesline! Isis meets Elba is just too awful to contemplate.

 

Now, as everybody who watches Boardwalk Empire knows, when Al Capone was eventually brought down it was not by a Thompson sub-machine gun, but by the ineluctable laws of double-entry book-keeping. In this respect, panel member, Richard Forgan, from the global accounting firm PWC, clearly has much to contribute. Perhaps he’ll be able to have the Islamic State arrested for tax evasion?

 

Hugh Cowan sits on the Earthquake Commission. When it comes to imagining everything that can possibly go wrong, he’s a good man to have around. Hugh knows, from bitter experience, that what the government (and the rest of us) don’t know can be, quite literally, earth-shattering.

 

Lieutenant-General Rhys Jones, the former head of the NZ Defence Force, is already very good at imagining the unimaginable. He was, after all, able to imagine that New Zealand’s award-winning war correspondent, Jon Stephenson, might be foolish enough to jeopardise his international reputation by claiming he had been somewhere he hadn’t, and met someone he didn’t. That Lt-General Jones wasn’t able to go on imagining such nonsense indefinitely might be considered a weakness. But at least he has proved that imagining things that never happened is a crucial element of the NZDF’s skill-set – one that Lt-General Jones is now very well placed to pass on to his colleagues on the SRRP.

 

Helen Anderson is a director of Niwa, Branz and DNZ. In a world as festooned with abbreviations and acronyms as the “intelligence community” she should fit right in. Keeping one’s thinking free of unnecessary words and phrases can only improve the SRRP’s (which Ms Anderson must surely be referring to already as “Syrup's”?) overall effectiveness and efficiency.

 

Speaking of which, one can only applaud John Key’s appointment of Productivity Commission chairman, Murray Sherwin to Syrup’s distinguished membership. Ensuring that New Zealand gets more national security ‘bangs’ for its Treasury ‘bucks’ can only be a good thing. Can’t it?

 

So, there you have it. The Prime Minister’s free-thinking panel. Those of you who are disappointed that the SRRP does not include people like ‘New Zealander of the Year’, Dame Anne Salmond; investigative journalist, Nicky Hager; former Court of Appeal Justice, Sir Edmund Thomas; TPPA opponent, Professor Kane Kelsey; or that other tireless campaigner for our national sovereignty, CAFCA's Murray Horton; must understand that when John Key talks about “free thinkers”, he is not talking about those thinkers determined to keep us free.

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites on Thursday, 6 November 2014.