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'Rise up against Islam': Kiwibloggers react to the Sydney siege

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[In the aftermath of the siege and shootout at Lindt cafe, thousands of Australians have taken to the streets and to the internet with messages of tolerance. The slogan 'I'll ride with you' has been widely used by Aussies who don't believe that their country's Muslim community should be punished for the actions of Man Haron Monis. Leaders of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities have come together to preach peace. 
Here in New Zealand, though, some observers have had a very different reaction to the tragedy in Sydney. On a number of right-wing blogs, commenters have made Man Haron Monis into a representative of all Muslims, and have demanded the collective punishment of Australasia's Muslim community. 
Here are some excerpts from a long and depressing argument I had in a comments thread at Kiwiblog, the very popular site run by National Party pollster David Farrar, during the Sydney siege. The anti-Muslim ranters at Kiwiblog included David Garrett, a former member of parliament for the Act Party. Garrett is no longer an active member of Act, but his opinions about Muslims are shared by Stephen Berry, who got one of the party's top list spots in this year's elections.
tranquil wrote:
I would love to see the Australian people rise up against Islam as a result of this incident (but it probably won’t happen). I am fed up with Western people being on the receiving end of such savages and barbarians. I would love to see the tables turned and *Muslims* suffer for once. At least the Buddhists in Burma have the right idea in how they are dealing with the Muslims there.
rightoverlabour:
Would the jihadists who read this blog and downtick the comments please tell us who you are so we can put some bullets in you. Else Eff off to Syria and become martyrs. If it’s just lefty pinko liberal types, please eff off to Syria to go and talk nicely to them. David, Can you track who downticks what? This information could be useful in sanitizing New Zealand from Jihadists…
Odakyu-sen:
Little by little, the notion of stopping and reversing Islamic immigration will gain traction. Actions such as these in Sydney will prompt people to question the standard liberal ideology of the belief in tolerance or non-discrimination. Ask a white blood cell about “tolerance” when it comes across a pathogen in the human body.
Scott wrote:
I’ve noticed the 'stopping and reversing of Islamic immigration' being proposed by people on the right, but these folks never explain how it would be done. It seems to me that such a policy would be impossible to implement without the creation of something akin to a police state here. 
Odakyu-sen:
Stopping new immigration is easy. Reversing the trend will involve discrimination. Reclassify Islam as a political belief system. Identify the most virulent strain of Islam (as they are not all the same) and revoke the citizenships of members of that group. Pick one group at a time. Work through the process politely and professionally. Review progress. Proceed on to the next group if required. 
Scott wrote:
You want to 'reclassify Islam as a political belief system'. How do you define this system? Is anyone who self-identifies as a Muslim a Muslim? Would you deport members of the Ahmaddiya faith from New Zealand? They first arrived in numbers in the ’70s, have their own prophet and idiosyncratic beliefs, and are detested by jihadis because their liberalism and ecumenism. Indeed, the Ahmaddiya have often been the target for Al Qaeda attacks. Sectarian Middle Eastern governments persecute the Ahmaddiya, accusing them of apostasy. You'd be sending some of these people to their deaths. 
Religious communities which use the Koran and uphold Mohammed as a prophet but do not consider themselves Muslims would also presumably have to dealt with. The Baha’i community reveres Mohammed, but also regards the Torah and the New Testament as part of the word of God. Presumably our Baha’i Kiwis would have to reform their theology, and part company with their Korans, if they wanted to stay in their homes... 
The policy you're proposing would require the constant monitoring of immigrant populations, to ensure that Muslims hadn’t slipped into the country by pretending to have another or no religion. Muslim New Zealanders who’d renounced their faith so as to remain in the country would have to watched, in case they showed the same backsliding ways as English recusants in the Elizabethan era. Many Muslims would go underground rather than convert or leave the country; their safehouses would have to be raided and emptied. A branch of the police would have to be organised to sniff out and destroy samizdat editions of the Koran.
What would you do with the Kiwi Muslims who lack dual citizenship? What about our Maori Muslims? Perhaps you think some cash-strapped nation could be persuaded to accept some of the Muslims we expel as refugees, in the same way that Nauru and the Papua New Guinea have accepted asylum seekers spurned by Australia? 
waikatosinger wrote:
We don’t need to keep out all Muslims. It is probably enough to ensure we don’t import a large enough number from one place that they can become a community. That is easily achievable by simply setting very small immigration quotas for Muslim countries.
Scott wrote:
The first significant group of Muslim migrants to New Zealand came from Fiji, which is not a Muslim majority country. More recently, many Muslims have arrived from India, which is not a Muslim majority country. 
In many places it is difficult to determine the demographic relationship between Muslims and other groups. Are Muslims a majority in Albania, where fifty years of Stalinist rule left most people with little relationship to religion? What about Bosnia, where being Muslim is often a matter of culture rather than going to a mosque? And in many Third World nations it is difficult to get reliable data on the relationship between different religious communities.
Odakyu-sen wrote:
I agree that facing off against “Islam the monolith” will not work. You have to clearly break down “Islam” into the various sects and deal with each one individually. The different sects are, as you point out, not all the same. Like I said: discriminate. Use common sense. Take the initiative.
Scott wrote: 
But no matter how much you subdivide the Muslim community – whether you decide to deport everyone who calls themselves a Muslim or just X or Y branch of the religion – you are going to face the same logistical problems. Let’s say you decide to pick on Sunni Islam, and leave alone Shi’a and other branches of the faith. You still have the problem of constantly monitoring the New Zealand population for Sunni texts, for secret prayer meetings, for signs of evangelising. You still have to hunt underground Sunni believers through safehouses and encrypted internet sites. You still have to maintain a constant watch for ‘self-converts’ – and since there’s nothing so glamorous as a banned ideology you’ll get a stream of these. You still have to maintain prisons where suspected Sunni are held and interrogated, and deportation camps where the condemned await exile.
And you can’t do all these things without creating a police state.
waikatosinger wrote: 

I do believe in religious freedom. Don’t you?
Scott wrote:
I hope it’s clear that I’ve been trying to call the bluff of those who demand that Islam be banned from New Zealand. I think that by examining the logistics of any attempt to ban Islam we can show what a terrible move it would be. 
The only religion ever to be banned in New Zealand is indigenous. For fifty-five years, Maori were barred by law from worshipping their gods and consulting their tohunga...
The Tohunga Suppression Act was motivated by hysteria and punished a whole religious community for the alleged misdeeds of one of its members. It’s a part of our history which we should remember when we hear calls for the banning of Islam and the deportation of Muslims.
David Garrett wrote:
It appears to be an invariable rule: Let Muslims get to 2% of the population (2.5% in Australia apparently) and you get problems…let them get to 5% (as in the UK) and ghettoization and atrocities occur…It seems the jihadis in Australia aren’t waiting until they get to 5%…
As for the bullshit that banning further immigration from Islamic countries would mean we had a police state here, what a total and unmitigated load of crap…Very very simple: a change of policy to allow no immigration at all from specified countries…easy peasy…
Any country in the Middle East (even Israel, there are Arabs there too) plus any other country which is officially Islamic – such as Pakistan – and any whose citizens have been involved in terrorism… I don’t give a rats how many countries that is…Call it racist if you like – I really don’t care – but can anyone really argue that illiterate uneducated Somalis add anything to our society…except risk?? 
Scott wrote:
According to David Garrett, we should prevent a Muslim demographic bomb from exploding in New Zealand by banning migration ‘from any country in the Middle East’, plus any other country that is ‘officially Islamic’.
As someone pointed out upthread, though, many of the migrants that have arrived in New Zealand from Middle Eastern nations are not even Muslim, let alone supporters of groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda. Many of the Iraqis who live here, for instance, are members of religious minorities – Chaldeans, other Christians, Mendaens. Another big chunk of the Iraqi migrant population are Kurdish Muslims. These communities have arrived here because they have been displaced from their homes by Bush’s war and by the various religious fundamentalists that have taken power in its wake. It is hard to think of any New Zealanders who would be less inclined to raise the black flag of ISIS and Al Qaeda. 
The example of New Zealand's Iraqi community shows why bigoted generalisations shouldn’t be allowed to guide immigration policy.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]


Three holiday shots

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[Continuing the series begun last week...]
Onehunga: the Milburn Carrier, which moves to Westport, is the last of the fleet of large ships that once cut the Manukau harbour. The metal sheets of the Milburn's hull are neurons that help the ship remember, on behalf of all its sunken or scrapped comrades, that journey through the harbour heads - waves striking waves on the bar, the salt haze spreading, dense as smoke, black rocks rearing suddenly, like harpooned whales - 
Ngatea: peat-haze like mustard gas over the Hauraki Plains. Dogs sap a ducksniper's hide. Gorsepods misfire.
Huntly: chimneys make a tundra in the sky, while in the heat haze of Generating Unit 5 faces ripple and disintegrate.

Christmas cheer at the Mall of America

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This photograph was taken yesterday during an anti-police protest in Minneapolis' massive Mall of America; it reminded me of the 1976 sci fi movie Logan's Run, which is set in an underground city whose beautiful young inhabitants are encouraged to party and shop, and then party and shop some more - and threatened with violence if they are imaginative enough to question the logic behind their apparently blissful lifestyle.
The Mall of America's sinister text message to protesters underlines an argument that sociologist Mike Davis has made about the anti-democratic nature of privately owned shopping precincts. 
In City of Quartz, his classic study of life in Los Angeles, Davis notes the difference between a publicly owned city space, like a park or a square, where citizens are often free to meet and discuss ideas, distribute materials like leaflets and pamphlets, and hold protest rallies, and a privately owned mall, where anybody who upsets the owner can be eased out the door by security guards. 
A shopping mall offers the illusion of public space. As long as visitors to the mall keep buying toys and soft drinks and movie tickets, then the illusion is maintained. When visitors to a mall want to behave like citizens rather than consumers, though, they soon discover the true nature of their environment. 

Pleasing a reviewer

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Over the years I've had a few reviews of my work. Some of the reviews have appeared in journals, others on websites, and still others in newspapers. Some have been positive, and some have been negative. But no response to my work has been quite like the review I got tonight from Aneirin.

I'd been struggling for a couple of hours to get my son to bed, and I knew his insomnia was my fault. I'd disrupted his sleep pattern earlier in the day by letting him nap in the car, and ramped up his blood sugar levels by feeding him a couple of ice creams. We'd turned the lights off in his bedroom, lain down, and calmed down - I get more agitated than him, in these situations - when he demanded that I tell him a story.

I improvised a rather trite and formulaic tale of a bear that goes wandering in the woods, gets lost, and then encounters, as evening shadows are growing, a huge lulu (that's the word for owl that Aneirin learned in Tonga last year) with bright yellow eyes. At first the bear is afraid, but the lulu quickly explains that it wants to be his friend, and offers to fly him home. The bear climbs on the owl's back, and the two of them rise high above the trees, so that they can see stars, and a moon as big and yellow as the owl's eyes.

When a little blue house - blue is Aneirin's favourite colour at the moment - appears in the grassland beyond the forest, the bear recognises his home, and the owl expertly descends, landing in the sandpit outside the front door (bears, I explained to Aneirin, adore sandpits as much as he does). The bear's mother and father open the door anxiously, and chastise him for getting lost. They smile, though, when the bear explains how he got home, and the owl is invited inside, where a dinner of pizza and honey - what else do hungry bears eat? - has just been pulled from the oven.

"That's really good story Dad" Aneirin announced, after I'd finished improvising. He closed his eyes and began a smooth descent into sleep. I'd never been more relieved and pleased by a review.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

It's 'Akilisi!

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This is my favourite photograph of 'Akilisi Samuel Pohiva, the long-time leader of Tonga's Democratic Party who has just become Prime Minister of Polynesia's only continuously independent nation.

At Tonga's recent election, 'Akilisi's party won ten of the seventeen seats on the general roll; the others went to independents. The remaining nine seats in parliament are allotted to nobles, and most commentators expected the nobles to unite with independent MPs and form a government that excluded 'Akilisi. There was a precedent for this sort of manoeuvre: at Tonga's 2010 general election the Democratic Party won twelve of the seventeen seats available to commoners, but was defeated when the noble MP Lord Tu'ivakano fumbled together an anti-'Akilisi coalition.

The 2010 general election was the first to be held under constitutional changes that allowed for commoners to elect a majority of MPs. These changes were won after decades of protest by commoners against the privileges of Tonga's royal family and its nobles. In 2005 public sector workers staged an epic strike against the status quo, and twenty thousand people - a fifth of the country's entire population - marched through the streets of Nuku'alofa to demand democracy. In 2006 another pro-democracy demonstration turned into a riot, and scores of capital's shops were looted and burned.

In 2010, many Tongans saw Tu'ivakano's power grab as a betrayal of the spirit of Tonga's revised constitution, and a defeat for the pro-democracy movement. Tu'ivakano's government was widely criticised as corrupt and inefficient, and several of its members fell from power amidst scandals.

In the lead-up to Tonga's recent election, 'Akilisi insisted that his party needed to win all seventeen of the seats available to commoners, in order to forestall any new manoeuvres by the nobles. After the Democratic Party fell far short of its goal many of its supporters looked forward gloomily to another term in opposition.

When parliament convened yesterday, though, five MPs outside the Democratic Party - it is unclear whether they were all independents, or whether some of them were nobles - sided with 'Akilisi, so that he had enough votes to form a government.

It is not clear what sort of policies Tonga's new government will pursue. Ever since he lost his state sector job in the 1980s for criticising Tonga's establisment, 'Akilisi has been preoccupied with the struggle to democratise his country. He has spoken and written ceaselessly about the structure of the country's parliament, the necessity of a free press, and the importance of depoliticising the judicial system, but has had less to say about state budgets and trade patterns. The Democratic Party has never produced a detailed plan for Tonga's small and troubled economy.

As the Tu'ivakano regime grew close to China, 'Akilisi made an alliance with the Australian and New Zealand governments, who are competing with Beijing for influence in the tropical Pacific. Now that 'Akilisi has taken power, his friends in Wellington and Canberra, as well as their friends in the Pacific offices of the International Monetary Fund, will be encouraging him to 'reform' the Tonga economy by privatising state-owned assets and making land and labour easier for foreign investors to acquire.

During the 1980s and '90s, democratic governments that replaced dictatorships in many parts of the Third World were persuaded to pursue the same sort of neo-liberal policies, to the detriment of their peoples. It would be a tragedy if Tongans gained democracy, only to lose their land and their way of life.

The example of several radical governments elected over the last decade in Latin America suggests that it is possible to reject the advice of the IMF without rejecting economic development. Back in June I tried to argue that Tonga could, like Venezuela and Bolivia in recent years, find ways of combining twenty-first century technology and trade links with traditional forms of social organisation and land ownership. The best parts of the old Tonga could not only survive but flourish in a new, democratic environment.

Some commentators, both inside and outside Tonga, have regarded my arguments as romantic. My friend and former colleague Maikolo Horowitz, for example, believes that 'Akilisi has no choice but to implement free market reforms in Tonga, and to open the country to foreign investment (Maikolo explained his thinking during this interview with me).

For now, 'Akilisi's supporters are celebrating his election, and the latest steps in the long march of the pro-democracy movement. At the Seleka Club, the headquarters of Nuku'alofa's political and artistic avant-garde, the kava will be flowing, and the music will be blasting.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Looking for the horizon

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I'll be spending one of the first days of the New Year on the Hauraki and Waikato Plains, helping Brett Cross, who has developed an interest in the region's contribution to aviation and maritime history, search farm drains and peat swamps for the bones of World War Two corsairs and nineteenth century schooners. If Brett and I can con a geiger counter from a handy nuclear scientist, then we might even test a couple of acres of soil near Ngatea for the dose of radiation that the landing gear of a flying saucer supposedly left in 1969.

I will probably spend some of my day with Brett staring west, at the Hakarimata and Hapuakohe Ranges, which together stand like a wall between the flatlands of the Hauraki and the Waikato River.

Like so many New Zealanders, I was raised amidst hills and valleys and trees, and sometimes feel lost and a little dizzy on a bare plain. In the same way that a disorientated yachtie might search a horizon for a familiar rock or star, I have to check the anxiety flat country gives me by looking into the distance for hills or, better still, mountains. The Hakarimata-Hapuakohes only rise a few hundred metres, and are covered in regrowth forest and scrub, but set beside the yellowing dairy farms, gravel pits, and peat swamps of the Waikato they seem thousands of feet high and primordially green.

I took this photo of the Hakarimatas from Gordonton Road, which flows southwest from State Highway One below the sacred maunga of Taupiri, past a dairy farmers' golf course and the ancient marae of Hukanui, into the bleak new northern suburbs of Hamilton. About this time last year, Gordonton Road began to lose traffic to the new four lane expressway Steve Joyce built between Hamilton and Taupiri township. Where Gordonton Road is adorned with bends and dips and rises, Joyce's expressway is determinedly flat and straight.

Without their shoals of commuters and daytrippers, Gordonton and nearby roads sometimes have the melancholy tranquility of estuaries at low tide.

If you're driving through the Waikato this holiday season, you might enjoy avoiding Steve Joyce's four lanes and giving the old roads your custom.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]


Mi go long skul Bislama

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Here's the cover of Terry Crowley's Bislama Dictionary, which my parents-in-law very kindly gave me for Christmas. Bislama is a creole that was invented by ni-Vanuatu labourers who were put to work on Queensland sugar plantations in the nineteenth century; today it is used as a sort of lingua franca in Vanuatu, a nation whose quarter of a million inhabitants speak at least one hundred and ten different autochthonous languages. 

Most of the vocabulary of Bislama comes from the English that was spoken in the Queensland bush and on sailing ships - 'savvy', which was a favourite word of the Carribean pirate and Johnny Depp lookalike Jack Sparrow, has found its way in - but the language's grammar is, linguists say, distinctively Melanesian. Words are spelt as they are pronounced, so that, for instance, Queensland becomes Kwinslan, and intricate metaphors are common - 'basket blong pikanini' (basket belonging to a child), for instance, is Bislama for womb. 'Mi go long skul!' means I'm going to study!
I'm going to study Bislama because I want to visit Vanuatu later this year, and meet some of the descendants of the ni-Vanuatu who were taken to New Zealand as indentured labourers in 1870. With help from the marvellous genealogist Christine Liava'a, I've been tracking these men through the newspapers and government archives of colonial New Zealand, and hope to include them in the book about blackbirding that I'll be writing this year.

Thanks to the erratic magic of the internet, it is now possible to visit even some of the fustiest documents of the nineteenth century from the comfort of a living room couch. While my older son has watched cartoons and recovered from his Christmas chocolate binge, I've been diving into newspaper archives like Papers Past and Trove, and pursuing leaky schooners and febrile, rum and blood-stained planters and traders across the Pacific of the 1870s.

There are uncanny parallels and contrasts between the piece of history I've been exploring and the present I inhabit. I look up from an account of the kidnapping and killing spree of Bully Hayes, the Pacific's most notorious pirate, to find my son watching a cartoon about a loveable old mariner with an eyepatch and a parrot on his shoulder. I read about the Melanesians found naked and dying in the locked and waterlogged hold of an Auckland schooner abandoned in the Gulf of Carpenteria, then check a news site and see photographs of scores of Africans adrift on a glorified lifeboat in the Mediterranean.

As William Morris said, the past is not even past.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Caching in the sunshine

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Who needs to lie on the beach this summer, when there's geocaching to be done beside the roads and on the bridges of our largest city? Here's Paul Janman giving my oldest lad a lecture about the occult science known as GPS, during a recent geocaching mission down Auckland's Great South Road. Paul and I were replenishing the treasure boxes we stashed along the road as part of last year's A Sense of Placeexhibition.
As well as filling ice cream containers with goodies and hiding them under convenient bricks and bridges, Paul showed Aneirin how to locate other people's geocaches. Under his avuncular gaze, Aneirin pulled a small box from a hollow tree on Pukekawa, the green and pleasant volcano in Auckland's Domain. The box contained a tiny replica of Mercury; its distance from Auckland's central business district was supposed to simulate the distance of that planet from the sun. At Mutukaroa, the vast traffic island just north of Otahuhu, Paul and Echo's kids Cosmo and Linton helped stash a cache; you can find coordinates for the treasure, and the comments of a few treasure
hunters, on this page.
Further down the Great South Road, Paul and I stopped to check on the geocache we left at Southdown Park, a rat-ridden maze of overgrown shrubs that sits between half-demolished slaughterhouses and the mud of the upper Manukau harbour. The park's entrances had been sealed, after asbestos was detected amidst its greenery. The ruins of the future have turned toxic. We've had to abandon our Southdown box, but the cache that we left on Mangere Bridge as part of the recent Other Waters festival seems to be doing good business.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

A quick non-contribution to a constitutional debate

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Over at his Kiwiblog, National Party psephologist David Farrar recently tried to provoke a constitutional debate, by asking his readers whether they are looking forward to having the eccentric and allegedly meddlesome Prince Charles as the head of the New Zealand state. A number of monarchists responded to Farrar's challenge. Presenting themselves as conservative defenders of tradition, they have offered a series of arguments in favour of keeping a member of the Windsor family as the head of the New Zealand state. 
Ideas and political positions that are portrayed as ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ by their proponents – and by their detractors, for that matter – often turn out to be, on careful inspection, decidedly contemporary. When a subject like New Zealand's relationship with Britain is debated, there’s a tendency to create a dichotomy between republicans and monarchists, and to present the monarchists as the upholders of some straightforwardly traditional relationship between New Zealand and Britain.
But the arguments that contemporary Kiwi monarchists make would seem strange indeed to their nineteenth and early twentieth century ancestors. The two arguments for the monarchy used repeatedly in the thread at Kiwiblog – the claim that a faraway British monarch would be less likely to interfere in New Zealand politics than some local elected leader, and the claim that the British monarchy is a symbolic reminder of the role Britain played in New Zealand’s early history – both rely on the assumption that New Zealand and Britain are separate nations, and that New Zealand’s interests must be considered separately from those of Britain. Such assumptions are, of course, almost universal in New Zealand today, but they would have seemed culpably radical a century ago.
As I've swum through nineteenth century newspapers for the past few months, I've become used to finding my ancestors using terms like ‘South Britain’ and ‘the Britain of the South Seas’ as synonyms for New Zealand. Until at least the middle of the twentieth century, and probably later, a large majority of Pakeha would have answered the question ‘Why should the British monarch reign over New Zealanders?’ with an answer as simple as ‘Because New Zealanders are British’.
As Tony Ballantyne has repeatedly reminded us, New Zealand was part of a complex and worldwide ‘web of empire’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Britain was always a corporate nation, and British identity has always belonged to multiple populations. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the British empire expanded, New Zealanders, Australians, and Canadians joined the English, Scots, Welsh, and Ulstermen as holders of the identity. We became ‘South Britain’, just as Scotland had become ‘North Britain’. 
There were, of course, some Pakeha who refused a British identity. Many Irish emigrants hated the empire that had occupied their nation for centuries, and a few, like the band of Fenian gold miners who supplied Te Kooti's army with ammunition, supported Maori resistance to the colonisation. For a big majority of Pakeha, though, New Zealand was no less a part of Britain than Cornwall or Yorkshire. 
Although colonial New Zealand and the imperial homeland often found themselves in disagreement – they had very different attitudes, for example, to the wars that were fought in the Waikato and in Taranaki for Maori land – the colonists tended to deal with these disagreements by asserting that they, and not the administrators and politicians in London, represented the true spirit of the Britain. It is significant that, when New Zealand leaders lobbied for British support for the annexation of the islands of the tropical Pacific in the late nineteenth century, they presented themselves as the vanguard of the British Empire. The mandarins of London had lost some of the vigour and courage that had made the empire great; the colonial boys in Wellington could help them recover it. 
And it wasn’t only on the right of the political spectrum that the identity of Britain and New Zealand was assumed – when early advocates of a welfare state and other left-wing reforms made their case, they often justified these measures by talking about New Zealand as a ‘better Britain’, where Anglo-Saxon civilisation could be rid of its injustices and thus perfected.
The notion of the British monarch as a distant and powerless figure, who is preferable to a local head of state mainly because he or she will do less damage than a local, would have horrified conservative New Zealanders of earlier generations. The idea that Britain enjoyed an important relationship with New Zealand, but that New Zealand had nevertheless evolved into a separate nation, would also have seemed heretical.
If we take a long view of New Zealand history, then, we can see that the Republicans and monarchists of the twenty-first century agree about a lot more than they differ. Both accept that New Zealanders are no longer Britons. Britain and British identity were extraordinarily effective inventions, but in the twenty-first century they are losing their meaning, even in the old imperial homeland. Britain's slow, century-long decline as a world power has forced its former affiliates to find new allies and new identities.
The only genuine supporters of the traditional relationship between New Zealand and Britain are individuals like Aidan Work, who advocates the reintegration of this country into a revived British Empire, and organisations like the British Israelites, whose members believe that the British Empire was blessed and directed by Jehovah, and will be revived in the eschatological future. Ninety years ago the British Israelites could count New Zealand’s Prime Minister as a member; today they are obscure eccentrics.
Instead of trying to associate themselves with a tradition that no longer exists, monarchists should acknowledge that their worldview and arguments are as contemporary as those of republicans. 
[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Charlie Hebdo in ancient Greece

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In the aftermath of the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a number of right-wing commentators in the West have faced a dilemma. On the one hand, these commentators hate Charlie Hebdo for the cartoons it publishes poking fun at nuns and priests and Christianity; on the other hand, they also hate Muslims, and can see that the massacre offers a good opportunity for a bit of anti-Muslim propaganda.

It's always fascinating to see one prejudice battling another, contrary prejudice in the mind of a bigot.

In an online magazine (mis)named American Thinker, Selwyn Duke has tried to reconcile his distaste for the godless liberals who publish Charlie Hebdo with his contempt for Muslims. According to Duke, the attack on Charlie Hebdo showed the true nature of Islam, and should be condemned. But we shouldn't, Duke insists, forget that Charlie Hebdo'was an enemy of Western civilisation'.

Duke's words might be true, if we equate Western civilisation with religious authority. But if we understand Western civilisation in terms of reason and argument and art and freedom of speech, then we need only look to the ancient Greeks to find parallels with the provocations of Charlie Hebdo.

In their different ways, philosophers like Diogenes and Socrates and writers like Aristophanes ridiculed the gods of their own society as relentlessly as Charlie Hebdo has attacked the religions of the twenty-first century. At a festival in the fifth century BC, Aristophanes presented his play The Frogs, which made audiences laugh by putting the god Dionysus onstage in a costume of buskin boots, a saffron cloak, and a lion skin, and sending him on a bumbling adventure through the underworld.

Aristophanes would surely be amazed that, nearly two and a half thousand years after he staged The Frogs, so many human beings spend so much time worrying about the proclamations of religious fundamentalists.

When he founded a school called ‘Atenisi, or Athens, on the outskirts of Nuku’alofa fifty years ago, the Tongan philosopher Futa Helu argued that his society needed to learn from the free thinking of the ancient Greeks. Today, I would argue, the whole world needs the spirit of Aristophanes.


Crossing a border

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On the edge of the Maungakawa Hills a secret border can be crossed. To the west of the border are the dairy and horse farms of the central Waikato, and the oak-lined streets and picket fences of the meticulously fabricated town of Cambridge. To the east of the border are plantations of ragwort and sickly radiata, scrubcutters' huts shedding weatherboard panels, unvisited parks filled with convalescing forests, and small quarries, with their rows of empty graves and piles of lime and shingle.
On one side of the border is the flat land that was confiscated after the conquest of King Tawhiao's realm a century and a half ago; on the other side is the rougher country where Tawhiao's supporters repaired to build a parliament, which was almost powerless outside the Maungakawas, and to print their own money, which went unacknowledged by Pakeha stores and banks. 
To cross this border is to exchange one sort of geometry for another. The conquerors of the Waikato made the straight line into a tool and symbol of their rule. Ancient paths that curved cautiously up hills and around swamps were replaced by relentlessly straight roads, just as the scruffy stone walls that had demarcated and heated fields of kumara were replaced by hedges of hawthorn and blackberry so straight and neat that they might have been rows of soldiers standing at attention. Even water was made to march in straight lines, as creeks and rivers were demoted to drains and canals, and given the same routes as roads. Theodolites were set up like canons on the ruins of captured pa; forests fell and swamps retreated before their fire. The panoptic geometry of Descartes, with its windswept horizontal lines and its escape-proof rectangular ceilings, was raised over the empire's new conquest. 
Beyond the confiscation line, though, roads and fencelines that had been stubbornly straight become kinked and curved. Bands of kanuka and karaka sneak into paddocks, reconnoitring for the forests that have their strongholds on the summits of the Maungakawas. Creeks that had been as still as goldfish ponds on the plains suddenly roar like unmuffled motorbikes.
We were travelling in a two car convoy. I was sitting in the navigator's seat of the lead vehicle, brushing potato crisps into the margins of my father-in-law's road atlas and arguing with him about the best road - the slowest, most elaborately curved, least travelled road - to take over the Maungakawas, when we were beeped by my wife and mother-in-law, who were following sceptically with the kids. The youngest member of our party needed breastfeeding, so we all parked near a bridge at the bottom of one of the first sizeable hills in the range. Kanuka and karaka scrambled halfway down the slope towards us, then seemed to lose their nerve. A homemade sign at the end of a gravel drive offered access to a maze-garden for a price that must have been designed to maintain the owner's privacy.
I walked with my older son to the bridge, so that we could throw stones into its creek, which had found its voice as it poured excitedly over boulders. Aneirin was most interested, though, in the vehicles that were curving their ways out of the plain and into the hills. A tour bus, empty except for its grinning driver. Two late model SUVs, so pedantically clean that they must belong to daytrippers from Hamilton. A vintage Chevrolet, whose new engine and shiny purple paint job seemed, like the lycra-clad septegeneurian cyclists who clog Auckland's waterfront roads, like vulgar denials of the passage of time. "Cars are brooming like the water" Aneirin said, as he added a stone to the creek. We had crossed a border. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Road works

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The machines at Rangiriri are as neutral as well-trained beasts. Herds of bulldozers have been ordered to expand the road through King Tawhiao's old fortress, and the site of the Waikato War's decisive battle, into a four-lane expressway, and so they work through the afternoon heat, uprooting daisies and fenceposts, burying ancient musketballs and infant snails. An asphalting machine follows them, grunting and oozing a thick black liquid; my son perhaps mistook it for a wounded dinosaur.
One hundred and fifty-one years ago, in the aftermath of the battle for Rangiriri, work gangs pushed through the gaps canons and infantry charges had made in Tawhiao's earth walls, flattened the earth, and emptied bags of gravel. The Great South Road moved further south. Only a few metres of the Maori fort were preserved, close to the Waikato River. On the other side of the new road, beside the hotel that had opened for travellers, a cemetery holding the remains of Maori and Pakeha killed in the battle - the Pakeha got individual headstones, while Maori were put into a mass grave topped by a grassy mound - was fitfully maintained.

In New Zealand, the destruction and preservation of history often occur simultaneously. The construction of roads and large buildings adds to our knowledge of the past, because surveyors and builders are obligated to call in archaeologists before they begin their depredations. The interesting thing is carefully recorded, and then efficiently destroyed.

A team of archaeologists excavated the land where the new freeway will flow, and discovered a pa built long before the battle of Rangiriri; another layer has been added to the history of the site. The small reserve around the remnant fragment of earthworks has also been tidied up, and given a new set of signboards and a ceremonial arch.

Despite all these enlightened activities, I can't help but feel there's something barbarous about the way our nation's most important road runs right over the fortifications built to stop the roadbuilders and landgrabbers who started the Waikato War. It is as though the men who pushed the road through Rangiriri wanted the invasion of the Waikato to be repeated endlessly, by generations of bullock wagons and Morris Minors and Sunny Datsuns.

The bulldozers, though, are neutral. If their orders only changed, they would contentedly plough up the expressway, and gouge new rifle and kumara pits in the riverside soil, and dig new trenches in which a new army of invaders could stumble and bleed.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Folly

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Josiah Firth made an estate in the conquered Waikato; his folly has the narrow paranoid eyes of a watchtower.

From Rushdie to Catton

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After condemning New Zealand's National government at the recent Jaipur Literary Festival, Eleanor Catton has been called a 'traitor' by talkback radio host Sean Plunkett, and has been the target of a creepily avuncular open letter from National Party psephologist David Farrar.

Like Plunkett, Farrar thinks that Catton ought not to have brought her politics to Jaipur:

We don’t tend to mind criticism at home, but we do get worked up, when people knock their country overseas...Your choice of forum to talk politics is perhaps not the best. A campaign launch is an excellent choice to talk politics. A global literary festival seems rather inappropriate for you to rage against the so called neo-liberal agenda in New Zealand...

If an All Black in 2008 had got up at an international test match and devoted his after match comments to how much he hated the nanny state policies of the then Labour Government, well they would have been criticised greatly also.

Catton became widely known in New Zealand when her novel The Luminaries was awarded the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is perhaps the most famous of all the novels to win the Booker, and there’s an interesting similarity between the responses that the young Rushdie got in the aftermath of his victory in 1981 and the criticism that Catton is copping now.

Midnight’s Children led readers through the modern history of India, and as soon as it took out the Booker Prize Rushdie was being asked for his opinion about the political situation of his homeland. Then as now, Rushdie was not afraid of offering opinions. In an impromptu speech at the dinner where the Booker was awarded, he mocked the Congress Party regime of Indira Gandhi and suggested that she and her diplomatic representatives in London should not try to associate themselves with his success.

Long before he upset Islamic fundamentalists with The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had become a hate figure for the Congress Party and the Indian political establishment. Like Catton, he was condemned as a traitor, because he criticised his country's government in front of foreign audiences.

But Rushdie kept expressing his opinions, whenever he turned up to a book festival or gave an interview, for the same reason that Catton will surely keep expressing her opinions. Despite what Farrar implicitly claims, literature is not some some sort of harmless and meaningless game, like rugby or chess or marbles, that can be pursued and discussed in isolation from the rest of the world. Ever since Aristophanes attacked the political establishment of Athens and Petronious satirised Rome’s ruling class, literature has been a place where the world is examined and judged, and where ideas, including political ideas, contend and quarrel.

Eleanor Catton was invited to the Jaipur festival to discuss the long and ambitious novel she wrote about New Zealand. It is hardly surprising that the festival's organisers and audiences were interested in her opinions about New Zealand society. When he suggests that Catton should have avoided any discussion of her homeland's political and economic situation, and instead offered up some of the cliches and platitudes that dominate speeches at sports awards dinners, David Farrar shows how little he knows about literature and the men and women who produce and read literature. 

New Zealand’s writers have long been critical of their society and its various governments. James K Baxter called New Zealand a ‘sick society’, and Auckland a ‘great arsehole'; RAK Mason denounced this country as a ‘far-pitched place’ where poets had a ‘perilous existence'; Frank Sargeson compared his studies of Kiwi life to reports composed for a sewage board. When they scrutinise and criticise their own society, our writers show loyalty to the critical values nurtured thousands of years ago by scribblers like Aristophanes, and their disloyalty to political elites and their shibboleths.

In 2012 Salman Rushdie was forced to cancel an appearance at the Jaipur festival after his Indian enemies once again denounced him, and eventually threatened violence if he were allowed to take the stage. It is sad that the aftermath of this year's festival has seen prominent and powerful New Zealanders aiming denunciations at one of their own writers.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Expensive Movements - and expensive photographs

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Last December Brett Phibbs and Ioana Gordon-Smith both visited Pukekohe, which has the well-deserved reputation of being New Zealand's most redneck town. 
In a paddock outside Pukekohe Phibbs, who is the chief photographer for the New Zealand Herald, took a series of shots of Polynesian workers while they brought in a harvest of onions. In a gallery near the centre of town Gordon-Smith, a curator and art critic, set up an exhibition called Making Visible, in which a group of artists emphasised, with a mixture of exasperation, anger, and humour, the contribution that workers from the Pacific Islands have made to New Zealand's economy and culture.
Phibbs' photographs were published in the Herald, and seen by many thousands of Kiwis. The exhibition that Gordon-Smith curated was viewed by a far smaller number of people, some of whom walked out of the gallery when they were confronted by images of Pacific Islanders driving forklifts or lying in Aotea Square.
Over at the online arts journal EyeContact, I've contrasted the photographs that Phibbs took at Pukekohe with some of the art that Gordon-Smith brought together in the town's gallery, and asked what Phibbs' images tell us about the way New Zealand sees migrant workers and Pacific Islanders. I've argued that Salome Tanuvasa's two screen video work Expensive Movements, which was shot at a brewery on Auckland's Great South Road and a hotel somewhere in the east of the city, can be seen as an implicit reply to Phibbs' photographs. 
Unfortunately, the New Zealand has refused to let EyeContact reproduce Brett Phibbs' photographs without paying an unreasonably high fee. The paper's stance is disappointing, because New Zealand's galleries and museums have always allowed EyeContact to reproduce images of the works they hold for free. I'm hoping that Brett Phibbs will respond to my comments on his work by posting the photographs he took at Pukekohe online, so that everyone can see them.
[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Two shots from Huntly

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      Inside the freezer, a bestiary.    

                           
The power station sucks another tide through its lungs; light lies on the river like the scales of poisoned fish.

John Macmillan Brown's return from exile, and other fantasies

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[Summer is the time of the year when I invent over-ambitious and sometimes absurd projects, and burden friends, editors, and publishers with my fantasies.

I sent this e mail to Paul Janman recently. I don't think he has time to take on the project, and I don't have the time or the expertise to develop the idea myself. I thought I'd post my e mail to Paul here, though, in case it finds a reader who is equipped with the time, expertise, and enthusiasm to retrieve John Macmillan Brown's vast and strange novels from exile in the library of obscurity...]


Hi Paul,


John Macmillan Brown was educationalist, an explicator of Shakespeare, and a scholar - a sometimes wayward scholar, it must be said - of the Pacific, who is perhaps best remembered today for being the grandfather of James K Baxter. In the first years of the twentieth century Brown published, under the pseudonym of Godfrey Sweven, two massive novels - Riallaro, the archipelago of exiles, and Limanora, the island of progress -  that were intended as satires on religion and superstition and as arguments for atheism, rationalism, and science.


Influenced by Gulliver's Travels and - perhaps - by HG Wells, Brown sends the narrator of his books on a journey to an obscure region of the Pacific, where a series of bizarre societies have evolved on a series of almost perfectly isolated islands. Some of these societies are rustic and fierce; others are highly enlightened, and fitted out with supermodern technology. Readers are invited to draw conclusions about the connection between material progress and rationalism.
Brown's novels are nearly plotless, and consist mostly of extremely detailed descriptions of odd buildings, machines, and ideas. Because of their lack of action and teeming details, they are often dull to read.

But the images which Brown cumbersomely assembles are often original and strange. Arguably, they express subconscious obsessions and urges that are at odds with the author's rather sterile rationalism.


Let me offer an example. In a city that Brown's narrator visits, old-fashioned religion has been replaced by a sort of theatre, in which humans can watch film-like projections that give them the same ecstatic feeling that the worship of gods might once have provided. Brown's strange theater seems to me to express a longing for religious rapture, as much as a freedom from it.


Brown's books can be seen as pioneering works of science fiction, and they also look forward to some of the work of the surrealists. It is extraordinary that a New Zealander could produce such material a century ago. 
I was imagining that you might be able to 'translate' Brown by mapping and visualising his vast and weird fictional world. Using your skills as a film maker and editor, you could shuck off those endless passages of minute description, and instead give us Brown's imaginings in hyperlinks and images. I'm thinking of a very particular, very interactive, and probably very original, type of e book: an island where visitors could lose their way...

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Public intellectuals, and other enemies of elitism

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[In the aftermath of the debate about Eleanor Catton's criticisms of the Key government, the Christchurch Press has published a long and thoughtful article by Philip Matthews about public intellectuals and their place in New Zealand society. When he was researching his article, Matthews sent a short questionnaire to high-profile intellectuals like Nicky Hager and Jane Kelsey, as well as to dimmer lights like myself. Matthews has quoted a few of my responses in his article, but here they are in full.]

Do you consider yourself a public intellectual? 

I am a public intellectual because I do intellectual work that I try to relate to public issues. I research and write about the history of culture and ideas, but I don't want my research to be of merely historical interest. If I study New Zealand's nineteenth century, it's partly because I think that the events of that time, like the attempts of New Zealand to build a Pacific empire and the wars between Pakeha and Maori, are of relevance to the twenty-first century. In the same way, if I write about a great cultural figure of the past like George Orwell, it's because I think that figure has something to tell us today. 

What does the role involve? 
I admire many public intellectuals who have worked inside New Zealand's universities and museums, like the late Judith Binney and the late Roger Neich, but I also revere men and women like RAK Mason, Hone Tuwhare, and Elsie Locke, who worked for long periods in blue collar jobs, organised study groups inside their workplaces, gave lectures in trade union and community halls, and wrote important things about New Zealand society and its history during their free time. These working class public intellectuals believed that in a democratic society every citizen should take an interest in and contribute to intellectual debate. I agree with them. As the great Tongan public intellectual Futa Helu said, a democratic society is a society where everyone minds everyone else's business. 
What are the risks of the public role? 
The public intellectual risks being misunderstood by both intellectuals and the public. Intellectuals who are content to work within their chosen fields, without relating their research and writing to contemporary issues and debates, can sometimes consider public intellectuals a little vulgar, because of the way we try to popularise ideas and offer opinions about political issues. On the other hand, members of the public can perceive an intellectual who jumps into a public debate as some sort of elitist, who thinks his or her opinion is automatically more valid than those of ordinary mortals. 
In some ways both of these responses are understandable, even if mistaken. Specialised scholarship is very important - without it, we would not have the facts and theories that are raw material for informed discussion of our world. And the Kiwi suspicion of intellectuals is often related to an egalitarian irreverence - a refusal to consider that qualifications or wealth or bloodline makes one person's opinion automatically better than another's - that is preferable to any form of snobbery. 
I'd like to convince anti-intellectual Kiwis that public intellectuals are the enemies of elitism, rather than its exponents. Public intellectuals want to storm the palisades that separate intellectuals from the rest of society, and spread knowledge and debate. The way to defeat intellectual elitism is to create more public intellectuals and more public intellectual debate. 
It is unfortunate that Eleanor Catton has been condemned by some commentators as an elitist, because her own words show that she believes in the wide dissemination of knowledge and the democratisation of intellectual discussion. In an article published last year, for example, Catton celebrated public libraries as places where New Zealanders could, regardless of their class background or educational qualifications, encounter ideas and develop their understanding of the world. Catton called for New Zealand governments to build many new public libraries; an elitist would never make such a demand. 
Do you feel NZ supports its public intellectuals? Do our universities and media encourage them?
In New Zealand and elsewhere, intellectuals have to steer a course between marginalisation and cooption. New Zealand intellectuals know all about marginalisation. Censorship was widespread in New Zealand until the 1960s, with classics like Defoe's Moll Flanders as well as works of contemporary literature like Jean Devanny's bestselling novel The Butcher's Shop being targeted by the cops and courts. Our writers and artists were sometimes treated brutally, because of their failure to conform with cultural and mental mores. Frank Sargeson was prosecuted and sent to internal exile in the King Country; Janet Frame was almost lobotomised; Ian Hamilton was thrown into prison for years. 
The recent experiences of Nicky Hager and Catton show that New Zealand intellectuals can still suffer excoriation by the media and the government, and even persecution by the police. But intellectuals also face the danger of cooption. A desire to maintain access to universities and funding agencies can tempt us to pull our punches. The Key regime has been more or less at war with intellectuals, but the Clark government's relatively sympathetic attitude to the arts and to universities sometimes seemed to insulate it from criticism it deserved. 
I remember helping, as a member of an anti-war group, to organise a protest outside a meeting that Clark held with Auckland's art community in the city's main public gallery. It was a month or so after 9/11, and New Zealand troops were in Afghanistan, acting as spotters for George Bush's air force as it carried out an extraordinarily heavy and reckless bombing campaign - a campaign that has since been estimated to have killed five thousand civilians. My fellow anti-war activists and I found little enthusiasm for our placards and leaflets from the painters, art teachers, and curators who had come to see Clark: they were preoccupied with thanking her for the additional financial assistance she was giving the arts sector. Public intellectuals must guard against that sort of cooption. 
[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Exhibitionism: a quick guide for the offended

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With the encouragement of the Young Men's Christian Association, the Taxpayers Union, and various bloggers, thousands of people have signed a petition denouncing the exhibition of an obscene T shirt at Canterbury Museum. 

The shirt, which was produced to promote the heavy metal band Cradle of Filth and shows a nun masturbating as well as the slogan JESUS IS A CUNT, was banned from New Zealand in 2008. Canterbury museum's curators got special permission to show it - in a secluded, adults-only room - as part of an exhibition called T Shirts Unfolding. The museum wants its visitors to think about the limits to freedom of speech, and about the functions of censorship. The YMCA and co argue that the T shirt is offensive, and that museums should not display offensive objects.


I've been wondering when the organisers of the campaign against the T shirt will turn their attention to the Auckland War Memorial Museum. On its second floor, in a room dedicated to the Second World War, Auckland's museum displays two of the most offensive objects of all time - Hitler's swastika flag, and his demented book Mein Kampf. Both objects help the museum tell the story of World War Two.
Museums use objects to tell true stories about society and its past. A museum doesn’t necessarily endorse the messages encoded in the objects it displays, any more than a historian necessarily endorses the events and people he or she describes in an article or book.
The T shirt is helping Canterbury museum tell a story about street art, and about censorship. Canterbury museum isn’t endorsing the meaning of the shirt any more than Auckland museum endorses Nazism by displaying a swastika.
I haven’t seen the show in Christchurch, but I’d argue that state censorship is a subject that is worthy of coverage in our museums. 
New Zealand has had a long history of state censorship of culture and of political speech. A hundred years ago Auckland cops were hunting down copies of Defoe’s Moll Flanders, on the grounds that it corrupted the public, and putting the book’s distributors in court. For decades anyone who published Marx risked time behind bars. In the 1920s Jean Devanny’s feminist novel The Butcher Shop became a bestseller and was promptly banned as offensive. During its confrontation with New Zealand's militant unions in 1951 the National government used emergency legislation to ban the leader of the opposition from radio airwaves. Right up until the 1990s, Maori sculptures displayed in museums or other public places were attacked with axes because the genitalia they showed upset religious conservatives.
We need to be aware of this historical context when we debate censorship and related issues, like state surveillance, today. I’m pleased that the Auckland museum’s permanent display on World War Two includes a section on the censorship laws introduced by the wartime Labour government, and shows a copy of an anti-war newspaper that Labour banned.
Many of the critics of Canterbury museum have argued that 'the community', that ubiquitous but mysterious entity, should be charged with deciding what New Zealand's museums exhibit. If an object is offensive to part of the community, then the object should, they suggest, serve a life sentence in a museum storage room.

But almost every object in a museum is likely to be offensive to someone, if that someone has mistaken exhibition for endorsement. Besides its swastika flag and commie newspaper, the Auckland museum displays artefacts from dozens of religions and relics from a series of wars. 

On the museum's ground floor, for instance, masks and drums associated with Papuan religious rites rest a short walk from a massive and austere sculpture of Kave, a goddess from Nuku'oro atoll, a carving of the Madonna and child by an early Maori convert to Catholicism, and a Samoan-language Bible published by a Protestant church. Relics of the religions of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt advertise their creeds upstairs. In the room of the museum devoted to the New Zealand Wars, the Union Jack and the banners of Maori nationalist movements confront each other, as speakers play recordings of bugle calls and haka.

We can only appreciate myriad and contradictory exhibits like these if we accept that a museum is a space where different aspects of and ideas about the past are allowed to manifest themselves, and where visitors, rather than curators, have the responsibility for forming final interpretations. 


When I worked at the Auckland museum the institution mounted a major show about Charles Darwin’s life and work. Darwin offended the religious views of some visitors. I remember, as well, the way that some veterans of the Vietnam War were offended by the museum’s coverage of that conflict. Those vets didn’t like the museum mentioning that the war had created considerable public debate and protest in New Zealand. 


They may have been offended, and their views may have been shared by hundreds or thousands of other Aucklanders, but neither the religious folks who objected to Darwin nor the Vietnam veterans who objected to references to anti-war protests should have had the right to intervene and alter or shut down the museum’s displays. A museum’s duty is to the truth, and the truth about the past is complex, and polemicists speaking on behalf of a nebulous community have too little patience with complexity. 


[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

New Zealand and the war against ISIS: a lesson from 1885

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Chanting Koranic verses, the army of a grandiose leader conquers a piece of desert and a few towns, and proclaims these possessions a caliphate. Muslim prisoners of war and infidel interlopers are executed in horribly ingenious ways, and in the cities and barracks of the West politicians and generals demand a response. As expeditionary forces are assembled in Britain, North America, and Australia, New Zealanders debate whether they should join the war in the desert.
This narrative might fit with the events of the last few months, but it also describes the dramas of 1884 and 1885, when a Sudanese nationalist calling himself the Mahdi, or messiah, pushed Egyptian and British troops out of his homeland, and made Khartoum the capital of a state that he hoped would eventually cover the world. The British general Charles Gordon, who struggled unsuccessfully against his own messianic delusions, was decapitated after refusing to retreat from Khartoum. 
New Zealanders may have lacked social media and television in the 1880s, but they followed events in the Sudan tenaciously. Newspapers carried long commentaries on the fighting, and in a hall in the military settlement of Hamilton a diorama made with sand dunes and toy soldiers showed crowds of visitors a battle between the Mahdi’s army and the British.
During the first months of 1885 hundreds of volunteers learned to march and salute and shoot in a Sydney barracks, as the government of New South Wales pledged its support for the battle to retake the Sudan. But John Ballance, the Premier of New Zealand, was uninterested in doing his bit for the empire. When a retired colonel of the British army wrote to ask him whether New Zealand would be sending an army to Sudan, Ballance responded negatively, explaining that his sympathies were with the Mahdi, rather than with the British.
In Paradise Reforged, his history of New Zealand from the 1880s to the end of the twentieth century, James Belich argues that Ballance’s refusal to send troops to the Sudan was not some personal eccentricity, but the reflection of a distrust of Britain widespread amongst Pakeha New Zealanders in the 1870s and ‘80s. Men like Ballance had been born in Britain, knew about the inequities and hypocrisies of the place, and had crossed the world to create a new homeland for themselves. For them, New Zealand was a ‘Greater Britain’ which would, like the United States before it, become economically and politically free of the old country.
John Ballance was not some enlightened anti-imperialist – he hated Maori, and had fomented and fought in the Taranaki War of the late 1860s. But Ballance lacked the loyalty to and awe of the British monarchy and empire that had led Charles Gordon to martyrdom in the Sudan.
The story of John Ballance’s response to the war in Sudan might have surprised Philip Hammond, who is the Foreign Secretary in today’s British government. During a recent visit to Wellington, Hammond explained that New Zealand ought to contribute to the new war in Iraq because we are ‘part of the family’ that includes Britain, the United States, and Australia. Britain has, Hammond said, gotten ‘used to’ New Zealand ‘being there alongside us’ when wars are fought.
Hammond was referring, of course, to the Kiwi troops who have fought and died during two world wars and a series of smaller conflicts, like the battle against communists in Malaya and the long struggle against Pashtuni nationalism in twenty-first century Afghanistan.
But Philip Hammond’s argument did not resonate with New Zealand politicians. Cabinet Minister Peter Dunne is not known as a radical anti-imperialist, but in an angry speech to parliament he described Hammond as ‘a patronising figure from abroad’ who wanted to lead New Zealanders into a new ‘round of unmitigated slaughter’.  
John Key’s recent decision to send troops to Iraq has been condemned by the forces of the left, but also by conservatives like Dunne, the Maori Party’s Te Uruora Flavell, and Winston Peters. For the critics, New Zealand’s new military adventure is a pointless show of loyalty to the United States and Britain.

James Belich explained New Zealand’s twentieth century enthusiasm for the British Empire and its wars by pointing to changes in the country’s economy that began late in the nineteenth century. After the advent of refrigerated shipping and the beginning of mass exports of beef and lamb to Britain, New Zealand became economically dependent on the old country, and conservative farmers came to dominate the nation’s politics and culture. Links with Australia and other parts of the Pacific were half-forgotten, and Pakeha New Zealanders, at least, began to consider themselves residents of a misplaced fragment of Britain. When Britain itself came under the domination of the United States after World War Two, New Zealand became an obsequious ally of Washington, as well as London.
Britain’s economic influence over New Zealand has evaporated over the past forty years, and during the last decade and a half China has usurped the United States as an export market for Kiwi farmers. The rise of China and disastrous failure of George Bush’s attempt to remake the Middle East show that, like Britain sixty years ago, the United States is a declining power. The opposition to the new military adventure in Iraq from mainstream politicians like Peter Dunne and Winston Peters is a harbinger of a future where New Zealand governments no longer march in step with the United States and Britain. The nationalism of John Ballance is making a comeback.


 [Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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