MUST READ: No Questions Please – We’re Revolutionaries!
PERHAPS THE MOST ASTONISHING aspect of School Strike For Climate Auckland’s (SSFCA) spectacular self-cancellation was the media’s lack of interest. Oh sure, they picked up the group’s news release, and made its contents known to the public, but that was it. There appeared to be a general reluctance, extending across the whole of the mainstream news media, to investigate the story in any depth. No attempt was made to flesh-out and explain what, to most New Zealanders, was a jarring and baffling item of news. The same media which had welcomed the School Strike For Climate Movement, and praised its achievements, accepted the curious demise of its largest section without serious investigation or comment.
The only explanation for such an egregious dereliction of journalistic duty is that mainstream editors and reporters were fearful of the territory into which any serious investigation of the event was bound to take them. They would have to explain why a group of young and idealistic secondary-school students, people they had written glowing stories about, had somehow been persuaded that they, and their organisation, were racist. They would have been required to question whether the Maori and Pasifika groups into whose hands SSFCA had vouchsafed the climate fight were capable of maintaining the political momentum generated by Greta Thunberg’s global movement.
Most of all, they would have had to help ordinary New Zealanders understand the extraordinary self-abasement contained in the group’s news release:
“We apologise for the hurt, burnout, and trauma. We also apologise for the further trauma caused by our slow action to take responsibility. We recognise that this apology can never be enough to make up for our actions on top of years of systemic and systematic oppression, racism, and the silencing of those who are the most affected by climate change. This apology is just one of our steps in taking accountability for our actions.”
What could possibly have made these young people say such extraordinary things about themselves, and about the movement they had worked so hard to build?
Unwilling to go there, a more politically savvy mainstream news media would simply have ignored the news release. Certainly, if your intention is to let a story die, then the last place you should put it is on RNZ’s “Morning Report” or the NZ Herald’s website. That, however, is where the statement ended up – in all its woke glory. Tens-of-thousands of astonished New Zealanders heard it, or read it, and said: “What on earth?” But, from the editors and reporters who had salved what remained of their journalistic consciences by broadcasting and publishing SSFCA’s words, no answers came – just enthusiastic endorsements of the organisation’s actions from indigenous activists.
Those astonished New Zealanders seeking an explanation for SSFCA’s actions need look no further than the American-born ideology known as “Critical Race Theory” (CRT). According to the University of California, Los Angeles, Luskin School of Public Affairs:
“CRT recognises that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalisation of people of colour. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colour-blind, however, CRT challenges this legal “truth” by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle of self-interest, power and privilege.”
Now, while you might need to be a professor to write the above definition of CRT, you most certainly do not need a PhD to grasp how CRT works in practice. In a nutshell, CRT operates according to the principle: “If you’re white, you cannot be right.”
Naturally, in the United States the historical force credited with creating white privilege and white supremacy is Slavery. In New Zealand, however, the place of Slavery has been taken by Colonisation. It is not to white slavers, but white settlers, that the followers of CRT look for the root of all Aotearoa’s evils.
Leftists who object that white workers will always have more in common with brown workers than they will with a white ruling-class that oppresses allworkers, get no joy from the followers of CRT. White elites may derive material benefits from their dominant position, but working-class whites derive equally important psychological benefits from their position in the racial hierarchy. According to CRT, the existence of a whole category of human-beings deemed immutably inferior to the white race, makes it easier for white workers to accept their own socio-economic subordination. At a stroke, Marxism is reduced to just another prop for white supremacy!
By stripping away all moral and philosophical grounds for unified struggle, CRT can only strengthen the elites’ grip on contemporary society. The abdication of SSFCA offers a textbook example of this phenomenon. The moral force of the nation’s secondary students in the fight against climate change has been significantly compromised. Doubts and resentments will spread swiftly through the SSFC Movement, making it a pretty safe bet that the turnout for any future demonstrations will be only a fraction of its former efforts. If the oil companies had set out to sabotage the domestic movement against anthropogenic global warming, then they could hardly have done a better job than these local adherents of CRT.
Black American progressives have themselves noted the dangerous ironies inherent in CRT. As Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora note in their recentGuardian article “Today, the self is the battlefield of politics. Blame Michel Foucault”:
“Despite the ever-growing presence of this politics, its shortcomings are growing clear. “White guilt and black outrage,” as Cedric Johnson, professor of African American studies, has recently pointed out, “have limited political currency, and neither has ever been a sustainable basis for building the kind of popular and legislative majorities needed to actually contest entrenched power in any meaningful way” ….. In fact, he added, this “militant expression of racial liberalism” will “continue to defer the kind of public goods that might actually help” all those who are “routinely surveilled, harassed, arrested, convicted, incarcerated and condemned as failures”. With material stakes of politics growing ever more urgent many in the liberal centre would much prefer us to busy ourselves with loud rituals announcing our inner battles.”
It would be unfair, however, to heap too much blame upon the young students at the heart of this story. One can only imagine the emotional intensity of the “struggle sessions” required to induce the abject capitulation of SSFCA’s activist core. During the infamous “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s, the brutality of similar sessions, at the hands of Mao Zedong’s fanatical “Red Guards”, was sufficient to break Communist Party veterans of the “Long March”. What chance had an well-meaning, idealistic bunch of middle-class Auckland kids against such tactics?
We conclude, therefore, where we began. In its coverage of the SSFCA’s self-immolation, the mainstream news media touched upon none of the issues featured in this post. Why? Because, bluntly, any such investigation would be severely career-limiting for the young (or old) mainstream journalist who undertook it. This is unfortunate, because arising out of this story are a number of important questions.
Does it mean, for example, that in spite of being disadvantaged and under-resourced by colonisation, and only responsible for a small part of the local climate problem (which tends to be correlated with income, as well as population) Maori and Pasifika will also now bear the burden of solving the whole of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s climate change problem? Does it mean that Pakeha climate change activists will no longer accept historical responsibility for persuading the country’s farmers – overwhelmingly Pakeha for obvious colonial reasons – to do their bit to reduce biogenic methane and plant more trees? (Hat-tip to Dr Chris Harris.)
Don’t hold your breath for the answers. Like it or not, the precepts of CRT are now accepted as holy writ in the newsrooms of the nation. Guilty white journalists may cheer-on the Revolution as loudly as they wish, but they must not, under any circumstances, interrogate it.
1.The statement from SSFCA looks more like a piss take to me. It reads like a hostage note.
2.Someone has spat the dummy and gone a bit over the top with the self flagellation. “Me thinks he doth protest too much”
3. The key bit here is who is the racist? No names? Its easy to write a generic mea culpa and call yourself out as a racist while hidden behind someone else.
4. The author has left significant clues that the statement not as it seems.
I think you’re looking too deeply Chris. Sure you’re not wrong in what you say – CRT is, of course, total bullshit and all that. But I think the media angle was this:
1. The initial story: A bunch of privileged teenagers think they can solve a massive scientific, engineering and social problem by having a day off school. (LOL)
2. The denouement: They self immolate on the bonfire of political correctness (LOL x 2)
” CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy,”
If this is a description of CRT and it is and I would agree with it, then how does the follow opinions
“If you’re white, you cannot be right.” and “Guilty white journalists may cheer-on the Revolution” fit that description? Shouldn’t it read: “If you’re white, your always right.” and “Smug white journalists may cheer-on the Revolution”?
I think we can explain those journalistic idiocies as ingroup virtue signalling at no cost to the signallers. They may be white but they live on the upper side of the class divide.
When I read the quoted article and passage I felt doubt about it’s sincerity . It would be dangerous to report on without an inside perspective of the conversations within the organisation that led up to it. There must have been some bitter exchanges for people as motivated as these to abandon their project so emotionally embraced .
I think there will be more to come.
D J S
I hope you’re right DJS, and that the missing pieces surface.
As it stands, I can almost hear Winston in the distance giving a half-chuckle into his coffee and muttering, “I tried to warn them, but they wouldn’t listen”.
The Herald covers it here, with some more details:
School Strike 4 Climate Disbands
It’s very hard to imagine that any large proportion of these young people is faintly racist.
I don’t for a moment believe that.
D J S
And yet they have decreed that people of a certain skin colour, ancestry or DNA should no longer initiate action against Climate Change.
How is that not racist?
I don’t mean to direct this question to you DJS (when I read it back now it sounds accusatory) – I was just mulling it over…
That’s why I doubt the sincerity of the decree. I don’t believe they are racist and I don’t believe they think they are racist.
D J S
Thanks for the link. It contains some clues as to what the issues might have been.
D J S
Yes, and I think that at least some of what they are trying to say should be taken more seriously. From the Herald article, there are real climate concerns behind this. They refer to the far greater impact of Climate Change on the Islands out there in the Pacific than has hit us here in AO/ NZ. That is true!
Some of the islands are disappearing under the waves. Some smaller ones have already gone. And yet, for the main, we here in AO/ NZ act as if any such concerns are still some way off. The people who live out there in the midst of it all really do have something to tell us, to show us about the urgency that is needed.
However, for a functioning group to be closed down simply because they were not from those most devastated places of origin, nor from specific disadvantaged people over here, is not going to help their cause.
There is validity to at least some of what they have already said. They’ve just gone at it the wrong way around. They should be expanding the number of people involved, and groups involved, not eliminating them.
And, the elephant in the climate closet, whatever mix that elephant may be of black, white, brown, red, yellow, green, purple, spotted or striped, … the underlying tenet of this newly woken creed is itself RACIST.
These groups are organised by the right to distract from real issues and control the debate. Another one was the Generation Zero movement for the Sky path, also another project that got nowhere and has been abandoned after doing a huge amount of damage and occupying MSM time while other voices remain unheard.
Go back to grass roots campaigning with people who don’t care what colour or creed or age anybody is and has open minds to everyone!
Meltdown of the Planet doesn’t care what race you are. And Meltdown of the Planet hardly cares what species you are. It just wipes them out.
That’s why the truth about our predicament is unmentionable.
Pity the children.
Pity anyone under the age of 70.
Daily CO2
Jun. 16, 2021 = 419.21 ppm
Jun. 16, 2020 = 416.5 ppm
All true, AFKTT, at least as far as these processes being relentless and unresponsive to human judgements are concerned.
But, shouldn’t we also consider the proposition that the only species that “cares” about this spinning ball of dirt, rock and molten iron is homo sapiens itself?
In a formulation reminiscent of the old question: “If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?”, shouldn’t we also ask:
“When the last human-being dies, will anything that happens on this planet, or anywhere else in the entire universe, ‘matter’?”
Is “meaning” a species-bound concept?
As another angle on the forrest my son once gave me a birthday gift of a Tshirt with the caption ” If a man speaks deep in the New Zealand forrest where no woman can hear him, is he still wrong?
Back to the point though, I can’t for a moment abide the idea that no life matters but human life. I guess the question is “matters to who?. To some it may be that that is the case , but it is then a short step to “which human lives matter and which do not? Undoubtably there are those who don’t much care about any lives but their own.
D J S
Does he drive a Ute?
Indeed he does
They probably gave into the inevitable hopelessness of the whole argument.
But in any case the cause they apparently believed in is now much weaker for their surrender.
And if one is to be pure woke, accepting recommendations of who to support from these so-called racists is not going to fly either.
I would have thought if you deem yourself not qualified to continue the first thing you do is ensure any resources you have are handed to the appropriate people. This seems to me like a bunch of people being told they are racist and spitting the dummy and burning down the house on the way out!
It remains to be seen whether or not the emerging groups and movements that critique the roots of racism become revolutionary. Revolution is a project in the making and remaking.
But one thing is sure. No social movement that remains trapped in the institutions of settler racism, including the state, can become revolutionary.
No liberal bourgeois road to the future will rescue humanity as they all lead back to capitalism.
They are by definition part of the counter-revolution.
Young people who demand that any movement that fights against climate change must also fight against white racism, against patriarchy, and all other forms of oppression, offer some hope on the horizon.
That hope is that those who resist all forms of oppression will realise in the ebb and flow of the struggle that the common cause of oppression is capitalism, and that to end capitalism, a proletarian revolution is necessary.
“Young people who demand that any movement that fights against climate change must also fight against ..[a dozen other things as well]”
Dave, You’re effectively telling the firemen they cannot go into the burning house to save the occupants unless they stop and take off their muddy boots first (for want of a better metaphor). They stop and do that, the house burns down and the family die.
Was not meant to be all bold…
No, I think you will find that young people are beginning to realise that all the today’s crises of race, religion, gender, nation, pandemics and climate change, have a common cause – capitalism. I use the term ‘capitocene’ to explain the links between all these crises.
It is hard to miss the fact that they all have a very visible embodiment in the few billionaires that own most of the world’s wealth and drive everyone else down by fomenting furious divisions and wars among us.
The world’s workers are of every colour, culture and gender, and their unity as one working class is the only revolutionary social force capable of ending the capitocene and reversing global warming.
Fighting in silos and against one another is exactly what the 1% wants us to do because we exhaust our power to end capitalism on futile divisions among ourselves.
It seems to be that CRT is two-edged. On the one hand the argument that slavery’s long shadow pervades American society in the form of a general brutalisation and also helps to divide the working class is perfectly valid (and, for that matter as old as the hills, so maybe that’s not the latest version of the theory). On the other hand, there is the destructive version that Chris calls out.
Then again I suppose you could say that about any ideology, e.g. does socialism mean Michael Joseph Savage, or Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution?
And certainly, as regards the splits and meltdowns and purity contests, that’s nothing new among would-be revolutionaries. A certain Monty Python skit does indeed come to mind, as does Rick with a silent P from the Young Ones.
Even Karl Marx said he wasn’t a Marxist if by fanaticism, Marxism was meant.
All good but I prefer to take a simple line.
The SSFCA collapse is just confirmation that its membership are, and think like, children.
Post modernist philosophy has a lot to answer for. It fits perfectly with neo liberal individualism.
School Climate Strikes will likely reappear with a new political centre or just good old anarchy. Because Climate Disaster and societal meltdown totally disrespect social being and constructs!
Same with gender identity politics
I guess the BLM movement became trendier than the climate movement.
WOKE GONE MAD
So TDB doesn’t get any public funding but stories glorifying Bevan Chung get a publicly funded 2.6m mini feature! Something is wrong with NZ brainwashing from the PRC!
Princess of Chaos: $2.6m funding for Bevan Chuang and Len Brown film
“Telefeature Princess of Chaos is the story of a political scandal as told from the perspective of the ‘other woman,’ Bevan Chuang,” NZ on Air said when announcing the funding.”
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/princess-of-chaos-26m-funding-for-bevan-chuang-and-len-brown-film/ED3ONTIJ5HUTZ65TLVZ2YWUUMI/
And Bevan Chuang is the idea of the modern NZ citizen?
“In 2011 and 2012, Chuang engaged in a public outreach campaign to find a suitable man to impregnate her soon enough to be able to bear a “dragon baby”, a child born in the Year of the Dragon.[1][7]
Chuang acknowledged to the Whale Oil blog in October 2013 that for two years she was Auckland mayor Len Brown’s mistress.[6]”
https://gyaanipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Bevan_Chuang
And the idea of ethnic cleansing of Auckland all planned out a decade ago. Worked with Tibet!
“Mayor Len Brown’s Auckland is predicted to have a majority Asian, largely Chinese, population by 2040, with the existing long standing European ethnic and cultural base becoming a minority. This means that a very large percentage of Auckland’s projected 2.1 million population will have a short working history in this country with low associated tax and Kiwisaver contributions, and a rapidly escalating number of older people moving onto New Zealand Superannuation with no contribution coming from their original home countries.”
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1110/S00572/grey-power-warns-of-impact-of-high-immigration-rates.htm
Dave Brown: “No social movement that remains trapped in the institutions of settler racism, including the state..”
So to this particular “Marxist” the state is no longer an institution of capitalism, or even colonialism, but of “settler racism”, meaning, I presume, Pakeha/European racism.
This of course is what the “mainstream” (capitalist) media want us all to believe and why they ask no hard questions about the bizarre demise of SS4C. They are comfortable with the idea that politics is and shall remain an arena of combat between races and cultures rather than between say, between capitalism and socialism or as I would prefer to see it, between colonialism and kotahitanga.
The problem for the media is that if they challenge the idea that it is all about “settler racism”, then they will inevitably be drawn to the question “What is it all about then?” and that leads to one obvious answer, which would be “colonialist capitalism”.
That in a nutshell is the answer to Chris Trotter’s question about the not-so-strange silence of the mass media.
Geoff we agree broadly that capitalist colonisation is the cause, and racism the effect.
The state enables the cause funding and arming colonisation, the alienation of the land and disciplining of the labour force, but also reproduces the ideology of racism through law, religion, media etc. to justify all this.
As I pointed out above, in the case of Aotearoa, to legitimate (fraudulent Treaty) a settler invasion and occupation (war against ‘rebellion’ to justify land theft), necessary to create a new capitalist colony, racism directed at the ‘natives’ is inevitable. So reproducing racism is one of the colonial state’s functions which requires some ideological institutions but that does not reduce the state to a mere ideological apparatus, unlike the media.
I’m afraid you share with Chris an arrogance towards those building social movements that do not live up to your liberal preconceptions (i.e. “bizarre demise” of SS4C). Racism has to be confronted head on everywhere, along with all other forms of capitalist oppression that emerge within social movements, before those movements can become effective in uniting as one anti-capitalist movement. Class unity and all that.
I think you will find that the process of colonisation and de-colonisation of Aotearoa, if not already, will soon take centre stage, in all the debates from He Pua Pua to Extinction Rebellion, despite the efforts of politicians and media to mischaracterise it.
You do not change my opinion by labeling it “arrogant” or “liberal”. Whether these kids actually are racists, or merely thought they had been racist, or uncritically accepted the opinion of others that they were racist is one thing. But to then walk away from a cause that they were telling us is critical to their future on this planet is another. To me that is bizarre.
Fortunately I am of an age when I am not going to respond by saying to you “Yes, Dave, you are so right. I am an arrogant liberal and henceforth in my shame I will not write or utter another word on political matters, but will leave all that to the Marxists who have so much more right to a point of view than I do”.
I think we can explain those journalistic idiocies as ingroup virtue signalling at no cost to the signallers. They may be white but they live on the upper side of the class divide.
Cancel culture is not a new thing.
“Hi, I’m Nigel, I’m a racist”.
During the Bastion Pt. occupation I remember one Pakeha guy who turned up obstensibly to offer his support, saying all Pakeha including himself were racist. The Ngati Whatua organiser told him to piss off, “We don’t need racists here”.
Kia ora Patrick
Your anecdote caused me to re-think my reply to Dave Brown.
I rationalized my feeling that the self-canceling action of SS4C was bizarre because of its political implications, but I now realize that the problem is cultural as much as political.
In our culture there are many ways to acquire mana and many ways to lose it, but no one abandons their mana. That is what SS4C did and that is what really came across as bizarre in my mind. Bizarrely, they abandoned their mana in response to a challenge.
The tika way to meet a challenge is with respect and goodwill towards the challenger while maintaining one’s own mana and dignity. Treat the challenge with contempt and there will be war. Grovel, and it is you that will be regarded with contempt. Brutal or not, that is the way it is. That is the tikanga.
The good news is that Nigel and SS4C can regain their mana, and play a positive role in the affairs of the motu. They just have to learn to stand tall and not to crawl.
“Foreigners are enemies”
“Politicians are corrupt”,
“Journalists are liars”.
“Pakeha are racists”,
“Men are rapists”,
These are the memes of that keep us divided from our potential friends and allies and from each other They make us powerless.
“Internationalism”
“Solidarity”
“Fraternity”,
“Sorority”
“Unity”
These are our memes. They make us invincible.