The Liberal Agenda – The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater

The book launch for Maire Leadbeater’s new book, The Enemy Within, is an important examination of who the NZ Government has considered ‘The Enemy’ and as Trump takes power with promises to attack the ‘Enemy within’, it is a timely reminder of just how crazy shit can get when you become an enemy of the State.

Marie is from one of the most famous activist families in NZ and alongside her dear Brother Kieth Locke, were spied on since they were 10 years of age.

How the Christ a 10 year old can be manufactured into the enemy of the state highlights how crazy the State’s focus is.

As someone who was personally attacked by the Police because they thought I was Rawshark, I am all too well versed in the paranoia of the State and their unbelievable over reach.

Dear old Unionist Robert Reid was the opening speaker and his remarks are important enough to repeat here:

The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater is many things. It is:

• A family history
• A social history
• A history of the left-wing in Aotearoa
• A chilling reminder of the origin and continuation of the surveillance state in New Zealand, and
• A damn good read.

The book is a great example of citizen or activist authorship. The author, Maire Leadbeater, and her family are front and centre of the dark cloud of the surveillance state that has hung and still hangs over New Zealand’s “democracy”.

What better place to begin the book than the author noting that she had been spied on by the security services from the age of 10. What better place to begin than describing the role of the Locke family — Elsie, Jack, Maire, Keith and their siblings — have played in Aotearoa society over the last few decades.

And what a fitting way to end the book than with the final chapter entitled, “Person of Interest: Keith Locke”; Maire’s much-loved brother and our much-loved friend and comrade.

In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country.

The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.

I have often deprecatingly called myself a mere footnote of history as that is all I seem to appear as in many books written about recent progressive history in New Zealand. But it was without false modesty that when Maire gave me a copy of the book a couple of weeks back, I immediately went to the index, looked up my name and found that this time I was a bit more than a footnote, but had a section of a chapter written on my interaction with the spooks.

But it was after reading this, dipping into a couple of other “person of interest” stories of people I knew such as Keith, Mike Treen, the Rosenbergs, Murray Horton and then starting the book again from the beginning did it become clear on what issues the state was paranoid about that led it to build an apparatus to spy on its own citizens.

These were issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, de-colonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought. These are the issues that come up time and time again; essentially it was seditious or subversive to be part of any of these campaigns or ideologies.

It always amazed me that the SIS and GCSB could spy on me, Nicky Hager, MANA, Greenpeace, the Unions and the Greens yet couldn’t catch a white supremacist terrorist who was plotting an atrocity in Christchurch.

The insanely talented Caitlin Smith blessed us with her singing at the event and the Women’s Activist Movement made delicious snacks.

It was communal and beautiful and a reminder of just how important it is for the Left to get together physically and bond with one another, especially in the wake of the horror that is Trump.

It is those bonds between us that matter now as the US turns fascist and the State will once agains turn its Eye of Mordor upon those arguing for peace over war.

I fear Maire’s book will be less a historic account and more a blueprint for what is to come.

 

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