We Are The Goodies! Trotter’s Fantasy and Fanaticism.

“Are we the baddies?” asks Chris Trotter in his latest From the Left column for The Democracy Project (17/10/2024). He asks it of the New Zealand Left (as a self-described “libertarian socialist”) in connection with what he sees as their misguided perversion from liberalism towards a doctrinaire identarian and indigenised agenda broadly described as decolonisation. His columns on this subject are now so numerous they trail far off into the darkness, like so many tiki torches, it is difficult to say whether he’s marching to, or returning from, a burning cross. Indeed, in years gone by when his name came up in conversation around the Left wing traps the “level of intervention” meant his thoughts on the extent Government needed to reign in capitalists, but now when that phrase is mentioned we are referring to the extent he may need psychological assistance. Leave any three Lefties in a room for more than ten minutes and this subject will emerge – always with a mix of bewilderment and alarm, but with increasingly less sympathy.

Having recently re-read his (excellent and recommended) 2007 book on New Zealand’s political and social history, No Left Turn, the glimmer of those lights, and the darkness from which they emerge, were always there. The existential struggle of the European settler colonist in a Polynesian milieu was the framing just as much as the struggle between labour and capital was. The essential masculinity of the enterprise was throughout. The fetishisation of violence are not just present in graphic semi-fictionalised passages (such as a rather turgid piece on ANZAC cove) but daubed on almost every second page as a blood splatter motif to break sections. Not that the style is objectionable – Peckinpah meets Tarantino can make for a gripping tale – but the idea that political and social questions are best answered by Israeli amounts of overkill confirms his reactionary credentials. As such he is a literary gateway drug into the amphetamine psyche of the Right.

If the threat to the white settler colonisation project – that is to say the colonisation of Aotearoa primarily if not exclusively on their own terms – is real and substantive (if not irreversible) then their fears are not merely paranoia and phobia they are concerns. How legitimate or justified those concerns are and how they are reconciled with what he calls the decolonisation project is the issue.  The Act Party’s “Treaty Principles” Bill is the catalyst for this latest discussion, however it is fairly representative of the perennial concerns of the white settlers and serves as an adequate vehicle for their discontent in the current term of parliament. As such it is a situational, opportunistic, political gambit not wholly encompassing the spectrum of white settler angst; but the visceral responses and polarisation tells us it is close enough of a proxy to be used both as a lens to focus and a prism to diffuse.

I will reply below to Trotter’s latest column with similarly unencumbered emotion, but hopefully also with more pointed facts with which to answer him. In particular his entire notion of comparing New Zealand with North versus South in the American Civil War is fantastically warped.  To do him and the reader a favour this reply will be done methodically, paragraph by paragraph, in tandem with his column.

 

Are We The Baddies?

Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does.

 

This is so not what it seems when you see where he takes this!

 

‘THE DEMON OF UNREST’ documents the descent of the United States into civil war. The primary focus of its author, Erik Larson, is the period of roughly five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860, and his inauguration in March 1861. These were the months in which, one after the other, the slaveholding states of the South voted to secede from the Union.

Coincidentally New Zealand at this time faced a crisis of partition. These are also the months where the Second Anglo-Maori “Land” War began. The Waitara block was in dispute in 1860 with pressure from the Taranaki settlers to take it. The Governor at the time, Gore Browne, convened a hui of Queenite and neutral tribes at Mission Bay known as the Kohimarama Conference to isolate the Kingitanga and solidify Government support (which was only partially successful).

Seldom has the evolution of an implacable political logic proceeded in circumstances where so few effective means of altering its direction lay to hand. Americans had become the prisoners of convictions that could not be set aside without incurring, to employ a key concept of the era, an irreparable loss of honour.

So too the British honour was at stake in New Zealand and so too the implacable settlers and their Government were on a collision course with the autonomous tribes of the central North Island.

Only a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have won the American Civil War, but not even a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have prevented it.

Gore Browne was victim to the settler’s rapacity and in 1861 the former Governor, Grey, was brought back for Kill Bill Volume 2.

The most disconcerting feature of Larson’s historical narrative are the many parallels between the America of then, and the New Zealand of now. There are Kiwis, today, as committed to the decolonisation and indigenisation of their country as Yankees once were to the abolition of slavery. Likewise, there is an answering fraction of the New Zealand population every bit as determined to preserve the colour-blind conception of what it means to be a New Zealander as the slaveholders of the American South were determined to preserve their own “peculiar institution”.

Here Trotter draws back the bow to modern New Zealand – but an assessment of the same time period is more productive to gather insight into how things have developed in this country. The transposing he attempts is assaultive: “colour-blind” is held up as an ideal – but he equates it with… the slaveholding South! That is intellectually peculiar and certainly intellectually courageous.

The key historical question arising from this comparison is: which of the opposing sides in the present conflict between “New Zealand” and “Aotearoa” represents the North, and which the South? The answer is far from straightforward.

I would prefer to just look at what war New Zealand was undergoing while the Americans were having their war to figure out the two divergent strands of ideology of today that descend directly from that cleavage. His naming of the conflict as between “New Zealand” and “Aotearoa” I do agree with. “Aotearoa” (being the name of the North Island) was sewn onto a Kingitanga flag captured in the Waikato, and the memorials set up following the Land Wars by the Government states the soldiers “Died for New Zealand”. This is a good way of understanding the tension.

Superficially, it is the promoters of decolonisation and indigenisation who most resemble the Northern abolitionists. Certainly, in their moral certainty, dogmatism, and unwillingness to compromise, the Decolonisers and the Abolitionists would appear to be cut from identical cloth. Brought together by a time machine, one can easily imagine their respective leaders, so alike in their political style, getting along famously.

Superficially? No, substantially. The Maori who visited the Auckland settlement in that period of the early 1860s report that with the influx of British immigrants came a hostility towards them they had not experienced before – these white settlers viewed Maori as an enemy and were conspiring to attack and subdue them.

By the same token, the defenders of Colour-Blind New Zealand, in their reverence for tradition and their deep nostalgia for the political certainties of the past, would appear to be a more than passable match for the political forces that gave birth to the Confederate States of America in 1861.

“Colour-Blind” – again that terminology is used without any provenance. It is an irksome and perverse inversion of reality. The same racists in the 1860s that were hating on Maori and coveting their lands are no different in essence to the racists of today hating on Maori and coveting their lands. The political certainties of the past and traditions he refers to is their racism.

These correspondences are, however, more apparent than real. From a strictly ideological standpoint, it is the Decolonisers who match most closely the racially-obsessed identarian radicals who rampaged through the streets of the South in 1860-61, demanding secession and violently admonishing all those suspected of harbouring Northern sympathies. Likewise, it is the Indigenisers who preach a racially-bifurcated state in which the ethnic origin of the citizen is the most crucial determinant of his or her political rights and duties.

It is the European, the white settler, that makes the distinction between the Tangata Whenua and themselves a matter of “race” – not Maori. Maori are the same race as their Rarotongan and Tahitian cousins, but each set of cousins respects the mana of each other in their own respective territory. Race and colour is a peculiarly European obsession. The bifurcated state was exactly what the Treaty envisaged: tribes were autonomous and the Crown controlled the lands alienated to the settlers. The whole country is under one Governor, but there are two systems operating. It was operating that way from day zero. It was the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 (UK) that provided for “Maori Provinces” to be gazetted to formalise the territorial bifurcation. As an historian Trotter cannot project the prejudices he holds today back to this time period against the weight of the historical record, the evidence does not permit him to do this.

Certainly, in this country, the loudest clamour and the direst threats are directed at those who argue that New Zealand must remain a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equal rights, irrespective of wealth, gender, or ethnic origin, and in which the property rights of all citizens are safeguarded by the Rule of Law.

No. No they aren’t. Everyone wants what he describes including Maori nationalists and white liberal “identarians” so far as I can tell. Trotter’s deliberate confusion is to pretend that the Treaty and its guarantees to Maori of their autonomy and property rights is somehow not a law.  It isn’t even the first law of the land, it’s more than that: it’s law zero from year zero. Whether the Treaty can be ambulated into matters of Government policy and rules beyond the autonomy and listed guarantees is going to be a live issue, but he makes no distinction so as to roll everything into his racial rubric.

 

These threats escalated alarmingly following the election of what soon became the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government. Like the election of Lincoln in 1860, the success of New Zealand’s conservative parties in the 2023 general election was construed by the Decolonisers and Indigenisers as a potentially fatal blow to any hope of sustaining and extending the gains made under the sympathetic, radical, and identity-driven Labour Government of 2020-23.

Again with the threat rhetoric. Threat of what? We wait a couple of years and maybe a less bigoted coalition assumes office. Such an anodyne state of affairs lacks the drama he seeks so he again draws an acute angle to something he says is a parallel. Everyone does not know that in 1960 the United Nations General Assembly passed a landmark resolution on Decolonisation proclaiming the process was inevitable and irreversable; but everyone in New Zealand does know that this conservative cocktail of a coalition is nowhere near being a “fatal blow” to this nation’s process of doing exactly what that resolution of 64 years ago foretells: decolonisation.

Just as occurred throughout the South in November and December of 1860, the fire-eating partisans of “Aotearoa” lost little time in coming together to warn the incoming government that its political programme was unreasonable, unacceptable, and “racist”; and that any attempt to realise it in legislation would be met with massive resistance – up to and including civil war.

No source given for “civil war”. The only figure of any significance that speaks with any regularity of civil war is Trotter himself. His prophesising has been so inaccurate he can’t even be rightfully called a Cassandra. Why have civil war when there’s a potential change of government in less than three years (and currently less than two)?

The profoundly undemocratic nature of the fire-eaters’ opposition was illustrated by their vehement objections to the Act Party’s policy of holding a binding referendum to entrench, or not, the “principles” of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like the citizens of South Carolina, the first state to secede, the only votes they are willing to recognise are their own.

It’s funny how one’s own interests are rights that must be protected by law against the scourge of democratic mob rule… and the rights and interests of those with a Treaty that might affect one’s presumption of rights suddenly just don’t mean anything. It is funny how that happens.

Another historical parallel is discernible in the degree to which the judicial arm of the New Zealand state, like its American counterpart in the 1850s, has actively supported the cause of ethnic difference in the 2020s.

The so-called parallels are now running at right angles across each other. The Treaty of Waitangi up until the racist 1877 “simple nullity” ruling from Chief Justice Prendergast was being abided by the judiciary. Once again discard the “ethnic” fixation and consider the parallels between the US (and former British) Treaties with the native American Indian tribes – “sovereign” tribal nations – and how those relationships manifest themselves today. Those tribes have their own government administration, taxation, police, courts, drivers licences etc. Those tribal members, for example, can pass through the Canadian border using nothing more than their tribal ID. All of these bifurcated abominations occur, more or less, without any federal, state or judicial anxiety – their Treaties are held inviolate.

In 1857, the infamous Dred-Scott decision of the US Supreme Court advanced the cause of slavery throughout the United States. Written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the judgement found that persons of African descent: “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States”. The Taney Court’s decision made civil war inevitable.

This was more akin as their 1877 “simple nullity” decision.

In 2022, the New Zealand Supreme Court’s adjudication of the Peter Ellis Case would add a novel legal consideration – tikanga Māori – to the application of New Zealand Law. The Court’s constitutionally dubious decision was intended to, and did, materially advance the establishment of a bi-cultural legal system in Aotearoa. It represented an historic victory for the Decolonisers.

Yes it was a victory of sorts to the cause, even though many of us raised an eyebrow at how tikanga can apply to a situation where the parties are all Pakeha.

It may occur to some readers, that the argument put forward here resembles the celebrated Mitchell & Webb television sketch in which a worried SS officer asks his Nazi comrade-in-arms, Hans: “Are we the baddies?” It’s a great line. But, over and above the humour, the writers are making an important point. Those who devote themselves entirely to a cause are generally incapable of questioning its moral status – even when its uniforms are adorned with skulls.

It applies to you, Mr Trotter! You stand there in the garb of Prendergast without a shred of self-awareness it seems for your sartorial choice.

 

Those New Zealanders who believe unquestioningly in the desirability of decolonisation and indigenisation argue passionately that they are part of the same great progressive tradition that inspired the American Abolitionists of 160 years ago. But are they?

Yes. Yes they are. Trotter the contrarian has four remaining paragraphs to at least start to make his case because there has been no detectable argument thus far.

Did the Black Abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, embrace the racial essentialism of Moana Jackson? Or did he, rather, wage an unceasing struggle against those who insisted, to the point of unleashing a devastating civil war, that all human-beings are not created equal?

Hate the double negative – it usually belies a contorted logic, as it does here. The “racial essentialism” is spurious, it is being used to argue against a Treaty position not founded essentially on race.

What is there that in any way advances the progressive cause about the casual repudiation of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that: “one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”?

Trotter seems to take great alacrity to his mission of poking the kittens at the petting zoo in their eyes with a sharp stick. At this stage the comments are barely worthy of a serious response.

When will the partisans of decolonisation and indigenisation finally notice the death’s head on their caps? That, driven by their political passion to atone for the sins of the colonial fathers, they are willing to subvert the Rule of Law, deny human equality, misrepresent their country’s history, and abandon its democratic system of government. Can they not see that the people they castigate as the direct ideological descendants of the slaveholding white supremacists of the antebellum South, are actually fighting for the same principles that animated and inspired the Northern Abolitionists?

If it’s sarcasm it’s comedy gold, but if he’s being serious? “Can they not see…” – it does sound like he’s written this for April 1st.

Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does. The demon of unrest has claimed you for his own.

 

Paranoid, accusatory, hysterical – and they were the best parts. The demon of gin and across-the-counter pseudoephedrine appears to have claimed another Trotter column.