Re: <nettime> Some background to Christchurch

[Douglas Bagnall <douglas@halo.gen.nz>]

On 26/03/19 9:44 AM, Luke Munn wrote:

> Sure, the Springbok protests were hugely formative, but I would say boiling
> anything down to one event is placing too much emphasis on it.
> 
> With respect, dating the 'beginning' of inequalities and civil unrest back
> to 1981 is also a pretty Western/white perspective. Aotearoa has a long
> history of civil unrest, not least in the New Zealand wars / Land Wars
> beginning around 1845.

Well yes, sort of. We have that *now*. Protest heritage seems to be a
curriculum subject at my children's school, jumping from the
Kororareka flagpole to Parihaka, suffragettes, 40 hour week, Waihi,
1951, Vietnam, "damn the dam", 1975 land march, Bastion Point, 1981,
nuclear free, homosexual law reform, foreshore and seabed. But the
historical facts are not really what David/Simon are on about -- the
question is how [most] people understand their response to the
Christchurch attack, and how 1981 affects that.

In 1981 we didn't have protest studies in primary schools (I was
there). There were protests -- half the canon was the produced in the
70s -- but that was a fad, not linked to tradition. And there had been
anti-springbok protests for 20 years or so and they had sometimes been
successful. Tours were cancelled. That meant in early 1981 the
protesters had a well established organisational infrastructure but
faced widespread complacency. The tour would be stopped before it
started, so why join the protest? When everyone suddenly realised the
WWII-era farts in charge were going to have the tour at any cost and
the protests grew massively. The result was, on the face of it, a
failure -- the tour went ahead. But after that, even as the new right
fucked up the economy, the public service and the Labour Party
consisted largely of Springbok protest veterans, at least mildly
disposed toward rethinking the colonial past. In 1985 historic
Waitangi claims were unleashed, which -- combined with relative
contentment with diverse immigration -- led to the society you
describe. It doesn't matter whether the vision of these protest
veterans ("independent, racially tolerant society, a moral exemplar"
in Simon's words) was hypocritical bollocks or not -- the argument is
it drove us here from a very weird place. At that time New Zealand was
famous for being the country that *uniquely in the world* would play
sport with racist South Africa. There were Olympic boycotts against
us. Nobody had heard of Te Whiti. The treaty was a historical
curiosity. Our race relations were the best in the world, we said, our
past had finished, there was no depression in New Zealand.

OK, so that's the argument for 1981's significance. But I don't see
the Christchurch response in those terms. Rather it is desperate and
existential -- we have no choice. We just want peace. Sectarian
violence is unimaginably foreign to us. It would be like death to end
up in a cycle of copycat and reprisal attacks, even if the statistical
chance of actual death was negligible. We will do almost *anything* to
keep the peace, though of course with spontaneous collective
responses, "anything" precludes nuance. If we plan we will bicker and
dither. So we smother the aggrieved with love and sympathy in the hope
they will not blame the rest of us, and we spurn the attacker so that
nobody wants to follow his path. Which is not to say the emotion is
contrived. We are *really* hurt. People cry in the streets. Where I
live in Wellington this is not surprising -- we are a soppy lot,
diverse and integrated, our walls plastered overnight with hundreds of
pieces of outraged and loving graffiti -- but I can also report from
suburban Christchurch where, for family reasons, I just spent a few
days in a quite different context. And people are devastated. In a
suburban mall the P.A. system asked us for two minutes silence. The
tills stopped and we stood and wept. On every day since the attack
there has been rally or vigil of various sorts, all across the
country. Often 10 or 20 percent of the town population turns out.

The obvious question is what we do next? Or at least, what else do we
do? I am not going to answer now. Many people are trying to shift
positions as quietly as possible. A clutch of despicable talkback
hosts have been deleting their anti-muslim tweets and articles. One
even apologised and recanted. On the left, it is harder now to argue
against the existence of state spy agencies (though the focus of their
surveillance has been woefully inaccurate). All of a sudden the police
guarding crowds have guns and we do not question it. At the same time
as this response is an exemplar of spontaneous self-organisation,
stable anarchist society seems more far fetched than ever.

I see people are urging each other to call out "ordinary" bigotry,
sometimes citing the theory that it allows extremist speech to hide as
if semi-normal. And perhaps I would, but I haven't heard any bigoted
speech in the last ten days (I am not on social media). This I think
is part of our collective effort: we will not add insult to injury, at
least not before the injured party is placated if not healed.

In recent months I have seen warnings about our complacency. Tse Ming
Mok comes to mind, though I can't find the piece. The fascists are
emboldened, organised, here. The right wing media are getting
systematically worse. And so on. At the time I was spending my days
settling a three year old into a preschool where no ethnic group makes
up more than 20% of the class. When you are hanging out with a bunch
of happy three year olds you can't think the world is getting worse.
But now I know there was someone in our midst who would shoot them, or
80% of them or 20% or some other number depending on their exact
theory (I have not studied the killer). This has opened up for us the
possibility of a future we cannot stand.

Now, to link back to 1981, those old fuckwits Muldoon and Ces Blazey
wanted another racist tour for, well, god knows what reason. Lets say
they wanted more rugby and to spite everyone else in the world who was
trying to interfere with that. They would rub our noses in it. Rugby
rugby rugby and New Zealand would go on forever stinking like a beer
soaked carpet. They people reacted against this and the country
careered off in another direction entirely. Ha! Then this attacker, he
wanted something, racial disharmony, civil war, pogroms, crusades,
whatever. We won't do that. But can we rebound off this attack and end
up somewhere better? And how exactly? These questions are explicitly
discussed, though i haven't paid too much attention yet, being still
very caught up in the collective ache.

Douglas
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: