Victor Billot
Histories of Hate: The radical right in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley (Otago University Press, 2023), 444pp, $50
Histories of Hate starts at the end of the story so far—15 March 2019—the date when the radical right achieved its first notable twenty-first-century intervention in New Zealand politics and society, the terrorist attack in Christchurch. After a century or more of largely ineffective activity, the radical right has found a new lease of life in the last few years. Its incoherence meant it failed to capitalise on upsurges of social discontent at key moments in New Zealand’s history. But this incoherence has become an advantage in the contemporary post-COVID, post-truth era, as the radical right embeds itself in a nexus of conspiracy, paranoia and prejudice.
Histories of Hate is a timely book, part of a growing crop of analysis in New Zealand, including the recently published Fear by Byron Clark and Fake Believe by Dylan Reeve. Histories of Hate is a more academic enterprise. It is divided into five sections, dealing with the historic evolution of the radical right in post-1840 Aotearoa New Zealand. Fifteen chapters are drawn from a range of contributors.
Following a scene-setting introduction by the editors, the first section deals with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first chapter by Leonie Pihama and Cheryl Smith seems distinct from the others in providing a context on colonial capitalism and the State itself. While this is a solid short account of the traditional Māori worldview and the ‘scientific racism’ of the settler state that underpins ideologies of racial purity and ‘fitness’, I was simultaneously struck by the symmetry of traditional Māori concepts such as whakapapa, whenua and wairua to common traditional touchstones of the (Pākehā) right—family or ancestry, nation and ‘land’, and God.
The following two chapters deal with the anti-Chinese fervour of the late nineteenth century, which found expression through mainstream politics and the labouring class, as well as fringe individuals such as Lionel Terry. Terry is remembered for one horrific act: in a case of propaganda by deed, he randomly shot an elderly Chinese man Joe Kim Yung in a Wellington street. This act has echoes right down to the current day when individual terrorists continue to see violence as providing inspiration to stir the apathetic majority into action. Terry largely spent his last 47 years in psychiatric institutions and died in Seacliff Asylum in 1952. The Christchurch terrorist is facing a similar incarceration in a high-security prison.
A further chapter by historian Mark Derby investigates the life of Arthur Desmond, author of the ‘proto fascist’ manifesto Might Is Right. Desmond’s life would be a minor historical curiosity if not for the strange fact that his work has resurfaced and circulates in the contemporary online world of the radical right in the United States.
The second section of Histories of Hate deals with the ‘ideological cauldron of the interwar years’. Here we see how the radical right moves on to fresh obsessions to cater for its need for an external or internal enemy. Elizabeth Ward writes on how the advance of militant socialism and Bolshevism was seen as a leading threat by the far right (and the conservative mainstream.)
The Great Depression of the 1930s was a time of crisis when antisemitism flourished: the topic of Marinus la Rooij in Chapter Seven. New Zealand did not see the formation of a mass antisemitic fascist movement, and active antisemitism appears confined to the ranks of adherents of ‘Douglas Credit’ economic ideology and cranks inspired by the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. These ideas did spread further through society and even ended up being debated in Parliament. Just as concerns about workingmen’s wages and conditions were diverted into ‘yellow peril’ prejudice in previous generations, concerns about finance capital were now transmogrified into a conspiracy by Jewish bankers. We see the same pattern repeated today when the crisis of the system is manipulated by the radical right to produce marginalised or minority scapegoats.
William Faulkner observed, ‘… the past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ I was once at a Christmas party for a large workplace in the North Island when a tidy retired gentleman with an English accent suddenly veered our general conversation onto the ‘Jews’. An expression of loathing animated his face, a small moment I have never forgotten. Ironically, Judaism these days seems to have been replaced by Islam as the bogeyman of choice.
Other reactionary and bigoted groups sprung into existence in this mid-twentieth century period, which Matthew Cunningham defines as a time of ‘conservative populism’. One group had a religious fixation. The Protestant Political Association based itself around anti-Catholic prejudice but faded away. Religion has played a less prominent role in New Zealand politics than it has elsewhere, including with the radical right, although Dolores Janiewski discusses the influence of the Christian right in recent decades in Chapter 11 (‘From Moral Crusaders to New Conservatives.’)
Part Three of the book moves into the post-World War II period. The West had an anti-Nazi wartime alliance of convenience with Stalin, but this rapidly disintegrated into the Cold War. The tiny New Zealand Communist Party was pushed back to the margins of political life, while the establishment used the 1951 Waterfront Lockout to create an atmosphere of hostility to the militant left. Left-wing intellectuals did point out at the time the tendencies of New Zealand society that allowed it to incubate a fascist mindset, notably Bill Pearson’s classic essay ‘Fretful Sleepers’, originally published in Landfall in 1953.
Despite all this, the radical right found it hard to get traction in the post-war years. New Zealand may have been conservative and parochial, but the association of the radical right with Nazism meant it struggled to define itself and gain an audience.
In Chapter Eight, Steven Loveridge notes the appropriation of Nazi symbolism by youth and motorbike gangs in the 1960s, a phenomenon that has been replicated by members of the Mongrel Mob in more recent decades. The conclusion is that Nazi regalia is utilised for its shock value rather than any understanding of its political meaning, and it should be noted that even Prince Harry gained notoriety in 2005 for using a swastika armband as a party prop.
In this unpromising and dull era, the radical right had to latch on to distant global events to find relevance (political commentator Bruce Jesson once observed how the political left in New Zealand used to do the same thing.)
The widespread anti-communist sentiment of the Cold War found an outlet in the domestic debate over South Africa, the subject of Sebastian Potiger and Tyler West’s chapter. The radical right saw South Africa as providing a bulwark against international communism, but so did many mainstream New Zealanders and the National Party. There were various levels of racism in this debate, and no clear dividing line between the radical right and the conventional mainstream right, something that continues to be true today.
The radical right found new audiences as the post-war consensus started to shake loose in the 1970s. Urbanisation and alienation fed into the development of more visible social dysfunction. Crime researcher Jarrod Gilbert contributes a fascinating and detailed chapter on the heyday of the skinhead phenomenon in the 1980s, pulling together an underground social history of various South Island thugs, references to the cult movie Romper Stomper, and a solid economic analysis of the environment that spawned this nasty outbreak.
A strong recurrent theme for the radical right is the base of a white/Pākehā and Anglo-Saxon ethnic identity perceived as under threat from the ‘outside’. This, of course, leads to some interesting contradictions with the status of New Zealand as a colonial settler state; so in more recent times, the perceived threat from the ‘outside’ has been complemented by a threat from the ‘inside’: the Māori cultural and political renaissance. In Chapter Twelve, Peter Meihana writes on the ‘Anti-Treatyist’ response. This shades from mainstream debate about Te Tiriti into outright anti-Māori racism, as well as the profusion of pseudo-history such as the wild theories of ancient Celts and Egyptians being the first settlers of New Zealand. Whether the promoters of these absurdities are merely eccentrics or have another more sinister agenda, the result is clearly political in effect: denying the status of Māori as the indigenous people of this nation. The recent ugly scenes at the anti-co-governance meetings of Julian Batchelor—including the exclusion of Māori from entry—indicate a hardening of opinion.
The concluding Part Five provides three chapters that bring us up to speed with current developments in the twenty-first century. Up until less than ten years ago, past experience seemed to predict a marginal existence for the radical right in New Zealand. This might be summed up in Chapter Thirteen, authored by Mark Dunick, which profiles would-be demagogue Kyle Chapman and his various dead ends in trying to organise a rabble of associates into a disciplined fascist movement. While not underplaying the criminal convictions of Chapman or his potential to cause harm, the overall impression you get is of a perennial loser.
Kyle Chapman’s history is a list of failures, which is, of course, good for the rest of us. If only that was where the story ends. But the volatile global situation of the last decade has created a Petri dish environment where new and fast-mutating combinations of the radical right hybridise and thrive. This topic is dealt with in the final chapter, where Michael Daubs examines the international networks of the far right and white supremacy, especially their migration to an online space in recent years, which sadly brings us full circle to the Christchurch terrorist attack.
Paul Spoonley and Paul Morris contribute a relevant contemporary chapter with ‘Identitarianism and the Alt Right: a new phase of far-right politics in Aotearoa New Zealand.’ This details the growth of a new extreme right focussed on ethnic and religious identity, linked to conspiracy theories such as QAnon and often referred to as the ‘Alt Right.’
The other major impact is the fallout from the COVID pandemic. It seems unreal that such a spark could have lit the fire of the modern conspiracy movement, which has now become a permanent feature of political discourse and the unifying theme of the Parliamentary Grounds Occupation and its violent denouement on 2 March 2022.
The conspiracy movement is not consistently right-wing in a conventional sense, nor is it even a movement in a conventional sense. I would argue that it functions as a ‘gateway drug’ to the radical right. Conspiracies nominally criticise power, but their analysis of power is either flawed or, in some cases, complete fantasy. Conspiracies are inherently anti-rational and rely on the collapse of political literacy and, nowadays, the collapse of the legitimacy of the State, and have a long tradition within the radical right.
There is now an ecosystem of radical right-wing parties and organisations, many of which operate on the border of conventional politics. They seem to be led by people who are unable to work together, hence the chaotic proliferation and lack of unity. The old joke about the far left splitting and splintering into tiny competing sects now seems reflected on the far right. There are, for example, at recent count, Democracy NZ, Freedoms New Zealand (a lash-up of Vision NZ and the Outdoors and Freedom Party), New Conservative, the Leighton Baker Party, New Nation, ONE, and the Heartland Party. Most have a common theme around their hostility to vaccine mandates or vaccination in general but are all radically right-wing in nature.
Trump, Brexit and the various far-right hardmen of Europe are all symptoms of the rising forces of a radical right entering the global mainstream. In New Zealand, we have had a good few bullies and reactionaries over the years—Muldoon comes to mind—but nothing that really fits the bill.
What we got instead was Winston Peters. Peters has spun out a remarkably long career by pressing the buttons of a stereotypical segment of the population. But fortunately for us, he seems to have no real political principles and just enjoys being in the limelight. His major achievement has been aggravating coalition partners and conjuring up the ‘Gold Card’ for superannuitants. Every election, he sucks up thousands of votes primed for the radical right and then he proceeds to do nothing of substance. 2023 is shaping up to be a repeat performance.
One question I kept coming back to when reading this book is the difficulty in defining what the radical right actually is in the New Zealand context. It clearly has its roots in Pākehā society and is reactionary in nature. The radicalism is in the proposed methods and extremes of the ideology, but the ideology itself often blurs into conservative and reactionary modes. This leads to peculiar contradictions, such as the radical right support for a ‘strong’ State, authority, and law and order, and the fact that the radical right is also currently attempting to attack the State and its institutions. The reaction to the police action during the Parliamentary Occupation was a classic example of this.
This book reinforced one thing. In New Zealand, failure to build a credible constituency still defines the radical right. For now, the radical right is largely irrelevant to the establishment—business owners, public service managers, aspirational middle-class New Zealanders. Compare the radical right’s fringe activism to the mainstream right in New Zealand, which is either comfortable with or unengaged by many of the massive social changes of recent decades. And consider the mainstream right’s most popular recent leader, Sir John Key, who advertised himself as a moderate. He was a cheerleader for mass immigration and is nowadays a public advocate for Communist China on the basis that they buy our stuff. He happily turned up at Gay Pride events. He was even forgiven for trying to change the flag. His vision is the epitome of liberal bourgeois capitalism, the global system he sought to fully integrate his nation with. His followers may not have understood or even agreed with all this, but they thought he was brilliant. The important thing was he spoke to the supreme motivating force of modern New Zealand society—money.
VICTOR BILLOT is a Dunedin writer. He is the editor of the Maritime Union of New Zealand magazine, The Maritimes, and is a regular contributor to The Commonweal, the journal of the New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies.
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