Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

HOW GUILTY SHOULD I FEEL?

It is over five weeks since the Christchurch barbarity happened and I have deliberately held off writing anything even peripherally associated with it. The Prime Minister, very eloquently and very appropriately, has had her say, to the admiration of the whole country and much of the world. The TV commentators, editorialists and op-ed writers have had their say. So have the relatives of the victims and all the people who have attended peaceful rallies and memorial services in support of New Zealand’s Muslim community.

There is very little I could possibly add to what has already been said and written about the horror, but the essence of it is very simple. A deranged fanatic murdered 50 people and seriously wounded as many more – an extreme right-wing, white nationalist, who had been encouraged to hate Muslims by many sources (the growing white nationalist exclusionism in Europe and America and all its spokespersons; the anti-religious rhetoric of Richard Dawkins etc.). We could find bleak comfort in the fact that the mass-murderer was not a New Zealander and nearly all of us agreed at once that it was time to crack down on the open sale and use of rapid-fire automatic weapons. After all, what legitimate purpose could any civilian have in possessing such firearms? We could also all agree that extreme-right white nationalism – like all fanticisms - is a destructive thing and should be monitored more closely.

So far, all these things have been the consensus. And I did perceive that for a brief moment, in the national outpouring of sympathy and solidarity with the Muslim community, in the awareness that 50 people worshipping peacefully had been slaughtered, the voices who claim that religion “causes war” and is the “root of all evil” all went very silent. We briefly believed that such a terrible event had changed the country permanently, and in some ways it has. We have been told forcefully that New Zealand is not immune to terrorism, nor a safe little island country far from the major acts of violence in other parts of the world – but then teaching us that lesson was part of what the mass-murderer intended. We briefly believed that this terrorist attack would shock us into being more humane, understanding of diverse ethnicities and religions, and ready to live by the virtues of care, respect for others, the “fair go”, and toleration of ways of life that are not our own. These are virtues that the prime minister rightly encouraged as being at the heart of what it is to be a New Zealander. “Men of every creed and race / Gather here before Thy face / Asking Thee to bless this place”, as it says in the national anthem.

But then the chattering classes got to work, and the old, familiar, sectionalism got back on its feet and started barking.

Far from abhorring only extremists, and in this case the extreme right-wing, some voices started telling us that, if we were white, if we were evenly slightly and reasonably conservative in some of our attitudes, then we were just as guilty as the mass-murderer. After all, didn’t our “white privilege” and our attitudes tend towards the attitudes of the mass-murderer? Charts were produced, purporting to show how racism has small and apparently insignificant beginnings. The implication was clear. That mildly racist joke you laughed at in primary school – it proves that you too could have pulled the trigger in the mosques. We were told that New Zealand was built on colonialism, the suppression of the Maori language and culture, and much violence – including massacres – in the New Zealand wars of the 19^th century. Therefore white New Zealanders should study the real history of this country more closely and live with a legacy of guilt. The notions of the “fair go” and of the general openness and tolerance of New Zealand society were a sick joke, denied by our history.

As one who has taught New Zealand history at both secondary and tertiary levels, I am all in favour of people learning about, and confronting honestly, all the realities of colonialism and its evils. But at a certain point I will always ask “Am I personally responsible for events that happened in my great-great-great grandparents’ time? Am I involved in the killing at Rangiaowhia or the forcible evictions from Parihaka?” To say that I am is very akin to old European anti-semites who would say that all Jews were, forever, guilty of killing Christ. “You’re white, so therefore you’re guilty of all the evils in our history, no matter how long ago they occurred.” At a peaceful rally in Auckland in support of the Muslim community, many people began to walk away when one speaker made a speech along these lines.

Much of this resonates with me because once, when I was delivering a lecture on the New Zealand Wars, one student accused me of being “racist” when, after speaking of British atrocities in the New Zealand Wars, I also mentioned Maori atrocities. I did not argue with the student but – after a brief pause – continued with my lecture. Of course I did and do continue to consider how systemic racism might now still be, and how it is the challenge of all of us to fix it as best we can. But the lecture-room incident did lead me to examine my conscience repeatedly and consider how “racist” I am.

Here are some notes from my personal life.

My next-door neighbour on one side is Cook Island Maori and a good friend (we go to the same church among other things). My next-door neighbour on the other side is a Chinese woman married to a Kiwi bloke. They’re only recent arrivals in the neighbourhood and we don’t know them very well; but I’m sure that in time we’ll get on just fine. My GP is Chinese. My dentist is Chinese. The last time I visited an optometrist, she was Indian. The last time I had a colonoscopy (yes, I’m of an age to have such things) the surgeon was Syrian. They are all good people.

But apparently I’m racist.

Four of my children are married. One is married to an Englishwoman, one to a New Zealander of Indian descent (mother Hindu, father Parsee), one to an Italian and one to a Croat. So I rejoice in having five half-English, three half-Indian, four half-Italian and two half-Croat grandchildren.

But apparently I’m racist.

At the church I go to, the parish priest is Filipino and his curate is Sri Lankan. The most recent parish survey showed that of the parishioners in whose company I rejoice, 54% are Pakeha and the other 46% are Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Samoans, Syrians, Iraqis and New Zealand Maori. For those who are unaware of this, Christian churches in New Zealand (and especially in urban areas) are among the most ethnically-diverse institutions in the country.

But apparently I’m racist.

The last secondary school I taught at before retirement was a Catholic one. Not only did it have very active Kapa Haka and Pasifika groups, a Confucian Society and compulsory tuition in the Maori language at junior levels, but every year, all our Year 10 students were taken on visits to centres of religious worship around Auckland. The imam of the mosque in Ponsonby would explain Islam to them, the rabbi of the synagogue on Grey’s Avenue would explain Judaism to them [having been clued up on the Hebrew Bible in Year 9 the boys would already know something of this] and out in west Auckland a Tibetan monk would explain Buddhism to them. These lessons were reinforced in Year 12 when all boys spent half the year’s Religious Education programme learning about Judaism and Islam. To put it simply, the boys at this school had already learnt in considerable and sympathetic detail more about Islam than some New Zealanders began to learn only after the massacre.

What I am saying in all this is that, with the proviso that all obey the democratically-agreed law of the land,  I am perfectly happy to live in a multicultural society with all its ethnic diversity and various religions.  I am at ease with it, and accept multiculturalism as our current reality – the sea in which we all swim.

But you see, I have just used a very dirty word. Multiculturalism. Only a few years ago, some were decrying multiculturalism as a cruel stratagem by Pakeha, designed to destroy what should be the biculturalism of Maori and Pakeha. Multiculturalism, went this trope, was created intentionally to smother Maori concerns and ultimately leave Pakeha in charge in a divide-and-rule manner. I remember also, alas, that not too the long before the recent massacre, members of what is now the governing party were decrying Chinese immigration and the current deputy-prime minister, mercifully tactful and silent during most of the recent crisis, has built much of his career in calling for limitations on immigration.

In the end, the finger-pointing, the attempt to extend guilt about the actions of a mass-murderer, is an opportunist attempt to advance a political and social agenda – not an agenda of peace, harmony and the “fair go” among all New Zealanders, but an agenda of sectionalism. This always means an agenda in which one group is claiming moral superiority over others, simply by virtue of belonging to that group.

I have long admired the British Muslim writer and commentator Maajid Nawaz, a former radical Islamicist and jihadist whose experience led him away from extremism and back to a respect for open societies with democratic values. (For my review of his recanting book, which I reviewed on this blog 6-and-a-half years ago, look here = Radical). I am not a plagiarist, so when I repeat here a comment Maajid Nawaz made just after the Christchurch terrorist attack, I acknowledge that I first saw it in Graham Adams’ eminently level-headed article “The Perils of the Blame Game”, which I found on-line at Noted. 

Of the Christchurch massacre, Maajid Nawaz said: “A mere day after 50 of my fellow Muslims were so publicly and tragically killed, while the blood was still wet and the bodies remained unburied… the ideologues had circled like vultures. Opportunistic Islamist and far-left extremists began calling for a purge of people whose politics they disagree with, and started publishing McCarthyite lists of personae non grata to target.”

Quite so. I particularly agree with that use of “McCarthyite”. Just as, in the Cold War, McCarthy and others accused liberals and the mildest of socialists as being “Commies”, so now we have opportunists accusing white people of the mildest and most reasonable of conservative views of being white-nationalist extremists, or at least on the path to becoming such.

I apologise for the length of this post, but I have had a lot to say. In the end, one fanatic’s actions should at least make it clearer that we should respect the ways and beliefs of our fellow citizens whose origins lie in other parts of the world, just as we should respect Maori culture and beliefs. The atrocity should not be an inciter of guilt. Nor should it make us construct sectionalist walls to hide behind as we throw verbal bombs at people who do not share, exactly, our own identity or opinions. Yes, there should be no fanatical white racism and yes, there should be no opportunistic comments relating to a whole people. Similarly, in all our fellow-feeling for our Muslim fellow-citizens, we should not lose our powers of reasoning. I am sorry to tell you this but, just like white extremist racism, radicalised jihadist Islamism is still a major problem in the world. A little of its influence infected this country in the aftermath of the terrorist attack when a Muslim speaker at an event in Auckland blamed it on Zionism and local “Jewish businessmen”. And if we’re going to pluck at old wounds, as the sectionalists do, might I point out that nice Cat Stevens, who sang about the “peace train” when he appeared in Christchurch at a memorial event for the Muslim dead, is the same Cat Stevens who once merrily sang the homicidal ditty “I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun” and who, (though he later tried to deny it), after he had become Yusuf Mohammed, endorsed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (See on this blog my review of Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton).

I say this only to suggest, a little wearily, that manufactured guilt, sectionalism and opportunism are no way to respond to an atrocity. And (like you, I hope), I grieve along with all peaceful Muslims and for the 50 who were murdered, the many who were injured, and all their families.