6 minute read
Aotearoa
New Zealand
Editors: Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley
Published by: Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2023, 444pp, $50.
Histories of Hate makes for difficult reading. This is not owing to the many distinguished contributors to this needed book, but rather to its subject matter. The radical right is a concept with which most are familiar, looking as it does off in the distant parts of our collective consciousness. Yet few acknowledge the radical right as a perennial and occasionally potent aspect of our social and political lives. This edited volume grew out of this seldom studied topic and the 15 March 2019 Christchurch mosques massacre.
The book sets for itself an ambitious agenda: to provide the historical context of New Zealand’s radical right from the Treaty of Waitangi to the Christchurch massacre and its aftermath. This history is told over five parts: Part One begins by laying the foundation of future right-wing extremist movements with the experiences of colonialism and early racial tensions around these experiences and efforts to both bring in and limit Chinese migration. Part Two moves the discussion to New Zealand’s inter-war years of the early 20th century and the rise of antiSemitism. Part Three moves the discussion to the post-Second World War years and the creation of the myth of the golden age of New Zealand, the rising social divisions exacerbated by the anti-apartheid movement and tensions within New Zealand rugby, before moving into the 1970s and the rise of skinheads as a very visible form of ‘street racism’, as Jarrod Gilbert describes it.
Part Four offers an interlude from the otherwise mostly sequential approach to expand on notions of religious and cultural intolerance and includes a strong chapter on anti-Treatyist discourses and how these have formed part of the right-wing messaging for much of New Zealand’s history — elements of which remain present in today’s politics. Part Five offers a more indepth look into the contemporary state of the radical right, the role of the internet and, returning to the theme of the international, interconnected nature of radical right ideology, imagery and propaganda throughout Europe and settler nations in North America and Australia.
The importance of international movements of people and ideas, their connections and communication over the late 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries is a central theme of the book. We find a thread that begins with the colonisation of New Zealand and the arrival of European settlers and imported ideas of supremacy and the right to rule; it lays the legal and political foundations for New Zealand as a state and its subsequent development as a nation over the ensuing 180 years. The British Empire was the first vehicle for these ideas and New Zealand’s place as outpost. The rulers of the remote colony recognised that the young nation required imported labour in order to achieve its development objectives. This prompted the rise of the impera- tive to encourage the ‘right’ migrants and deter undesirable ones through such measures as the Chinese exclusion provisions, which persisted into the 20th century.
International movements of the 20th century, including the inter-war years and the ubiquitous and eventually catastrophic nature of anti-Semitism, characterised radical right discourses during these years. Right wing movements often aim to return New Zealand to an earlier and idealised time of economic success and racial order. These tenets formed part of the lingua franca of the radical right, not only in New Zealand but also throughout North America and Europe. The rise of urban, street racism as discussed in Gilbert’s chapter provides perhaps the most visual and public representations of the radical right and fascist imagery. These connections show the importance of the transferability of personal appearance, iconography and other badges of white supremacy, and how these became common throughout much of the European settler states.
The book also provides an important opportunity to consider the various policy settings in response to the radical right. First, the book addresses immigration settings as an attempt to limit the movement of people in two important ways. This involved deliberate attempts to maintain racial homogeneity, through restrictive measures such as the Chinese Immigrants Act [1881] and Amendment Act [1907] (Chapter 1 by Leonie Pihama and Cherryl Smith). A second and more affirmative exercise refers to those efforts to limit the free movement of people with radical right ideas (Chapter 13 by Mark Dunick). Not to mention the absence of such efforts in earlier times, where an early white supremacist such as Arthur Desmond, whose ideas continue to influence those in the global far right, moved with ease from New Zealand to Australia and eventually to the United States, where his ‘Might is Right’ beliefs first took root (Chapter 4 by Mark Derby).
This book presents both the historical as well as contemporary legal, policy and moral dilemmas at the heart of what has made the radical right movement so insidious. Historical periods of boom or bust, the latter of which attracts the disaffected, largely young, male populations who long for some imagined, distant past; a past in which they would have been successful and self-actualised. Yet, instead, they choose to see the world as one where this birth-right has been thwarted by the presence of undesirable, non-white populations, along with their enablers amongst the social elites in government and academia. The book also persuasively connects these strands and their conspiracy-theory-laden milieu to recent movements opposing the state’s lockdowns and vaccine mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as QAnon. These final chapters provide fertile ground for reflection about how to make and remake the liberal state that can both remain vigilant whilst reflecting liberal values to effectively confront these challenges.
Despite these many strengths, the volume is not without its limitations. An important weakness is perhaps best illuminated through words from a closing quotation. Michael Daubs’s final chapter closes with a quote from Hamimah Ahmat, widow of one of the Christchurch mosques terrorist attack victims, who wrote that New Zealand ‘need[s] capable people who have a good understanding of systems, Islam, culture, and the contemporary western mentality’. The book would have benefited from the inclusion of diverse voices to speak on how communities have endured, responded to and overcome racial discrimination in New Zealand more broadly. Here I think of the works of scholars like Rachel Simon-Kumar, Neda Salashour, Eric Boamah and Alfredo José López Severiche, who have each written about migrant experiences in varying policy domains.
Notwithstanding this limitation, the book enhances our understanding of New Zealand’s radical right. The chapters demonstrate the movement as one typically populated by the disenfranchised — a common attribute from the Christchurch shooter all the way back to the founding of the country in 1840. Perhaps it is this pedigree that proves the radical right so resilient despite having never enjoyed wide-spread support in New Zealand: the ability to follow an imagined identity back to an earlier point in time and, in so doing, to see oneself as part of something larger. Readers of this edition, particularly those interested in the international radical right, or scholars of New Zealand politics and government and historians should find the book to be an important resource.
