A few weeks ago, the Dominion Post ran as its feature letter to the editor a piece
arguing that Anders Behring Breivik was right in theory, but wrong in practice.
(A banal but still important aside:
imagine the obloquy facing anyone with an Arabic name writing in to make a
similar claim about Bin Laden!) All of this as Breivik’s trial continues, and
as we re-learn details of how he murdered scores of young social democrats and
citizens. The usual, polite correspondence ensued; such views are part of the
editorial sense of the acceptable, evidently, as is Chris Slater of
Silverstream’s contribution. Writing on how Islam is “a supremacist and
intolerant religion with increasingly conservative followers”, Slater proceeds,
as if quoting a local columnist or a slightly eccentric public intellectual: “As Anders Breivik
points out, multiculturalism is part of a deliberate…”
This is all contemptible and morally distasteful, obviously: it’s also
politically revealing. The Dominion Post’s
earlier, eager persecution of local ‘terror’ means I wasn’t surprised of its
coyness in the face of genuine, self-described terrorism of the fascist
variety, and this reminds us that not all treatment of terror threats are
equal. Besides, as Tad Tietze and Elizabeth Humphrys have argued in a series of
very important posts, media treatment of Breivik’s trial involves a dangerous
interaction of de-politicisation and political expansion. De-politicisation, as
speculation on Breivik’s mental state distracts attention from the detailed, programmatic
basis on which his terrorist attacks were carried out. Political expansion, as
this very programme finds its echoes all across the mainstream media: Breivik’s
hateful rantings, like so much produced by European fascism currently, are
echoes and repetitions from the much more respectable, and more widely
syndicated, discourse of Islamophobia and war-on-terror chest-puffing that
passes for serious thought on the constitutional Right. (Australia’s own
intellectual embarrassment, Keith Windschuttle, was one of the many
publicly-feted cranks and official racists Breivik drew on).
Understanding – and confronting – fascism is an urgent question for the
left, in Europe and elsewhere. Utoya’s tragedy is also a warning.
The Shadow
A series of events these last months have had me reflecting on a local
shadow of the Breivik trial, one which doesn’t match the current atrocity in
the scale of loss and suffering, but which contains all too many parallels with
the current scene of semi-apology, depoliticisation, and race hatred.
On 24th September 1905 Lionel Terry shot Joe Kum Yung in
Wellington. Full of the racial theories and eugenic obsessions that
characterised conservative thinking of his time (and, shamefully, that infected
and paralysed much of the Australasian Left), Terry intended his murder as a
political act, to rouse the colony against the threat of the ‘Yellow Peril’ and
Chinese influence. He had travelled to Wellington distributing copies of his The Shadow, full of anti-Chinese poems
and ravings. He turned himself in after the killing, and used his trial as a
platform for racism.
As with Breivik, much of Terry’s case centred around his mental state.
His later life, at Seacliff and elsewhere, make it clear that he was clearly a
very disturbed figure, but, despite the prominence given to it in most
historical accounts, the details of this particular petty individual’s life are
less important than the context of his crime. He found huge public support, and
it’s impossible to imagine this purportedly humanitarian concern being
mobilised were it not connected to deeper sympathies with his anti-Chinese
message. Clemency was granted, and the death penalty initially set transformed
into a sentence. Petitions were gathered. Prominent figures spoke out.
A policeman who had travelled some of the way to Wellington with Terry
described him in ecstatic terms: 'He looked a perfect picture.
As fine a man as ever I saw – bolt upright, and with as free an action as you'd
see on an athlete.' Some years later, once Terry was at Truby King’s
asylum at Seacliff, locals wrote to the Otago
Daily Times in support of his escapades: one correspondent wrote in 1907
that Terry would be “an honoured guest at 95 percent of the homesteads of
Central Otago. Had his capture depended on the residents of Central Otago he
would never have returned to Seacliff.” Truby King, himself a bigoted
eugenicist well in sympathy with anti-Asian political programmes and fantasies
at the time, developed a long-term friendship with Terry.
Madness is hardly the question here – why did it manifest itself as a
murderous obsession with the Chinese? The answer to this can be provided by a
glance through any of the mainstream publications of his time. Ettie Rout, now
remembered for her work around birth control, wrote in her Maori Mythology of the “truly fearful prospect” that the “Yellow
race” would overwhelm the white. (This
is much the same line used by European fascism around the threats posed by
multiculturalism, although given contemporary ‘culturalist’ twists). Dr Doris
Gordon, founder of the NZ Obstetrical Society, met Terry at Seacliff and recorded
these impressions: “'A man of wonderful physique and a brilliant brain.
Terry would propound his brilliant hypotheses; by the time he finished most of
the hypnotised students were wondering who should be labelled lunatic and who
custodian!'”
Terry drew
then, and developed, an existing discourse of hatred pre-prepared for him. The
parallels aren’t exact, of course; there was no fascist movement in 1905 for
which this murder could act as an organising issue; the ‘cultural’ politics of
our day (Breivik’s hated cultural Marxism) have replaced the pseudo-sciences of
an earlier era.
In memory of Joe Kum Yung
Joe Kum Yung
has, for the most part, slipped from the focus of narratives of the 1905
attack, and it’s easy to see why. He was a normal man, elderly, incidental,
until his death, to the story, chosen for his skin colour and the ease with
which he could be murdered.
The poet Alison
Wong, in her extraordinary and beautiful debut novel As the Earth Turns Silver, rescues Joe Kum Yung from posterity’s
condescension, and grants him posthumous dignity:
Joe Kum-yung was not a clansman, but with maybe three
hundred in all of Wellington, every Chinese was a brother, especially one shot
at point-blank range. Yung heard from Fong-man, who heard from Joe Toy, that
Kum-yung had been walking home when a man came up behind him and shot him twice
in the head. No one got a good look at the murderer. It was a Sunday evening.
It was dark. Haining Street was almost deserted. The man with the revolver wore
a long grey coat. He was tall. He was gweilo. When Joe Toy got there, his
cousin was lying outside Number 13 in a dark pool of blood, a paper bag of
peanuts scattered around him.
Wong’s novel, a
detailed and passionate work of historical reconstruction, restores some
attention to the Chinese voices in this period of sustained hostility and
European ill-will.
And who are the Chinese?
This isn’t
history, though, or not here. For months now television and radio has been
interspersed with announcements for shows analysing the dangers of more land
passing to ‘the Chinese.’ The Yellow Peril may as well never have left, and
neither, shamefully again, has sections of the left’s complicity with it.
Loudest in their condemnation of foreign ownership have been Labour and the
Greens.
And who are the
Chinese, the threat to those national treasures the Crafar Farms? If we’re to
enter stakes in any tauiwi entitlement register, my own memories are of
Cantonese-speaking Chinese families I met at my Dunedin primary school, many of
whom had family connections in the region dating back to the Gold Rush. A
longer period of settlement, to be sure, than that of my own family’s post-war
arrivals, and yet this is unlikely to prevent the verbal abuse and physical
threats that follow along from talk of ‘foreigners.’
Political
issues are in play too. I’ve written elsewhere on the Crafar farm sale, and
have, in the organisation I’m a part of, tried to hold to something like a line
involving socialist internationalism.
In the cultural
sphere, though, and amongst those who wish to see themselves as liberal or
progressive, we’re rotten with a xenophobia so strong it no longer needs to
recognise itself. You can buy hoodies with the slogan “Born Here” marked on
them, a phrase I hadn’t seen since the white race riots and attacks on Lebanese
people in Sydney in 2005. For New Zealand, though, the message is so universal
to seem like it’s lost any self-consciousness of its political purpose and
exclusionary effect.
Neo-nazis
marched, quite without opposition, through Christchurch not long ago. Violent
attacks against Asians are reported around the country. Slogans around ‘foreign
ownership’ become a common leftist currency, and smuggle in with them more
direct, forthright racisms. (One placard from last week’s hikoi against asset
sales in Wellington involved nothing more than a Chinese flag with a black
cross through it).
Amongst all
this, the Terry trial comes through to me like a moment of the pre-history of
this present. Intellectual climates are
built through asides, gestures, hints, implications – the pitch around
Islamohophobia was built over many years, and we see its results.
Anti-Asian
racism is, in a settler colony like this one, part of the obsessively re-worked
anti-myths of the Pakeha world, the fears of invasion nourished by generations
of invaders. They’re being revived, consciously, and dangerously, all around
us.
In March David
Shearer made this comment on TVNZ’s Q&A:
Yeah, but what I’m
doing here is saying we’re not closing the door to all foreign investment. I
mean, it’s very clear in the bill that I’m putting forward. What we’re saying
is that our land, our valuable land is best farmed for New Zealanders and the
value flows back to New Zealand as well. What we don’t want to see is foreign
corporates coming in here, buying up lots of land, and the value and the
benefits flowing out of New Zealand, and that’s very very important.
Who are these New Zealanders? Who are these foreigners? What does it
mean to say valuable land is ‘best farmed for New Zealanders’? (With hundreds locked out from a major chain of meatworks, that last question arrives with a
hollow kind of mirth).
Alison Wong carries
out a piece of cultural redemption and memory, and asks her readers to see the
world as Joe Kum Yung. Narrative and imagination here offer political
possibilities. Too many of the current political voices – official ‘left’ as
much as governmental right – offer the far-too-familiar filter of all of our
numerous Lionel Terrys.
Sources
Dr Gordon’s quote I’ve taken from Hilary Stace’s very
helpful article on eugenics in New Zealand. Philip Ferguson’s PhD thesis on the
White New Zealand policy – available as a PDF here – is the best piece I’ve
read on the politics of exclusion.
