I’m not indigenous to Tamaki Makarua, Aotearoa, A.K.A Auckland, New Zealand, where I live. I was born and raised in Essex, England. The Kenworthy name goes back to 17th century farmers around Chester. My grandmother’s ancestors all came from 15th century Yorkshire.
By any global or historical measure, I am ludicrously wealthy. My ethnic group acquired this wealth through centuries of environmental vandalism and colonial armed robbery. The victims were and still are indigenous cultures like the one I don’t really mix with here in my day to day life.
For centuries heavily armed Brits have marauded from our islands to invade exotic, beautiful places. To meet interesting people, and kill them. Each place has its indigenous names and identities, entwined with their own rich poetry, history and culture. We slapped the names of our homeland over them. Sometimes we chucked the word ‘new’ at the front.
Colonialists are the kind of lunatics who, after battering and abandoning a wife called Shirley, force every woman they meet to rename themselves New Shirley.
One of the most abiding, fundamental and dangerous parts of our culture is the myth that this is history. We kid ourselves that it requires careful assessment, argument or research to understand the ethical pros and cons. We pretend this unfortunate business was cast aside with the powdered wigs and slave ships. It is, of course, as current as the device you’re reading this on. It is inherent in many of the processes by which it was made and delivered to you.
Industrialisation is still largely a process of extorting and extracting resources from indigenous people and their land. We just change how we refer to this over time. We used to call it manifest destiny, empire and civilisation. We now call it development. We celebrate when exploited nations become ‘developed', like some kind of global Stockholm Syndrome. Exploitation is fine, as long as enough people join in. Everybody’s doing it. They’ve always done it. They’re just not as good at it as we are.
And so the warfare, the pillaging and terrorising continues. And us rich folk continue to collect our share, including those of us who pretend to disapprove.
Captain James Cook’s men shot their first Māori 250 years ago. The property owning classes of New Zealand are still surfing along on the proceeds. Aotearoa is a lovely place to live. That is why we stole, defrauded or short changed its previous owners into handing it over to us.
Me and my partner own a 1950s four bedroom wooden house near the coast of the sediment choked Hauraki Gulf. It currently earns me more every year than my full time job as a sustainability professional. This is the engine that drives middle class wealth in this country. It's turbo charged by the inflated prices of holiday homes and rental property. The less well off are disenfranchised. That includes descendants of the indigenous people whose land it all sits on.
We owned a rental property for a while. It was in Meremere, next to the Waikato River, south of Auckland. The town sits on what was once a Māori stronghold. In 1863 local people resisted my ancestral compatriots. The Māori had a captured British cannon that fired cutlery, because they didn’t have cannonballs. The British overran them, then confiscated the land.
The Tainui people got most of the town back 132 years later, in 1995. This was after 40 years of living under the pall of a coal fired power station. It was, pointedly, four years after the power station had closed, taking most of the town’s jobs with it. What they got back was a load of dilapidated state housing in the middle of heavily sprayed fields they no longer owned. It now sits next to a motorway and a motor racing circuit, surrounded by prisons. Some of the houses were broken up and shipped out. A lot of the rest were sold to a private company. Adding insult to injury, it was called James Cook Limited. James Cook eventually on-sold, mostly to middle class whiteys like me. So the people got disenfranchised all over again.
Colonialism persists because it works for the colonisers. The key is to help do over the original owners and grab some half decent land. Your descendants could be rich for generations. Unsurprisingly, the descendants deny this, justify it, ignore it or say it’s all in the past.
One side of my Kiwi in-laws originated from a shepherding clan from Scotland. They were colonised by the English, then joined their colonial adventures. They landed at a place called Wairoa. They renamed it Clevedon after a Somerset town to which it bears no resemblance. They grabbed some land for next to nothing. Six generations later, life is good among the multi-millionaires in one of the most affluent areas of the country. No doubt some of these ancestors had to stick their necks out and work harder than I ever have. But had they stayed where they were they might have worked just as hard. They would have then got cleared by the English into the slums of Edinburgh to become extras in Trainspotting.
Of course, the spoils are not shared equitably, even inside the exploiting countries. But the kind of poverty you might experience is still largely defined by whether your people are in on the blag, or victims of it.
Calling people out for racism in our culture is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indie 500. We’re not really punishing poor behaviour, since everyone we know is guilty. We're punishing poor etiquette. We attack those unable or unwilling to mask their inherent racism as effectively as the rest of us. In a way we’re just punishing honesty.
Our actions betray our belief that we deserve to be vastly wealthier and healthier than people who aren’t like us. What could be more racist than that?
Today, some of the most coherent views are held by people who deep down still believe in manifest destiny, survival of the fittest or plain old dog eat dog. I suspect this includes most conservative politicians. They have the benefit of consistency, if nothing else. I think that might explain why they remain so successful and influential in our society. Because we subconsciously recognise that these are the real ideas our society runs on.
New Zealand talks about being ‘clean, green and kind’. But we're still careful to side with the bullies when it suits us. We make sure to send troops to help invade places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course, there’s lots of talk about ‘shared values’...we value the resources we intend to steal, and want to secure our share of them. The idea that these are ‘Christian values’ is of course laughable.
It reminds me of the speech made by the fictional Col. Nathan R. Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson, in the movie A Few Good Men.
“We live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s going to do it? You?...You don’t want the truth because in places you don’t talk about at parties you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. [You] rise and sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, and then question the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said ‘thank you’ and went on your way.”
If you replace the word “freedom” with “affluence” or “convenience” then you get the picture.
The Colonel’s job is to fend off our victims.
Imagine you stole your neighbours' mower and burned down his house. Maybe you killed his children. He comes round to ask if he can cut your grass for minimum wage. The Colonel sets the dogs on him.
This is essentially the western world’s entire approach to war and immigration. It is central to our society. And like many of the central features of our society, it is surrounded by lies.
Most wars are essentially just very large armed robberies. If we can help rip off the oil concessions and other resources, we’re happy. Our allies will make a tonne of cash on the side rebuilding what we helped destroy. Then they'll make more money re-arming the place and/or its neighbours. Netflix can make movies about how heroically torn 'our' soldiers were by their experiences. We can all go on buying budget toasters and Harley Davidsons.
The idea that these actions are ‘humanitarian’ is completely and obviously ridiculous. Ditto the ludicrous notion that we invaded Afghanistan for women’s liberation. And we all know it. You might have thought these comforting lies would wear out over the centuries. But they just seem to be a gift that keeps on giving.
Consider, for another example, the first day of the invasion of Iraq in 1991. Let’s call it Operation 'Price at the Pump'. The US-led coalition of 35 nations mobilised at least one million trained personnel. They used trillions of dollars worth of equipment in a matter of weeks.
Did you see that happen for famines in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Rwandan genocide?
Sure, a particular robbery might not work out entirely as planned. We might even lose control of some resources for a while. But the idea that the US military-industrial complex can lose wars is like saying Cadbury can lose Easter.
So here’s my marketing idea for campaigners.
Let’s admit that the people we keep in power, the ones doing all this hideous stuff on our behalf, know pretty much exactly what they are doing, and why. And we do too. That's why we allow them to go on doing it and keep rewarding them for it with massive salaries, titles, medals and parades. That’s the horrible ethical ball bag poking out of those camo cargo pants all our homebound heroes like to wear so much. If we don’t intend to stop, let’s just own it. Bullying and killing poorer people is what made us rich and keeps us that way.
This would seem a far more honest and realistic position. It cuts straight through the circumlocutions we employ to try and shake the disconcerting scent of blood in our nostrils every time we buy crap at the mall. 'Raising awareness' about the ‘failings’ of this system is play-acting at best. It's a form of collusion.
People like me and you benefit hugely from this gigantic game of pretend. We pretend not to know what we do know. We pretend to believe what we don’t really believe. Then, when someone tells us the truth enough times we eventually pretend to ‘realise’ what we already knew. Then we pretend that we don’t know what we can do about it. Or we pretend we are doing it, when we’re not. Or just forget all about it. And we get to stay rich. We get to live in our pretend little world defended by real people with real guns. They carry on pretending to be freeing the people who they actually terrorise and kill. And when war inevitably comes to us, we'll have to join in. After all, we've all lived off the spoils of war all our lives.
This makes me feel sorry for the ‘whistleblowers’. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are blowing their little whistles into a hurricane. They simply tell people in detail what they already know in general.
Consider Wikileaks Collatoral Murder video. Who didn't know that members of the US military sometimes gleefully mow down innocent people from helicopters? Before Snowden, who didn't know that our government spies on us? How could we not know this? There’s an avalanche of information documenting and even celebrating it. It's in books, films and websites. It's strewn across our culture like discarded pornography on a 1980s building site.
These things aren’t the system failing. They're the system’s normal operations. It’s not a hidden agenda. It’s the agenda. It’s our agenda. It will remain so until we change it.
Our society doesn't silence and convict whistleblowers because they tell us things we don’t already know. It’s because they insist on telling us things we already know but are trying desperately to ignore. The silence outside Assange’s prison is the sound of ordinary people all over the industrialised world rolling over and gratefully going back to sleep.
So that’s my suggestion. NGOs and journalists in the industrialised world should abandon the self-righteous charade of ‘exposing’ ecological and social inequities. There should be no more ‘bearing witness’ or ‘raising awareness’. It’s like shouting fire in a tone of feigned surprise when we reek of petrol and our pockets are jammed full of matches.
Wonderfully expressed - one wonders about the moral outrage at Putin’s war, when we were/are complicit in so many others with lesser justification. There is barely a mention in our media of the Yemen war, where the US supplies the bombs that Saudi Arabia plasters over small towns, and where 2 million are on the point of starvation. And everywhere, resources and food are rationed by price! Could a labour government (here in New Zealand) or Democrat government in the USA ever consider guaranteed basic services together with tradable energy quotas (TECs) …… probably not as it would impact on the profiteering of the top 10%…
Damn....
"We’re not really punishing poor behaviour, since everyone we know is guilty. We're punishing poor etiquette. We attack those unable or unwilling to mask their inherent racism as effectively as the rest of us. In a way we’re just punishing honesty."
Having spent a couple of weeks watching Te Tiriti webinars, i'm only now beginning to understand the scale of the problem.
How do we do better? The system entrenches us with its momentum, halting the machine is more likely to get you run over by it...