Making Deserts.

Berlin 1945/Gaza 2025
“They make a desert, and they call it peace.”
 - Tacitus 56-117CE

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER doesn’t leave those demanding it very much in the way of wiggle-room. When President Franklin Roosevelt announced to the world that the Allied Powers would accept nothing less than the Axis Powers’ (Germany, Italy, Japan) unconditional surrender, he took the man sitting next to him, Winston Churchill, by surprise. Though the official history of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943 insists otherwise, the journalists present were pretty sure that Roosevelt had caught Churchill on the hop. Ever the wily imperial politician, Great Britain’s wartime prime-minister was a great believer in wiggle-room. Now there was none.

Roosevelt had very good reasons for his decision to eliminate the possibility of compromise. The most important of these was the absolute necessity of convincing the Soviets, then fighting for their lives, that there was no possibility of the USA and/or Great Britain negotiating a separate peace with the Nazis.

The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, whose paranoia was legendary, was fearful that Churchill, a convinced imperialist and passionate anti-communist, might prevail upon Roosevelt to transform the war into an anti-Soviet crusade. There can be little doubt that the thought, at least, had crossed Churchill’s mind.

No Wiggle Room: Franklin Roosevelt tells Winston Churchill, and the world, that the Allies’ war aim is Unconditional Surrender. 

Unconditional Surrender was Roosevelt’s way of reassuring Stalin that his fears were groundless. It was also intended to prevent his Soviet allies, whose backs had been against the wall since June 1941, from themselves negotiating a separate peace with Nazi Germany.

Beneath all this calculation, however, Roosevelt’s demand for Unconditional Surrender reflected his bedrock conviction that the evils of Nazism were too dreadful to be seated at any negotiating table. They could not be set aside in the interests of peace, because Nazism was the antithesis of peace. To end the war, Adolf Hitler and his creed had to be extirpated entirely. Nazi Germany’s surrender to the forces of civilisation had to be unconditional.

But, evil has a way of corrupting even the most noble of intentions – and the demand that it surrender unconditionally to the forces of righteousness is no exception.

When your enemy realises that there is no wiggle-room, the temptation to go on fighting to the bitter end is very hard to resist.

Equally hard to resist, on your own side, is the temptation to increase dramatically the level of punishment inflicted upon the enemy. If their stubborn refusal to acknowledge defeat persists, and the conflict is needlessly prolonged, then a steady escalation in the violence and destruction unleashed upon them is not only deemed morally justifiable, but also morally necessary.

Suddenly, the civilised distinction between combatants and non-combatants: soldiers and civilians; begins to blur. The commitment to waging Total War pronounced by one side, inevitably calls forth an answering commitment from the other.

Everybody and everything is to be considered a target. The sooner the enemy’s critical infrastructure, now deemed to include the houses – and the bodies – of their citizens, is reduced to rubble and torn flesh, the sooner peace will come.

This terrifying, though hardly novel, mode of thought was well understood by the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote of his own great city-state: “They make a desert, and they call it peace.” In Hamburg and Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allies’ quest for unconditional surrender would create deserts of its own.

And the making of deserts, if not peace, continues.

In response to the evil of 7 October 2023, Israel demanded the unconditional surrender of Hamas, and the release of all the hostages taken on that dreadful day by its pitiless foe. Hamas was defiant. God loves martyrs, and Hamas has plenty to give him.

Eighty years after the end of the Second World War in Europe, the world watches in despair as those who set forth in righteous wrath to secure the unconditional surrender of evil, have ensnared themselves in the same remorseless escalation of violence and destruction that captured our fathers and grandfathers.

The focus over recent days has been on the grainy images of universal celebration. [The 80th anniversary of VE Day. - C.T.] More difficult to watch are the images of ruined German cities, and how closely they resemble the images of ruined Gaza. Like the Romans and the Allied Powers, the Israelis are determined to bring forth the flower of peace from the desert they are making.

But, surely, the evil whose unconditional surrender Israel should be seeking, is the evil of not knowing when to stop.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 May 2025.

Mother Countries and Sentinel Sons.

Patriotic Appeal: Zealandia never really caught on. If asked, most Kiwis would scratch their heads and shrug their shoulders. “Never heard of her, mate? Is she in a band?” Some might guess that she’s the Pakeha sheila carrying the flag, and facing the Māori warrior, on New Zealand’s coat-of-arms. But, for the most part, Zealandia, an unoriginal Edwardian attempt at fostering national identity, is long gone.

NEW ZEALANDERS once referred to Great Britain as the “Mother Country”. This was no mere declaration of kinship or affection, it was offered in recognition of Britain’s status as the entity responsible for giving birth to, nurturing, and protecting the young New Zealand state.

Until relatively recently, the notion that Māori might also have had a hand in the creation of New Zealand, or that the Treaty of Waitangi might be viewed as the nation’s birth certificate, would have been dismissed out-of-hand. Obviously, Māori had a past, but beyond the military and legal efforts required to silence those benighted natives demanding a future separate and distinct from that of the Pakeha, it could have no bearing on the colony’s development.

New Zealand was a child of the British Empire. Of that its settlers were as certain as they were proud. The fact that Queen Victoria, titular ruler of an empire greater than any the world had hitherto encountered, was a woman, only reinforced the motherly metaphor.

But if most agreed that Great Britain was the Motherland, did New Zealand’s settler society feel the same way about the nation it was building? If pressed to provide an answer, would the settlers have stuck with the matrilinear option, or would they have opted instead to dub the entity that was rapidly emerging from the overwhelmingly masculine milieu of early colonial New Zealand, the “Fatherland”?

If the statue erected by the people of the little North Otago town of Palmerston in 1903 is any guide, the answer must be an emphatic “No.” This marble personification of the nation, arm uplifted to greet the new twentieth century, was Zealandia – and she was all woman.

Auckland and Christchurch boasted their own versions of Zealandia, and she even makes an appearance in the publicity material produced for the centennial of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1940. (Which, given the fact that she’s a lightly-clothed Pakeha, is ever-so-slightly, um, racist, and sexist, at least by today’s standards!)

Zealandia 1940

Does that settle the matter? Have Pakeha New Zealanders, guided perhaps by Papatuanuku, the Māori earth mother, always looked upon the nation as female? Or were our colonial forefathers merely aping their European betters? Most obviously Britain’s Britannia, but also France’s Marianne, the USA’s Columbia, and Germany’s Germania: all of them loosely-clad, somewhat stern young women, spoiling for a fight.

Except Zealandia never really caught on, did she? If asked, most Kiwis would scratch their heads and shrug their shoulders. “Never heard of her, mate? Is she in a band?” Some might guess that she’s the Pakeha sheila carrying the flag, and facing the Māori warrior, on New Zealand’s coat-of-arms. But, for the most part, Zealandia, an unoriginal Edwardian attempt at fostering national identity, is long gone.

Which is not something one could say about the scores of soldiers keeping watch over the dead of this country’s foreign wars in small towns and large cities all across New Zealand. Statues they may be, some carved out of marble, some cast in bronze, but for the families and friends of the fallen, whose names are often carved on the sides of the monuments they stand atop, these sentinels have kept the collective memory of sacrifice and loss alive for more than a century.

Memorial to the fallen of the Boer War, Oamaru, North Otago.

The first of these structures were raised in commemoration of the New Zealanders who fell “For the Empire” in the Boer War. Their statues strike heroic poses, as befitted their brutal imperial mission. Those of the Great War of 1914-18 embody less belligerent impulses. A soldier stands, rifle thrust forward, protecting his fallen comrade. As much a tribute to Anzac mateship, as martial valor.

New Zealand’s wartime Prime Minister Peter Fraser, believing the country had too many monoliths, to too many dead, opted instead to erect memorial halls to the fallen of World War II. Most still stand, places of community warmth and fellowship, rather than sad piles of cold marble and unflinching bronze.

No. New Zealanders will never refer to their nation as the Fatherland. The term sounds ridiculous – as inappropriate in 2025 as Mother Country. New Zealand is a nation built by daughters and sons. Like settler societies everywhere, it pushes the past behind it, and strides towards the future.

Māori, who have lived here longer, are waiting for us to turn around.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 25 April 2025.

The Woke War On the Cultural Conduits of Capitalism.

WHAT IS WOKE MORALITY? How does it work? More to the point, can it be countered without making use of the same arguments and justifications deployed by the woke themselves?

To begin with, “woke” is just the latest political shorthand for the ethical architecture supporting the tactics and strategies of anti-capitalism. The belief that capitalism lies at the root of all social inequality and injustice has been the prime driver of left-wing thought and action since at least the mid-nineteenth century. (By the arrival of the twenty-first, environmental despoliation and climate change had been added to capitalism’s rap-sheet.)

If only the ingenuity and understanding of human-beings were harnessed to a better purpose than squalid private enrichment, argue the anti-capitalists, then a world of abundance, equality, freedom and happiness would emerge spontaneously from the reeking capitalist corpse.

Certainly the radical reformers of the mid-nineteenth century did not have to work very hard to convince those at the sharp end of the industrial revolution that they were the victims of a viciously exploitative system. To appreciate capitalism’s iniquities, the industrial working-class had only to look around them. Not for nothing did the English poet, William Blake, describe their workplaces as “dark satanic mills”.

Satisfying human need would be a relatively simple matter, declared the anti-capitalists of the 1840s – better known to their contemporaries as ‘socialists’. But overcoming the human greed that fuelled capitalism – that was an altogether more daunting proposition.

Just how daunting was demonstrated by the steady improvement in the lives of working people made possible by the enormous wealth which capitalism was generating. Only a small fraction of capitalist profit was required to improve dramatically the material conditions of working-class life – a fact which the more intelligent capitalists acknowledged by allowing the state to tax the worst excesses of laissez-faire out of their system. More importantly, they also encouraged the state to lay before the best and brightest toilers a pathway out of working-class poverty.

The capitalist promise? That education, augmented by hard work, would conduct the children and grandchildren of the working-class into a larger, more exciting world.

For the socialists, however, this combination of incremental improvement and socio-economic co-option was intolerable. While its material circumstances may have improved marginally, the working-class’s relationship with capitalism had, to socialist eyes, become even more exploitative and unequal.

By providing their employees with a modicum of comfort and leisure, the capitalists had pared down the dangerous ‘Us versus Them’ dynamic of the Victorian era to the much safer ‘Us’ of the early twentieth century. To the socialists, however, the gulf between master and servant remained as great as ever. It was just that rising living standards and the glittering tinsel of empire had made it much harder to see.

How else could the masters have killed and maimed so many millions of their servants in the First World War?

Ah, yes, the First World War. In the wake of its horrors the anti-capitalists of the 1920s were encouraged to exchange their gently persuasive ‘social-democracy’ for the unapologetically coercive ‘communism’ of Lenin and his Bolsheviks.

The left-wing vision of humanity redeemed: its attachment to an emancipatory global revolution in which the world’s peoples, liberated by science and technology, would build a better world in friendship and equity; was still there. But getting there required men and women prepared to use any means – up to and including terror, torture and mass murder – to achieve the revolution’s ends. The omelette of communism would require the cracking of millions and millions of eggs.

This was no gentle poet’s dream of building “Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land”. By the 1920s, the construction of paradise had become the global project of the Communist International – better known as the Comintern. Not a reckoning of masters and servants in one country, but a full-scale assault upon the manifold injustices flowing from European and American capitalism’s attempted subjugation of the entire planet.

Murder, rape and plunder; enslavement and exploitation; all of it perpetrated under the cover of spurious anthropological hierarchies. A global system dedicated to rewarding Europeans in perpetuity for the inestimable virtue of not being black. That, at least, was the way the Comintern portrayed capitalism’s predation upon the rest of the planet. Communism and anti-imperialism were joined at the hip.

By the 1930s, however, the ideological foes of capitalism were growing increasingly embittered. Lenin and Stalin may have embedded communism in the Soviet Union, but everywhere else the emancipatory vision animating the Left was being hacked to pieces by the ferocious forces of a racially and/or religiously charged nationalism.

Why were the masses so unmoved by the communist saints, but so aroused by the fascist devils? Could it be that emancipation was something more than a straightforward exercise in wealth redistribution? Was the refusal of the world’s workers to lose their chains attributable to deeper and darker forces moving beneath the surface of capitalism? Was the Marxist social psychologist Eric Fromm correct in his diagnosis? Did the masses truly live in “fear of freedom”?

The answers emerging from World War II, the most destructive event in human history, were not encouraging. When leftists, gasping for breath, finally broke the surface of the War’s bloody ocean, they were slick with the evidence that their faith in human nature may have been … misplaced.

And, as if the Left’s dark night of the soul wasn’t dreary enough, the political managers of post-war capitalism made everything worse by shrewdly applying the scientific and technological advances of the War to the much more congenial challenges of peace. For close to three decades, in those parts of the world beyond the repressive concrete drabness of “actually existing” Soviet-style socialism, apprehension had grown on the Left that its vision of a free, equal, and abundant society might end up being realised by capitalism itself.

More than a few Capitalists were equally apprehensive that the Left might be right: that, just as Marx predicted, the system would end up digging its own grave. But not, they resolved, on their watch. Since the 1970s, the number one priority of these uncompromising free-market capitalists has been very clear: stop digging!

The accommodating capitalism of 1946-1976: the capitalism responsible for strong unions, social welfare, public housing, and an ever-expanding state sector, had to be utterly destroyed – along with the left-inspired “new social movements” its policies were at once empowering and emboldening.

These new social movements have, over the past 40 years, become more and more synonymous with what most people identify as ‘The Left’. It was within their ranks that the word “woke” was first used to describe the need to be alert to all the manifestations of injustice. They were born out of the conviction that human emancipation cannot be delivered by economic means alone. That unless the root causes of oppression, those psychic and cultural conduits sustaining human exploitation and violence, are exposed and destroyed, then the capitalist tree, no matter how many times it is felled, will always grow back stronger from the stump.

What does this mean in terms of woke politics? It means attacking all the belief systems, all the institutions, all the cultural practices, that the Left has come to identify as the fundamental sources of oppression.

The belief that men are superior to women.

The belief that Europeans and their cultural heritage are superior to all the other ethnicities and cultures of the world.

The belief that the family is the single most important constitutive component of human society.

The belief that gender is biologically determined.

The belief that science and technology are the neutral arbiters of human progress.

The belief that the human world and the natural world are separate entities.

That belief that capitalism and democracy are mutually reinforcing.

These are the beliefs the woke are going to war to extinguish.

And woke morality?

It is the philosophical system which, since the 1930s, has been constructed by anti-capitalist intellectuals to identify the core cultural components of capitalism; the prime enablers of its exploitative and oppressive behaviours; and thereby to awaken capitalism’s victims to the urgent necessity of destroying  them.

The characteristic zealotry and intolerance of woke politics is a consequence of its practitioners’ conviction that nothing good can be achieved unless and until the whole repertoire of contemporary capitalism’s self-justification is confronted, challenged, and disabled. In the moral universe of the woke, virtue is only obtainable through the active extirpation of vice.

To build a better world, the woke are convinced that this one must first be burned to the ground.

They can only be countered by the rest of us proving them wrong.

A version of this essay was posted on The Good Oil website on Monday, 21 April 2025.

What’s on the Label -vs- What’s in the Tin.

Would our political parties pass muster under the Fair Trading Act?

WHAT IF OUR POLITICAL PARTIES were subject to the Fair Trading Act? What if they, like the nation’s businesses, were prohibited from misleading their consumers – i.e. the voters – about the nature, characteristics, suitability, or quantity of the products – i.e. the policies – on offer? Would they pass muster? Or would MBIE be sending them a letter?

Let’s begin with the smaller parties.

The unlikelihood of ever finding themselves in a position to implement their entire policy agenda significantly reduces the political incentives for small parties to obfuscate and mislead the voters.

Such honesty is both refreshing and alarming. Small parties like Te Pāti Māori, NZ First, Act, and the Greens are not, as a rule, reticent about their plans for the country. They rightly intuit that ideological candour attracts more serious interest than political evasiveness. Their preference is for the narrow temple over the broad church.

So, Te Pāti Māori is openly demanding tino rangatiratanga – Māori sovereignty – and to hell with all the cavilling colonialists who complain. The party’s openly stated mission is to win all seven of the Māori seats, and to eliminate Labour’s decisive advantage, vis-à-vis Te Pāti Māori, in the Party Vote. Its leaders neither expect, nor are they seeking, a majority of all the votes cast. Their plan is to win enough parliamentary seats to make the support of Te Pāti Māori indispensable to the formation of any future New Zealand government.

That this makes the party hell-scary to a very large number of Non-Māori voters doesn’t bother Te Pāti Māori. It is well aware that skewering the Pakeha is a winning feature, not a fatal bug, of the party’s pitch. To succeed electorally it needs the enthusiastic support of rangatahi – and half-measures are repugnant to the young. Inspired by the uncompromising militancy of Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, they want it all, and they want it now.

In other words, Te Pāti Māori is offering exactly what it says on the tin.

NZ First and its leader, Winston Peters, are considerably more opaque.

Schooled by Rob Muldoon – New Zealand’s second-most-successful populist politician after Richard Seddon – Peters’ consistent electoral objective has been to reconstitute the angry coalition of farmers, small-business owners, and culturally-alienated working-class voters, that swept Muldoon to victory in 1975.

Like Muldoon, Peters expects his angry coalition to shoulder the task of restoring the social, economic and cultural equilibrium which he charges the Left with disrupting. Unlike Muldoon, however, Peters had to launch his populist crusades in a multi-party environment. The binary choice between himself and Bill Rowling, which Muldoon set before voters in 1975, has never been available to Peters and NZ First. In the post-MMP political marketplace, NZ First has always faced too many competitors.

In attempting to match the offers of its competitors, NZ First has tended to promise more on the tin than its serially monogamous attachments to one or other of the two main parties could possibly secure by way of coalition agreements. It’s the party’s fatal marketing flaw: promising more, delivering less.

Act has never been overly concerned about what gets printed on the party’s tin, or whether it matches its contents. Hardly surprising, given that Act’s key objective has always been to preserve and, if possible, extend, the top-down free-market revolution.

Act’s most successful leaders, Richard Prebble and David Seymour, have always understood that the best way to achieve the party’s objectives is to persuade National voters that the dominant party of the Right has gone soft on social and cultural issues (free speech, the Treaty of Waitangi, law and order) or, even worse, that it is losing focus on the key objectives of neoliberal economics.

‘Give us the votes, and we will keep National honest’, has always been Act’s best pitch. And, if right-wing voters read no further than that on the tin, then satisfaction with the product is likely to be high. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones: Act doesn’t always get what disgruntled right-wing voters want (Treaty Principles Bill) but it’s highly effective at getting what the Neoliberal Revolution needs (workplace reform).

And then there’s the Greens.

For post-scarcity parties like the Values Party (1972-89) and the Greens, it really isn’t stretching things too far to suggest that what’s written on the tin matters a whole lot more than what’s inside it. The purpose of such parties (or should that be “movements”) is to educate and inspire the electorate. Meaning that it’s not so much a matter of telling people what’s actually in your tin, as it is of stipulating what should be in everybody else’s.

To a large extent this explains why Green Party co-leader James Shaw became something of an embarrassment to his colleagues. He’d committed the unforgivable sin of actually achieving something by persuading the National Party to lend its support to his Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill. Shaw’s wheeling and dealing, his willingness to compromise, smacked uncomfortably of actually existing politics – as opposed to the “perfect world” politics favoured by the true believers.

The Greens’ unbridled idealism explains in large measure why the challenge of matching what’s written on the party’s tin with its actual contents, has become so daunting. Promising the voters diversity, equity and inclusion on the label is one thing; opening the can to reveal Bible Belt Bussy; is something else entirely!

And Labour? Does it comport with the expectations of the Fair Trading Act?

It’s tempting to say that it does. (Not least on account of the fact that the author once sat as the party’s industrial representative on Labour’s New Zealand Council.) Certainly, anyone turning up to a Labour Party conference will still encounter trade union affiliates, feminists, LGBTQI activists, Māori reps, and ambitious youth delegates. Policy remits will be debated. Elections held. The trappings of a progressive party dedicated to furthering the interests of the New Zealand working-class are all still in place.

Upon closer inspection, however, the label on Labour’s tin has the look of something carefully designed by an advertising agency to evoke a powerful nostalgic reaction. There’s a lovely photo of Mickey Savage, the typeface chosen has a staunch 1930s feel to it, and there are numerous references to Labour’s proud history of delivering “social justice” to “working people”.

But the compulsory list of ingredients, set in 8 point at the bottom of the label, reveals something a little different: Democratic Socialism: 1 percent; Social Justice: 10 percent; Decolonisation and Indigenisation: 15 percent; Gender Equity: 19 percent; Neoliberalism: 55 percent.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

And National – New Zealand’s most successful political party? How closely does National’s content match its branding?

Let’s start with the party’s name, “National”. It was deliberately chosen by the party’s founders to indicate that, unlike Labour’s openly sectional commitment to working-class New Zealanders and their trade unions, the new party (born in 1936 out of the United and Reform parties) was committed to serving the whole nation – irrespective of its citizens’ class origins. That was a big, and an almost impossible, ask.

If they’d been serious: if the party had indeed been dedicated to the welfare and advancement of all New Zealanders; i.e. to the “national” interest; then its policies would have built upon and extended Labour’s reforms. Not to put too fine a point upon it, a genuinely “national” party would have been as much “left” as it was “right”.

There will be many who, reading the above sentences, will cry: “Aha! That’s exactly what National is – ‘Labour Lite’!”

But, that would be an ideological, not an historical, response. Between 1936 and 1946 National was pledged to sweep away all of the social and industrial reforms of the First Labour Government. And even the party’s reluctant (albeit election-winning) acceptance of the welfare state in 1949 was tactical, rather than sincere. Forty-two years later, in 1991, National atoned for its earlier historical sins by laying waste to both the unions and the welfare state. What little of them remained standing, the party has been systematically dismantling ever since.

So, National isn’t a national party. Still less is it a nationalist party. A party infused with nationalist pride would be voluble in upholding the achievements of the New Zealand nation. It would sing the praises of its settlers, its city-builders, its progressive legislators, its engineers and scientists, its writers, poets, painters, and architects. A nationalist party would not sit mute as the New Zealand people’s achievements were disparaged as work of colonialist white supremacists.

No, National isn’t a nationalist party either.

If the policies promoted by the dominant party of the present coalition government came in a tin, and that tin was labelled “National”, then the only defence against a charge brought under the Fair Trading Act would be that after nearly 90 years of “representing everyone, farmers and businessmen alike” (thanks Gary McCormick) New Zealanders have come to accept that, in their country, the Right’s leading political party has only ever been notionally “national”.

We all know exactly what’s inside.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 21 April 2025.

Our Rough Beast.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1921

ALL OVER THE WORLD, devout Christians will be reaching for their bibles, reading and re-reading Revelation 13:16-17. For the benefit of all you non-Christians out there, these are the verses describing the economic power of the beast.

“And he causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, and that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

Okay, okay, 47 is not 666, and the ergot-induced visions of a First Century hermit, living in a cave on the Greek island of Patmos, are hardly the most reliable guide to what is happening in the Year of Our Lord 2025. But, you have to admit, the spectacle of Donald Trump commanding the whole earth (including the penguins of Australia’s Heard and McDonalds Islands) to bend the knee to his universal tariffs, is pretty evocative of what are beginning to look remarkably like the “end times” – of globalisation.

The question I hear people ask, over and over again, is “How?” How did this happen? How is it that the CEOs of America’s largest corporations have been willing to watch trillions of dollars knocked off the value of their collective stocks – in silence? Why hasn’t Trump been summoned, as Howard Beale, hero of the 1976 movie classic Network, was summoned, to be reminded of the exact nature of the activity in which he is engaged? Why hasn’t Trump been told:

“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature ….. and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! ….. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.”

Of course the world was very different in the mid-1970s. For a start, the American constitution had just been stress-tested by Watergate – tip of the criminal iceberg that was the Nixon presidency – and it had come through with flying colours. To be sure, the USA of President Jimmy Carter faced numerous challenges, but the American system still worked, it hadn’t fallen apart.

Trump’s political success was predicated on the contrary proposition being true – America was falling apart. As evidence of its disintegration, the USA’s two-party system no longer seemed capable of choosing presidential candidates who could reach out and connect with the crucial clusters of angry voters, living in swing states, who now decided American elections.

The buy-in simply wasn’t there for the traditional country-club Republicans, or the bureaucratic liberals of a Democratic Party which, rather than representing American workers, condescended to and patronised them.

When push had come to shove in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09, the “Yes We Can” president, Barack Obama, had saved Wall Street, and allowed Main Street to go to the Devil. As a consequence, the game of politics became increasingly difficult to play.

Highly educated Americans with good jobs couldn’t understand poorly educated Americans with shit jobs. The Republicans drinking at the Country Club had no idea what sort of candidate alienated working-class Democrats getting drunk at their local bar might be willing to vote for.

But Donald Trump did. Like that other great political adventurer, Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (1808–1873) who made himself President, then Emperor, of France in the 1850s and 60s, Trump forced his way between the wheels and cogs of a political system that had ground to a halt, gave the machinery a hefty whack, and achieved a surprise victory that delighted his friends to roughly the same degree that it confounded his enemies.

By 2025 what used to be true of the USA is fast becoming true of the whole world. Everywhere, the wheels and the cogs are stuck. The global machinery needs a hefty whack. Sadly, the only politicians willing to deliver such blows are openly scornful of democratic pieties.

And so, the hour of Trump, our rough beast, comes round at last.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 11 April 2025.

What does India Want? What is New Zealand willing to give?

Give me what I want, what I really, really want:  And what India really wants from New Zealand isn’t butter or cheese, but a radical relaxation of the rules controlling Indian immigration.

WHAT DOES INDIA WANT from New Zealand? Not our dairy products, that’s for sure, it’s got plenty of those. Indeed 45 percent of the Indian population are small-scale farmers, most of them running a few head of cattle – not to eat, you understand – but to milk. If it once made no sense to send coals to Newcastle, it makes even less sense, in 2025, to send dairy products to India.

So, what does India want?

To answer that question it is important to understand where India currently stands in the process of economic maturation. In the most brutal terms, India stands in roughly the same place as Britain stood when the agricultural and industrial revolutions were generating population pressures that were fast becoming unsustainable. For a while, Britain’s industrial revolution was able to soak up most of the victims of its agricultural revolution. Those who could not, or (understandably) would not, be absorbed into the “dark satanic mills” of industrialisation, took the option of emigration.

The crucial difference between Britain’s options in the Nineteenth century and India’s options in the Twenty-First is that the Earth is carrying roughly eight times as many human-beings as it was in 1825.

Two hundred years ago there were places for Britain’s (and Europe’s) excess population to go. North America and Australasia were blessed with land – vast quantities of land – whose numerically insignificant (thanks to the arrival of European pathogens against which they had no natural immunity) indigenous peoples could not hope to defend, and the colonisers took it. Resource rich, and soon to become people rich, these territories contributed decisively to the global reach and power of the European way of doing business.

Returning to that extraordinary statistic relating to India’s primary production sector – i.e. that 45 percent of its population are small-scale farmers – what must happen if India wishes to conform to the historical rules of economic development? Simply put, those small farmers must be replaced by the sort of large-scale, and vastly more efficient, farming enterprises that characterise North American, European, and Australasian agriculture.

Will the small farmers of India go quietly into the good historical night? Unlikely.

Viewed dispassionately, the political raison d’être of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has always been to capture India’s small farmers before they were captured irretrievably by ideological forces less malleable to the needs of India’s elites. Modi’s Hindu nationalist populism has proved itself many times over, albeit at the cost of dismantling the Congress Party’s secular dream of a modern, religiously tolerant, and inclusive Indian state.

But, if India’s elites are to be congratulated for saving the world from the emergence of not one nation with a billion-plus citizens under the control of a communist party, but two, then that success has been won at the cost of seriously distorting the evolution of India’s economy.

Fewer than 20 percent of India’s labour force are employed in the nation’s secondary industries, and most of them are construction workers. As things now stand, there is simply no way India’s vast numbers of small-holders and agricultural labourers can be absorbed (as Britain’s were) in its factories. Not to put too fine a point upon it, China has already beaten India in the race to create a second “workshop of the world”.

Barring a geopolitical cataclysm, China’s victory is not about to be reversed anytime soon. [Although Donald Trump is doing his best! - C.T.]

So, where does that leave Christopher Luxon and his ambitious plans to open up India to New Zealand’s exports?

It leaves him facing a nation that must somehow earn enough from its secondary and tertiary sectors to keep its small-holders safe from the ambitions of investors determined to rationalise Indian agriculture.

This raises a number of possibilities for “New Zealand Inc”. Not the least of which is the contribution this country’s agricultural expertise could make to the voluntary consolidation of small-scale Indian farming operations into larger, more efficient, and much more profitable units. This country’s long history of successful farmer co-operatives makes it the ideal partner for a more equitable, owner-driven, transformation of India’s agricultural sector.

New Zealand could also embark on a major upscaling of it educational exports to India. This could be done in two ways: firstly, by providing New Zealand’s tertiary institutions with the resources required to make many more places available to full-fee-paying Indian students; and secondly, by inviting Indian investors to participate alongside New Zealand universities in establishing “franchise” institutions in India itself.

Tuition in English, at New Zealand’s well-established and (generally) well-respected universities, remains a powerful selling-point to middle-class Indian parents anxious to see their offspring well-credentialled in an increasingly competitive society. Most particularly when merit-based access to the upper-ranks of income-earners – via the most prestigious Indian universities – can no longer be guaranteed.

None of these options are a “sure thing”, however, while the offer that would really open doors for New Zealand Inc continues to be ruled out-of-bounds by New Zealand’s negotiators. What India really wants from New Zealand isn’t butter or cheese, but a radical relaxation of the rules controlling Indian immigration.

India isn’t seeking this concession because it is in love with New Zealand’s scenery, or its values. The Indian government is seeking similar changes from the United States, Canada, and Australia – as well as New Zealand. By increasing the Indian diaspora, it is hoped, India will follow in China’s footsteps. Trade may or may not follow a nation’s flag, but it sure as heck follows its people.

It is difficult to see the National Government being willing to court the political backlash that such a dramatic increase in Indian immigration would doubtless engender. Were Luxon to secure his promised New Zealand-India FTA by giving India what it most wants, NZ First would have all it needed to campaign against its former coalition partner with every prospect of increasing its tally of seats. Te Pati Māori would, similarly, be free to its indulge its worst xenophobic impulses without fear of losing votes. One suspects that even Labour would struggle to stay off the anti-immigrant band-wagon. Only the Greens could embrace the new policy without reservation.

That said, facilitating Indian immigration makes solid historical sense. The expectation that New Zealand could remain forever a proud redoubt of British ethnicity and culture at the bottom of the world should never have survived the demise of the British Empire. Indeed, there are those who argue strongly that it didn’t. They point to the 1986 Burke Report that quietly recommended the discarding of the de facto “White New Zealand” policy in favour of an immigration policy geared towards creating a multicultural New Zealand.

Given the fact that, in 2025, upwards of 20 percent of New Zealand residents were born somewhere else, the policy must be accounted a success.

An interesting exercise in counterfactual history is to ask what sort of country New Zealand would have grown into had the Burke Report recommended the continuation and strengthening of the White New Zealand policy. Rather than the generally welcoming and inclusive multicultural society that Aotearoa-New Zealand has grown into over the last 40 years, an alternative vision, of an embittered and isolated nation of increasingly unapologetic white supremacists, is distressingly easy to imagine.

Quite where that would have left Māori is anybody’s guess. Without Te Reo? Without the Waitangi Tribunal? With Te Tiriti once again dismissed as “a simple nullity”. Reduced to an unrelenting diet of white-bread and butter?

Faced with that dismal vision, a bowl of spicy Rogan Josh, with a side-plate of Naan Bread, doesn’t sound so bad!

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 24 March 2025.

Chris Trotter 

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