Is calling your fellow citizens "feral" and "a river of filth" so very far from calling them "enemies of the people" and stringing them up in the town square?
Let’s talk about agency.
If you hold as I do that people, ultimately, are responsible for their own actions, you must condemn utterly the violence that took place in our capital last week. Police provocation, political marginalisation, injustice, whatever, doesn’t put a paving stone in your hand or an arsonist’s torch to a children’s slide. They may have been a minority of the protesters, but just as if they were BLM racial revolutionaries or Extinction Rebellion radicals, a violent riot needs to be denounced. Even if it is a cause we feel sympathy for. Especially in that case. Otherwise, we become purveyors of what we most despise in the other side – hypocrisy.
That’s not to say there isn’t a time to start handing out the Smith and Wessons and googling ‘how to make a Molotov cocktail’. But that time is when your government has reached a pitch of tyranny (or slightly before, if you wish to successfully resist it) with no non-violent recourse available. We still have the ballot box and independent media outlets (such as the BFD). No jackboots at the front door at midnight, no gulags in the hills. Deep breaths – we are nowhere near that. Yet.
If you grant the protesters agency, you can also reject the absurd claims from mainstream media that they are the creation of some shadowy ‘far right’, usually located in America somewhere in the vicinity of Mar-a-Lago. These commentators seem to view the largely provincial working-class protesters as programmable automatons, slobbering over their keyboards, taking orders directly from Steve Bannon via Facebook. They never consider that it might be the other way round – that real grievances, the loss of jobs, homes and access to education due to the mandates and lockdowns, motivate some to seek out online groups that offer succour when little is provided here in New Zealand.
Our elite are making the very same mistake that the American elite made in 2016: demonising and distancing people who have genuine concerns that should be addressed in a democracy. There it was Hilary Clinton’s election-losing “deplorables” label for Trump supporters, here it is Michael Wood’s “river of filth” (ably backed up by Trevor Mallard’s “feral”) to describe the parliament protesters.
These protesters are the victims of ‘misinformation’, our Prime Minister says, dismissing their concerns. Some of them may well believe some pretty hairy things – the ‘government is frying our brains with radiation rays’ crowd probably have little to worry about either way. But what unites them is very real – the loss of freedom and its consequences. As time passes the PM herself appears the deluded one – as cases of Omicron increase, the rationale for mandates evaporates.
She cleaves to the fundamentally socialist idea that the progress of the many can justify the immiseration of the few. The collectivisation of land that took place in the Soviet Union had the same rationale. In Ukraine it led to the Holodomor – the mass starvation of over three million souls – the historical echoes of which we see playing out on our TV screens at the moment. The Ukrainians are resisting as fiercely as they are because they remember.
A hysterical comparison?
I hope so. But is calling your fellow citizens ‘feral’ and ‘filth’ so very far from calling them ‘enemies of the people’ and stringing them up in the town square?
And what will become of our “river of filth”? Will some political grouping take on the more rational of their concerns for the 2023 election? Or will they be barred from conventional political expression and pushed further into the online shadows or…something worse? In the US, had the establishment accommodated some of the American Rust Belt concerns about declining economic fortunes, rapid cultural change, illegal immigration and PC censoriousness, the wind would have been taken well and truly out of Trump’s sails. Just as obviously, if only one of our elected members of parliament had met with the protestors and advocated on their behalf, no one would have been throwing paving stones last week.
But such is the intransigence of our current political class, this is unlikely. The “river of filth” must be drained. “One day it will be our job to try and understand how a group of people could succumb to such wild and dangerous mis and disinformation”, said the Prime Minister as the riot was in progress. But the government’s job won’t be just to “try and understand”: it will be to stop the authority of the political and media class from ever being so boldly challenged again. Expect some sort of internet purge, accompanied by ‘hate speech’ legislation, before the next election.
Our politicians, in thrall to an academia and media so far left that they slander calls for freedom as ‘far right’, have lost the ability (not to mention the courage) to trust these voters and represent their concerns.
So who are the programmable automatons now?