Let’s get past the hurting before getting self-critical

professor of history at the University of Auckland

It is right that the brutal assault in Christchurch last Friday should trigger deeper conversations about New Zealand’s history and society. Many readers will recognise in the anger informing Anne Salmond’s article (White supremacy is a part of us, March 19) one of the key emotions we are all currently feeling.

Yet her suggestion that the present moment constitutes an opportunity for New Zealanders to be honest, for once, and her apparent belief that she is the one to bring us to that moment, sounds curiously off key.

The New Zealand that is currently at the centre of global attention is the recipient of widespread admiration for its response to these attacks.

One reason for that is the leadership of our prime minister, who has combined steely resolve with compassion and inclusivity in a way which offers hope to a global community desperate for such leadership.

The more important reason is the example set by New Zealanders of every age, socio-economic status, region, skin colour and culture, with Ma¯ ori at the forefront, enfolding the bloodied Muslim community in bonds of sorrow and love.

That community should be our initial and central focus. But it cannot be our only one. At the university where I teach, in the country where I live, and in many places elsewhere in the world, everybody is hurting. That is because this was, among many other things, an assault upon New Zealand.

It was meant to wound and hurt, and it has. It was meant to damage the inclusive, multicultural society that is being created in these islands, and to exploit the security vulnerabilities of a part of the world less prepared than some for this age of social-media-driven atrocity.

Thus it was also an assault upon one version of present-day global society perpetrated by one foreign national inspired by another (Norwegian Anders Breivik) after travels in parts of Europe (France, the Balkans) which have been grievously scarred by this kind of violence, and carefully equipped to be broadcast to the world.

It does not let New Zealanders off the hook of healthy self-criticism or introspection to question a view of such an atrocity as arising from specifically New Zealand historical or social factors, although it has suited the president of Turkey to thus misunderstand it.

The mass murder in Christchurch was a global event, the first response to which must be, and will be, improved protection for all New Zealanders.

There are indeed many ways of killing other than with guns, most famously by the pen. Citizens of the real world determined to live together in peace must confront the role of social media in enabling individuals and states with pathological intentions and access to technologies of destruction to act out their fantasies.

While the global community struggles with this and other problems, alongside enduring grief for the loss of life in Christchurch, I take comfort from the role of New Zealanders in leading the way with courage, clarity, decency and love.