LICENCE BE VILE
The end of political correctness
Bevan Wong was on a lunch break from his job at Devonport Naval Base this week when he idly picked up his phone. He swiped over a few posts, skimmed a story about the Asian population in New Zealand, and made a comment about it on Facebook.
Working in marine engineering for the Navy, he never expected to come under fire. He didn’t know he was sailing into a barrage of vile racial abuse.
‘‘I was reading through an online article which was about the population growth of one race and I noticed that some people were making bigoted comments, which I found quite ironic,’’ says Wong.
Intending it as ‘‘lighthearted banter’’, Wong commented: ‘‘Reading through the comments it seems to me that the tangata whenua are forgetting that pakehas did the same thing.’’
A young man in New Plymouth was quick to respond. ‘‘Your kids are ugly,’’ he wrote. ‘‘U shouldn’t have an opinion ‘‘asian’’ please leave this once great country immediately (no one wants you here).’’
The post was vile.
But New Zealand-born Wong’s reaction is sad in its own way. He has built up a ‘‘tolerance to racism’’. ‘‘I’ve seen it all ... it’s everywhere in our day to day lives.’’
Wong’s friend, Phill Su, shared the offensive comment on the Facebook page of respected New Plymouth firm Busing Russell Chartered Accountants, with the words: ‘‘Sort your racist employee out’’.
And this week, a director of Busing Russell told the Sunday Star-Times that their employee ‘‘was very young’’, had apologised to Wong and had since taken some time off work.
It does beg the question, though: At a time when familiarity should be breaking down divisions of sex, race and religion, what gives people such a licence to be vile?
Social psychologist Niki Harre says people ‘‘almost forget’’ the people they are attacking are real, especially online. ‘‘Unfortunately the more distant we feel, the harder it is for us to keep the feelings of the other person in mind.’’
Seeing others behaving in this way encourages them further.
Remember just a few short years ago when ‘‘PC gone mad’’ was a seemingly constant refrain?
Some people felt outraged at perceived constraints on speaking their thoughts because it was not ‘‘politically correct’’ to talk bluntly about others.
This is not a joke: In 2003, National leader Don Brash appointed one of his top lieutenants, Wayne Mapp, as party spokesperson for the Eradication of Political Correctness.
‘‘I understand you thinking it was satire,’’ laughs Mapp today. ‘‘I think some of my colleagues in my own party thought the same. My colleagues at the time were bemused and sympathetic, I think that would be the best way to put it.’’
Brash had been impressed by an article Mapp wrote on the nature of political correctness.
‘‘I was travelling through Canada and I got his call late at night,’’ recalls Mapp. ‘‘He said, ‘I’d like you to do this role in addition to the normal roles you’re doing and by the way I’m going to the press conference in 10 minutes time’. So I felt slightly put upon.’’
Looking back, Mapp sighs loudly before admitting: ‘‘It was ridiculous, really’’.
But now, Brash’s incendiary rhetoric (remember his Iwi v Kiwi billboards?) may have come of age. We live in a time of 140-character-assassination Twitterati. Social media is the new wild west. Online bullying is rife.
Is Twitter responsible? British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran publicly quit the social media site in July, saying it was ‘‘nothing but people saying mean things’’.
Or is US President Donald Trump to blame? From the comfort of his golf club last weekend, he lashed out at the plea for aid from Carmen Yulin Cruz, mayor of Puerto Rico’s main city, San Juan, after Hurricane Maria.
Trump tweeted: ‘‘Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.’’
Arguably, Trump’s illconsidered actions legitimise others’ vile behaviour online. That’s according to associate professor Sharon Harvey, head of the School of Language and Culture at Auckland University of Technology (AUT).
Harvey points out that this is the first time in history that ordinary people have been able to communicate in writing in an unmediated fashion to potentially wide audiences.
In an era when it’s all too easy to press ‘‘retweet’’, we need to work on our empathy, she says.
Cue right-wing blogger, Cameron Slater, who described a victim of a 2014 fatal car crash in Greymouth as ‘‘feral’’.
‘‘Some feral tried to evade the police,’’ Slater blogged on his site, Whale Oil. ‘‘They wound up dead by smacking into some innocent homeowner’s house.’’
He received death threats and his daughter was also threatened, but Slater never apologised and has no regrets.
After his mum died, he adds, people messaged him saying ‘‘good job, I hope you’re next’’.
‘‘I’ve had people say they’re going to gang rape my daughter, come around and kill me . . . It is OK to attack Cam Slater because he’s an asshole but if you attack these other snowflakes they get all upset and they want to prosecute you.’’
Slater, who is currently facing three defamation charges, argues that if New Zealand has a problem it’s with our ‘‘pathetic, cry baby attitude’’.
He feels that there are special groups in society who ‘‘you are not allowed to offend’’ because they ‘‘get all hurty and cry’’.
AUT law professor Warren Brookbanks believes the ‘‘widespread rejection of religious values’’, the glue that previously held societies together, is a contributing factor to increasing vile behaviour.
‘‘We have entered what could be described as a period of moral anarchy, or moral atomism, whereby everyone is his or her own moral legislator.’’
The polarised reactions to scandals involving the Waikato Chiefs rugby team abusing a stripper, and All Black Aaron Smith, caught trying to lie his way out of a liaison in a public toilet, are perhaps examples of this moral certainty.
On the one side, anger at rugby players’ treatment of women. On the other, vitriolic attacks on the women involved.
Take this post to the Sunday Star-Times: ‘‘None of this stupid woman’s claims were true. She wanted money and lied. All this hype about rape mentality is in the heads of the perverts who want to promote this filth. I would suggest you all apologise to each and every one of the Chief players.’’
In the 12 months to October last year, 22 cases were prosecuted under the Harmful Digital Communications Act most of them involving ‘‘revenge porn’’. And it is now a crime to incite another person to commit suicide.
But it’s not an offence to tell someone to ‘‘leave this once great country immediately, no one wants you here’’.
The only controls on that kind of behaviour are the horrified reaction of the author’s friends, family – and employer. Certainly the apology sent to Bevan Wong bore all the hallmarks of one written under the supervision of an appalled boss at Busing Russell Chartered Accountants.
It’s true, Wong did receive a message of apology from the author of the racist attack.
It read, in part: ‘‘Instead of being mean, I should have replied with a civilised reply, and we could have discussed our varying opinions as two men.’’
Wong was then Facebookblocked by the culprit.
‘‘You know,’’ says Wong, ‘‘the first thing I did when he sent me that apology?
‘‘I shared it on my Facebook for a laugh.’’
That was a moustache on a lady. Paul Henry mocks Greenpeace director Stephanie Mills on live TV Feral dies in Greymouth, did world a favour. Blogger Cameron Slater shows no sympathy for Judd Hall’s family There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever. Fox’s Megyn Kelly asked Trump about attacks on women – so he attacked her. Leaving a car running inside a closed garage while your kids are in the house is natural selection. Pebbles Hooper on the accidental deaths of an Ashburton woman and her three children Give me a good luck f*** and s***. Aaron Smith arranging some "sneaky toilet action" with a woman at the airport, unbeknown to his girlfriend, before asking her to lie about it.