New Zealand: land of awkward extremists
Spare a thought for New Zealand’s political extremists. Poor guys, they’ve always had a tough time, argues senior reporter Julian Lee.
Media outlets were tremendously excited last week when the United States State Department declared our very own Mark John Taylor an Islamic terrorist. An official Kiwi terrorist! Finally!
Unfortunately for Taylor (but good for the rest of us), he is no alBaghdadi or bin Laden. Instead, he’s known as the ‘‘bumbling terrorist’’. While with Isis in Syria he inadvertently gave away coordinates of his fellow fighters by not turning off the geotagging function on his Twitter account.
But it’s not just Islamic terrorism that is finding it hard to set up shop in New Zealand.
Earlier in March an attempt to launch a sort of white nationalist movement at Auckland University, the ‘‘Auckland University European Students Association’’, disbanded before the media had even had a chance to play catch-up. An attempt to set up a franchise over the road at AUT disappeared even faster.
Almost 40 years ago the National Socialist Party of New Zealand, vanished with barely a whisper in 1980 after just a decade in existence. One of its biggest successors, the Right Wing Resistance, has likewise struggled. Only 40 people attended a Right Wing Resistance rally in 2013.
The communists have never had an easy road in Aotearoa either. At its height the Communist Party of New Zealand only ever managed to top out at about 5000 votes nationwide in 1961. The Facebook page of the New Zealand Communist Party, at the time of writing, has 187 likes.
New Zealand can’t even muster up a successful terrorist attack. The 1982 bombing of the Whanganui Computer Centre killed only the attacker. The 1984 Wellington Trades Hall bombing killed an innocent caretaker, and no one even bothered to claim the responsibility. A year later, Fernando Pereira died in the Rainbow Warrior bombing in Auckland harbour – but that was done by the French.
So why does political extremism have such a hard time in New Zealand? Let’s leave it to John Gardner, secretary of health, education and welfare under US President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, who wrote: ‘‘Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world’s ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.’’
Perhaps there’s something about the New Zealand experience which prevents New Zealanders from seeing the world on such black and white terms. Perhaps there are no villains in the eyes of New Zealanders.
Stuff columnist Liam Hehir wrote about a bemusing experience when he bumped into a Right Wing Resistance street protest in 2016. Despite their intense rhetoric Hehir gave the impression that the encounter was mild, even friendly. Most importantly, he described them as slightly awkward – in other words, New Zealanders to a tee.
This is because New Zealand is still a very personable place, where people are forced to interact with others from different groups on a day-to-day-basis. Political extremism is brewed in social bubbles, where confirmation bias thrives as people consistently reinforce each other’s beliefs. Social self-isolation is hard in New Zealand. And it is not just the social reality of New Zealand that has thus far prevented political extremism. Everything about extremism seems to rub against the fairly laid-back New Zealand attitude. New Zealanders seldom talk in extremes as we desperately try to reach a consensus with one another in everyday conversation. The strong Kiwi aversion to conflict is poison to extremist ideas. Can you imagine a Mao or Mussolini getting up on a podium in the middle of Aotea, Civic or Cathedral squares? The devout followers in appropriate attire, saluting their beloved leader? The awkwardness would be profound.
New Zealand may never have had the social bubbles required to breed extreme ideas. But that doesn’t mean New Zealand is immune. New social bubbles are forming and they are online. Where once people may have been forced together into social echo chambers, people are actively choosing their bubbles now. People only click on articles and watch videos that confirm their budding suspicions, and those suspicions grow. Over time complex world problems become boiled down to a single cause and ‘‘suspects’’ become Gardner’s ‘‘villains’’. In which case, it’s New Zealand versus the internet. Can the echo chambers of the online world be overcome by the personability of New Zealand society?
New Zealanders . . . desperately try to reach a consensus with one another in everyday conversation. The strong Kiwi aversion to conflict is poison to extremist ideas.