A peculiar trip down Memory Lane

Something curious popped up in my comments box recently.

It came from someone who chose to remain anonymous (now there’s a surprise) and asked, in a phony tone of mateyness, “I wonder if Karl remembers his writings on Yugoslavia and the Serbs".

This nameless troll went on to quote at length from a column I wrote in April 1999 that was subsequently the subject of a complaint to the Press Council, as it was then called. He (and I'm guessing it was a male) seemed to think I would be stung by the reference to it.

As a matter of fact I do remember the column and, perhaps contrary to my commenter’s assumption, am happy to revisit it. I suppose I should take it as a perverse compliment that it’s still weighing on some unfortunate soul’s mind after all this time.

The column was published in the Evening Post and the Nelson Mail and recorded my feelings about the civil war then raging in the Balkans.

In it, I pleaded guilty, “probably for the first time in my life,” to a feeling of antagonism toward a specific race – namely, the people of Serbia.

“I don’t take pride in this,” I wrote, “but neither do I apologise for it. Humanity demands that we are repelled by the vile acts carried out in recent years in the name of Serbian nationalism.”

I noted that since the death of the communist dictator Tito and the breakup of the old Yugoslavia, “the Serbs have embarked on one barbaric series of atrocities after another, reactivating ethnic feuds that go back centuries. They are a disgrace to 20th century civilisation.”

I reminded my readers that the Serbs had given us the chilling phrase "ethnic cleansing" and I referred to then-recent events in Kosovo, where people were butchered, raped and driven from their homes “in systematic depredations that spring direct from the Dark Ages”.

Readers of this blog may recall some of the other appalling events of that era, notably the Bosnian Serb army’s four-year siege of Sarajevo (nearly 14,000 killed, 40 percent of them civilians) and the massacre at Srebrenica, in which Serbian soldiers slaughtered more than 8000 defenceless Muslim boys and men. Some of the perpetrators – Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic – were eventually convicted of war crimes.

My column was a tirade against the hideous excesses of militant ethno-nationalism, but a reader of the Nelson Mail complained to the Press Council that it was offensive and racist. “By most normal criteria – objectivity, fairness, balance, accuracy – the piece falls abysmally below acceptable standards and represents a breach of the Race Relations Act,” the complainant wrote.

She held that the column was deeply offensive not only to Serbians but to anyone who was affronted by racism. The Mail’s editor, David Mitchell, rejected the complaint and wrote a robust and eloquent defence in which he pointed out that my column didn’t condone racism but in fact condemned it “in very strong terms”.

I followed up that column with another in which I partially (but only partially) repented. I can’t find a copy of that second column, but in it I acknowledged there were good people of Serbian ethnicity and apologised for having smeared them by association with the barbaric acts carried out in the name of Serbian nationalism. I particularly remember a phone call from a polite but reproachful woman of Serbian descent who persuaded me that I’d overstated my case.

The woman who had complained about my column regarded my partial retraction as inadequate and declined to withdraw her complaint, as was her right. She wanted an acknowledgment from the Mail that my column “fell below acceptable standards” – a concession the principled David Mitchell, to his great credit, wasn’t prepared to make.

It then fell to the Press Council, chaired by the retired High Court judge Sir John Jeffries, to adjudicate on the complaint. It was not upheld. In a decision which he wrote himself, Jeffries (who died in 2019) had this to say:

“There can be no question but that Mr du Fresne expressed his views in both columns in the strongest and most forceful terms. He used rhetoric and passion to convey to his readers his unqualified repugnance of the present Serbian government, its people and its leader Slobodan Milosevic. Part of the rhetoric was to charge himself with racism and to plead guilty. Is Mr du Fresne by using that device, and others, to attract attention and support for his views in truth indulging in racial hatred and impliedly agitating against Serbs everywhere?

“Selecting some sentences and phrases from the April column and branding those parts as fomenting racial hatred that calls for disapprobation by the Press Council does not provide the answer. The Council believes it should go past the rhetorical devices and strategies to shock and awaken people to the brutality of what is happening in this year, in the Balkans, and instead go to the substance of the column.

“The first piece is not for racial hatred, it is against it. It is not for violence, but against it. The central point of the second column is that recourse should not be had to history to explain but that the violence should be halted right now. The political message of the piece is that Nato bombing be supported for the sole purpose of stopping the killing of thousands of Kosovars and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. When ethnic cleansing is the issue, some columnists choose not to express themselves by detached analysis using language of cold objectivity but prefer to startle and shock.

“To accuse oneself of racism and to plead guilty is in truth a device for demonstrating how evil racism is because it is able to infiltrate and contaminate the columnist against his own better judgment. The illustration had sacrificial overtones.

“This was not writing of an irresponsible, reckless or promiscuous nature. It was a powerfully expressed argument laced with emotion and passion. The Council in the name of objectivity, balance and judgment should not interfere with the freedom to write and publish such material. This is highly emotive writing but it does not call for disapprobation by the Council.”

So there we are. I'm left to scratch my head in wonderment that some tragically obsessed individual has dredged up this episode nearly a quarter-century later.

It’s an example of what’s called offence archaeology: the popular woke practice of unearthing statements or actions from the distant past in the hope of embarrassing or discrediting someone. But what’s the point? Here’s a tip for my anonymous commenter: offence archaeology works only if it causes harm, and if I thought that publishing his comment was likely to hurt me or damage my reputation, I would have simply deleted it. Instead, here I am giving him the oxygen he presumably craved, for the good reason that I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I will even give him the satisfaction of quoting from his closing paragraph, in which he resorted to a childish personal insult (which I won't dignify by repeating), called me a bigot and an “admitted racist” and concluded: “You should have been reported and prosecuted under the New Zealand Race Relations Act.”

Sorry, but it’s a bit late for that now, as attractive as the idea might be to the Human Rights Commission. But I hope he feels better for having got it off his chest.

For what it's worth, the Press Council decision can be read here.

Stuff's racist history

Most readers of this blog will be aware of Stuff's front-page apology to Maori on Monday for supposedly racist reporting dating back generations, and of the series of subsequent articles setting out the many ways in which the newspaper titles now owned by Stuff have supposedly perpetuated negative racist stereotypes.

This was my response in a letter published in The Dominion Post this morning:

The accusation of racism is an extremely serious slur – or would be, if the meaning of the word hadn’t been so weakened by overuse.

Racism is the belief that some races are intrinsically superior to others and that discrimination is therefore justified.

Adolf Hitler was a racist. The Ku Klux Klan is racist. So were the apartheid-era leaders of South Africa.

And now we’re told that the former editors and editorial executives of some of this country’s leading newspapers, of whom I am one, were (are?) racists too.

If the accusation of racism still meant something, it would be damning. But in the 21^st century the word racist simply means anyone who doesn’t conform to the authoritarian orthodoxies of identity politics.

So I refuse to take it seriously when I’m lumped in the same category as Adolf Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan, and I hope my former colleagues don’t either. But it’s saddening to see the papers we once proudly worked for confusing polemics with journalism.

We're all immigrants here

I recently read an interview with the Sri Lankan-born Wellington novelist Brannavan Gnanalingam. In it he talks mainly about the challenge of being male in a culture that he sees as clinging to a narrow and not always attractive idea of masculinity. But he also comments on the frequency of “casual racism” and his regret at having lost touch with his heritage, presumably as a result of feeling pressured to fit in to a predominantly white society.

One thing in particular struck me, and I quote directly from the article:

Being asked where you’re from, for example, is a “ridiculously common” experience for a non-white person, he [Gnanalingam] says. If it’s someone at a hostel overseas, or someone wanting to establish whakapapa links, that’s one thing. If it’s someone who’s noticed your skin is a different colour from theirs, that’s another. “I often get slightly sassy and respond, ‘Well, where are you from?’” he says. “It always throws them.”

But hang on a minute. I’m happy to admit that I’ve often asked people with dark skin or unfamiliar accents where they’re from – taxi drivers especially, since I’m sharing the front of the car with them and it’s an obvious way to get a conversation started.

I supposed I could play it safe and make meaningless small talk about the weather, but I ask about their background because I’m genuinely interested. It’s posed as a friendly inquiry, not as a demand that they explain their justification for being in New Zealand. Still less is it intended to imply judgment of them on the basis of their appearance or way of speaking. I see it as a way of establishing a connection with a fellow human being. Can that be so bad?

Sometimes they have an interesting story to tell, like the irrepressibly cheerful cab driver from Bhutan I met in Christchurch a couple of years ago, or the lugubrious Afghan who once picked me up from San Francisco Airport. If I sense that they’re not comfortable (which I don’t recall ever happening), there’s always the weather option to fall back on.

I welcome the fact that New Zealand has become a multicultural society, as do virtually all the people I know. To me it seems the most natural thing in the world to want to learn more about people’s cultural origins and the circumstances that led them to settle here. Quite apart from anything else, it adds to my knowledge as a journalist about the demographic forces shaping this county. It’s not intended to make immigrants feel like outsiders, still less that they’re not welcome. We’re all immigrants, after all; some just more recent than others.

Would it be better if I said nothing and completed the taxi ride in silence? That would seem far more cold and unfriendly.

And really, is it so different from someone asking about the origin of your surname, which happens to me all the time? Or inquiring where your accent comes from, as in the case of my Polish wife (who never minds being asked, although she’s been a New Zealand citizen for more than 50 years)? Or are such questions okay if you’re white, but somehow different if you’re brown or black – in which case, should we be asking whether the people who condemn the question as racist in those instances are themselves perversely promoting a sense of “them and us”, which is the very thing they profess to oppose?

I’m aware of the fashionable view that only the victims of racism can recognise and identify it. Using that yardstick, a taxi driver who thinks my question about where he comes from is racist must be right. But if the question is asked with goodwill and genuine curiosity, doesn’t that count for something?

Here, of course, we come to our old friend unconscious bias; the notion that you can be racist without realising it. If we accept the idea of unconscious bias, we also acknowledge the possibility of casual or unintended racism. But I reject the notion that by simply asking someone about their nationality or ethnic background, you’re somehow demonstrating racial prejudice. That strikes me as a complete non-sequitur.

In fact I’d suggest that treating discussion of ethnicity as a no-go zone is potentially an impediment to good race relations, because it risks amplifying awareness of difference rather than encouraging acceptance of it as normal. How can tip-toeing around questions of ethnicity in a “don’t mention the war” fashion be more inclusive than openly engaging with people about their origins?

I could go further and ask who’s more likely to drive a wedge between the predominant white culture and ethnic minorities: the person making an innocent inquiry about someone else’s race or nationality, or the person assuming it must be underpinned by racism?

So I intend to continue asking people where they come from. And if they turn the question back on me, as Gnanalingam says he sometimes does, it won’t throw me in the slightest. I’d be very happy to tell them that I come from Waipukurau and long before that, from Ireland on my mother’s side and France and Denmark on my father’s. There’s no stigma in that, and I wonder why it should be seen as potentially stigmatising if you tell people you come from Sudan, Taiwan, Iran or wherever. Perhaps more to the point, who exactly is doing the stigmatising by suggesting such matters should be off-limits? After all, as I said, we’re all immigrants here.

New Zealand: shining light, or breeding ground for violent extremism?

You may not have heard of the Somalian refugee Guled Mire. He was in the news last month when he appeared before a parliamentary select committee urging the government to remove what he described as a racist restriction on refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

He was referring to a policy introduced in 2009 which requires refugees from those regions to have existing family connections in New Zealand in order to be resettled here.

Speaking in support of a World Vision petition asking for the restriction to be lifted, Mire said it was an unnecessary and racist requirement that shut vulnerable people out.

It wasn’t the first time Mire had spoken out about the supposedly racist society that provided a sanctuary for him, his mother and his eight siblings after they fled civil war in Somalia 22 years ago.

Only days after the Christchurch mosque massacres in March, Mire said on TVNZ’s Breakfast programme that he had experienced racism almost daily in New Zealand. 

The Christchurch attacks, he said, were no surprise. “I think it’s time that we stopped living in denial about the very form of racism that has existed in this country for such a long time. It’s nothing new to us.”

He struck a similar note three months later when he was interviewed for a moralistic Australian-made documentary shown on Al Jazeera television. New Zealand’s Dark Days questioned this country’s reputation as a harmonious, peaceful place and said warnings about rising Islamophobia had been repeatedly ignored.

Mire, who has worked as a government policy adviser and is described on a public speakers’ website as an activist and writer, challenged the “This is not us” speech given by Jacinda Ardern in Christchurch after the shootings.

“This ‘This is not us’ idea is denying our lived experiences,” he told the interviewer. “That racism, that hatred that exists in this nation, is us.” He said the Muslim community in New Zealand had been calling out “violent extremism” for years.

This view aligned with a persistent far-left narrative that surfaced following the Christchurch atrocities. According to this alternative narrative, the slaughter of 51 innocent Muslims was the inevitable consequence of all-pervasive race hatred and white supremacist attitudes. This view overlooked the inconvenient fact that the alleged killer was not a New Zealander and evidently acted alone.

Mire was in the news again on Radio New Zealand this week, when he took exception to National leader Simon Bridges’ dismissive comments about the Ardern-initiated “Christchurch Call”.  Responding to Bridges’ statement that the government should concentrate on problems such as homelessness and the measles epidemic, Mire said: “It’s the same sort of rhetoric used to basically marginalise us people from minority backgrounds again and again. We’ve always felt as though we’re not accepted as New Zealanders and comments like that affirm it.”

But hang on. New Zealand gave Mire and his family refuge after they fled a dangerous, violent country. It also gave him an education and the right to speak his mind, a freedom few people enjoy in the part of the world he comes from. Surely that must count for something.

And before anyone dismisses that statement as the typical racist bigotry of a privileged white guy, perhaps we should take note of the “lived experiences” of other Muslim immigrants, some of which are strikingly at odds with the impression conveyed by Mire.

For example, there’s Gamal Fouda, the imam of Al Noor Mosque, where 42 worshippers were shot in the March killings.  Speaking in Dunedin this week, the imam said New Zealand had been a shining light to the world following the shootings.

He recalled that when he first came to New Zealand after 9/11, he was initially afraid to walk in the streets in his religious robes for fear of being attacked. His fear began to subside after he was greeted by a stranger with the unfamiliar words “Hello, bro’”.

He said he was now proud to be a Kiwi. “This is my land. It is the place of my family and my children. It is my turangawaewae. I love this soil. I love us because we are one” [the italics are mine].

The imam noted that there was still hatred and division and people needed to speak out against racism. But otherwise the tone of his message could hardly have been more at variance with that of Guled Mire.

Then there’s Abbas Nazari, an Afghani who was among the Tampa refugees given a home in New Zealand in 2001 after being refused entry to Australia. Then seven years old, Nazari settled in Christchurch with his family and this year won a Fulbright Scholarship after graduating from the University of Canterbury with first-class honours in international relations and diplomacy.

He told The Guardian earlier this year that he recalled his family being given a warm welcome by a huge contingent of locals when they arrived at Christchurch Airport and said the warmth and acceptance they experienced then set the tone for the family’s new life.

He went on to say: “I can’t recall any instances of racism, and that’s the same experience for the vast majority of my family and community. I can’t recall any instances where I was marginalised or I was on the receiving end of a whole heap of crap at all.

“We wove naturally into the fabric of New Zealand society. So when I hear stories of prejudice and racism, I know for sure that it exists but my experience in New Zealand has been amazingly warm and welcoming.”

It doesn’t sound like the same country Guled Mire describes. And then there was the story this week about the Hutt City council election candidate Shazly Rasheed, an immigrant from the Maldives, whose billboards were defaced with swastikas and racist messages.

That Rasheed’s election advertising was targeted, presumably because of her skin colour, is despicable. But on the plus side she said she had lived in New Zealand for 20 years and only once been racially abused, by skinheads in Hamilton.

Even a single instance of racial abuse is one too many, but otherwise Rasheed’s “lived experience” seems at variance with Guled Mire’s too.  You have to wonder whether the problem is with him.

I think back too to the dignified response of the Muslims who survived the Christchurch attacks. Their reaction was not one of anger, but of sadness that this terrible thing had happened in a country that they thought of – and still think of – as inclusive and welcoming.

I remember the Christchurch Muslim woman who told the BBC she and her family had come to New Zealand because it was safe and that she had never felt threatened here. And I recall the thousands of New Zealanders who showed their solidarity with the Muslim community by attending public vigils, setting up tribute sites and donating millions to a Givealittle appeal. I find it hard to reconcile all this with Guled Mire’s view of New Zealand.

Which image of New Zealand is the more accurate: the hateful, racist one, or the tolerant, inclusive one? I’ll go with the latter, thanks. It’s pointless to deny that racism exists in New Zealand, but that doesn’t make this a racist country. It seems to me that Guled Mire is himself guilty of the divisive rhetoric he accuses others of.

Confessions of a dinosaur

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, May 8.)

My wife reckons that if I had been alive in 1893, I probably would have opposed women getting the vote.

Ouch. That’s a bit harsh. I would, of course, prefer to think it’s not true – but how can I be sure? It’s unknowable.

I have never thought of myself as sexist; quite the reverse. The people I most admire and respect have been strong women. I have never identified with the Kiwi bloke culture that thinks women should be kept in their place, whether it be the kitchen or the bedroom.

But as I say, who knows? My thinking has been conditioned by a century of liberal democracy. Attitudes were different in the 1890s and had I lived then, I might intuitively have been against such a radical change in the established order as votes for women.

My wife’s accusation arose in the context of Louisa Wall’s same-sex marriage bill. She supported it; I didn’t.

I didn’t exactly lie awake at night burning with rage over the bill, but it would be fair to say I was uncomfortable about it. I’m cautious by nature. I believe there are often good reasons why society has evolved the way it has over thousands of years and that we need to think very carefully before giving way to the fashionable impulse of the moment.

So, had I been an MP, I would almost certainly have lined up with those voting against the bill. But at the same time I could see that the arguments from the other side were hard to counter.

I realise too that human civilisation can’t always be relied upon to evolve in desirable ways, and that sometimes the status quo has to be overturned for society to progress.

There was a time when slavery was accepted as part of the natural order, and the brave minority who challenged it were seen as dangerous radicals. But who would now question the moral correctness of William Wilberforce and his followers?

The same could be said of any number of issues that once polarised conservatives and liberals, but which have now been settled.

To conservative white American southerners in the 1950s and 60s, civil rights for black people were unthinkable. Even more recently, white supremacists tried to justify the subjugation and oppression of the majority black population in South Africa. Anyone proclaiming such views today would rightly be regarded as some sort of Neanderthal.

Does same-sex marriage fall into the same category? We don’t know.  To use a cliché, the jury is out. Either we have made an awful mistake, or future generations will look back in bemusement and wonder what all the fuss was about.

In his inaugural address in 2009, President Barack Obama – a man who, because of his skin colour, would have been able to enter the White House only as a cleaner or butler if society had stood still – used the phrase “the wrong side of history” to describe those who are left behind by the currents of change.

Will people who opposed same-sex marriage be regarded in future as having been on the wrong side of history? It’s possible.

My wife’s accusation (it was a joke, but she was making a serious point) caused me to reflect on whether I’d stood on the wrong or the right side of history on other causes.

The first issue that came to mind was the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1986. Although I didn’t march in the streets or attend rallies opposing it, I admit I was uncomfortable with that change too, which may seem extraordinary now.

Was I on the wrong side of history? Undoubtedly. I suspect hardly anyone now would seriously argue that homosexual acts should be treated as criminal. But at the time, it seemed a very big leap and the country was torn. The legislation eventually passed by only 49 votes to 44.

It would be unfair to characterise all opponents of Fran Wilde’s ground-breaking bill in 1986 as knuckle-dragging troglodytes, just as it was wildly inaccurate to portray those opposed to same-sex marriage (as National MP Maurice Williamson did) as bigots and religious fundamentalists.

On other issues, my record is mixed. I opposed the Vietnam War and the 1981 Springbok tour, which probably puts me on the right side of history.

I broadly supported the radical economic reforms of the 1980s, although I recall being apprehensive about the sheer scale and speed of the changes. Like many New Zealanders, I was probably so accustomed to living in an over-regulated society that the prospect of being liberated from all those suffocating state controls seemed almost scary. East Germans must have experienced a similar sensation when they were reunited with the West.

Here again I believe I was on the right side of history. What was then considered radical policy is now accepted as mainstream, although the Left continues to fight a dogged campaign of resistance. (Helen Clark pandered to the Left by referring to the failed reforms of the 1980s, but strangely left them intact.)

Nuclear weapons were the other great defining issue of that era, and while some anti-nuclear rhetoric verged on hysterical, I believed New Zealand was entitled to take the stand it did. In the end, it became a matter of asserting our right to chart our own course and resist bullying by bigger powers. That’s another tick for the “right side of history” box.

On some current issues we just don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong. The climate change debate, for instance, is so ideologically charged that it’s virtually impossible to distinguish propaganda from reliable science. 

Treaty settlements? Those who support them may yet turn out to be on the right side of history, provided settlement money is wisely used to raise Maori achievement levels, lift Maori out of poverty and contribute to economic growth. Ngai Tahu seems to be on the right track. But scepticism will persist if settlement proceeds are used to promote separatism and enhance the standing and power of tribal elites, as too often seems to be the case.

On the current issue of paid parental leave, it strikes me as contradictory that when so much has been done in the past 30 years to roll back the state’s intrusion into people’s lives, there is mounting pressure for it to assume the role of a super-parent.

On that issue too I’m sure to be seen as a social dinosaur, stubbornly resistant to progress. But at least my wife agrees with me.