Awareness Raising

I’m not indigenous to Auckland, where I live. I was born and raised in Essex, England. My late father’s ancestry goes back to 17th Century farmers around Chester. My mother’s harks back to an adopted great-great grandfather somewhere in the Midlands. 

By any global or historical measure, I am extraordinarily wealthy. My ethnic group acquired this wealth through centuries of environmental vandalism and colonial armed robbery. The victims were and still are indigenous cultures like the one I don’t really mix with here in my day to day life. 

For centuries the British have marauded out of our little set of islands to invade exotic, beautiful places overseas. They had their indigenous names and identities, entwined with their own rich poetry, history and culture. We mostly slapped the names of the places we just left over them, often just with the word ‘new’ added at the front. 

We behaved like a lunatic who, after battering and abandoning a wife called Shirley, forced every woman they met to call themselves New Shirley.

One of the most abiding, fundamental and dangerous parts of what passes for my culture is the myth that this is history. We kid ourselves that it requires careful assessment, argument or research to be understood. Or we pretend this unfortunate business was cast aside with the powdered wigs and slave ships. It is of course as current as the device you’re reading this on. It is inherent in many of the processes by which it was made and delivered to you.

Industrialisation is still largely a process of extorting resources from indigenous people. We just change the name over time. We used to call it manifest destiny, empire and civilisation. We now call it development. 

We’ve even stolen people, enslaving them to do our dirty work. We’ve transformed entire countries. We are happy when exploited nations become ‘developed,’ joining the ranks of the exploiters. It’s like some global form of Stockholm Syndrome. I think deep down we take it to mean that exploitation’s okay, as long as enough people join in. We tell ourselves that everybody is doing it, has always done it, they’re just not as good at it as we are. 

And so the pillaging and terrorising continues. And us rich folk continue to collect our share, even those of us who pretend to disagree.

Two hundred and fifty years after Captain Cook first landed the European property owning classes of New Zealand are still surfing along on a tidal wave of colonial appropriation. New Zealand is a lovely place to live. That is why we stole, defrauded or short changed its previous owners into handing it over to us.

Me and my partner own a slightly shabby 1950s four bedroom wooden house near the coast of the ailing Hauraki Gulf. It earns me more every year than my full time job as a sustainability professional. This is the engine that drives middle class wealth in this country. We can add in the inflated prices of holiday homes and rental property, which continue to disenfranchise the less well off, including descendants of the indigenous people whose land it all sits on. 

My wife and I owned a rental property for a while. It was in Meremere, next to the Waikato River, south of Auckland. The town sits on what was once a Māori stronghold. In 1863 local people resisted the invaders with a captured cannon full of cutlery, because they didn’t have cannonballs. The British overran them, then confiscated the land. 

The Tainui people eventually got most of the town back in 1995. This was after 40 years of living under the pall of a coal fired power station. It was, pointedly, four years after it had closed, taking most of the town’s jobs with it. What they got back was a load of state housing in the middle of fields they no longer owned, next to a motorway and a motor racing circuit, surrounded by prisons. Some of the houses were then broken up and shipped out. A lot of the rest were sold to a private company. Ironically, it was called James Cook Limited. James Cook eventually on-sold, mostly to middle class whiteys like me. So the people got disenfranchised all over again.

Colonialism persists because it works well for the colonisers. Survive long enough to appropriate some half decent land and your descendants get rich for generations. Unsurprisingly, the descendants justify this, ignore it or say it’s all in the past.

One side of my Kiwi in-laws originated from a shepherding clan from the Scotland Highlands. They were colonised by the English, then joined their colonial adventures. My lot landed at Wairoa South. The colonists renamed it Clevedon, after a Somerset town to which it bears no resemblance. They grabbed some land for next to nothing. Six generations later, life is good, and this is one of the more affluent areas of the country. No doubt some of these ancestors had to stick their necks out and work harder than I ever have. But had they stayed where they were they might have worked just as hard, and got cleared by the English into the slums of Aberdeen. 

Of course, the spoils are not shared equitably from one exploiting nation to another. And they're not shared equally within the exploiting countries either. But the kind of poverty you might experience is still largely defined by whether your people are in on the blag, or victims of it.

Facts like these make “calling people out” for racism in our culture like handing out speeding tickets at the Indie 500. 

We’re not really punishing poor behaviour, since everyone we know is guilty. We're punishing poor etiquette. We attack those unable or unwilling to mask their inherent racism as effectively as the rest of us. In a way we’re just punishing honesty. 

For surely we are ultimately judged by our actions. And the sum of our actions point to our belief that we deserve to be vastly wealthier and healthier than certain other people, simply because they live in a different country. What could be more racist than that?

This, uncomfortably, also implicates rich industrialised people who trace their ancestry back to other cultures. Today they also mostly turn a blind eye to the carnage their wealth is now secured by. To suggest this is entirely about skin colour is to oversimplify. It is about power and opportunity. 

In fact, perhaps the most coherent views are held by those who still believe in manifest destiny, survival of the fittest or plain old dog eat dog. I suspect this includes most conservative politicians. They have the benefit of consistency, if nothing else. I think that might explain why they remain so successful and influential in our society. 

This doesn’t for a second negate people’s right to protest, just as driving to a climate demo doesn’t negate its message. But it does call for that unfashionable thing, a frank assessment of our part in things, and how to truly change them.

For example, here in New Zealand, despite our ‘clean, green, kind’ rhetoric we're still always careful to side with the bullies. We make sure to send a few token troops to help invade places like Afghanistan and Iraq. They practise killing, and keep our snout in the trough for our share of the spoils, with the emphasis on oils. 

My own life is a walking, hollering sandwich board for all this. I have spent a lot of the last 20 years as a hypocritical jet-setting environmentalist. I have been flown into places like India, Vietnam, Peru, Colombia and Borneo. I have made a good first-world living while hugely enjoying the drama of it all. I have rushed around the globe to ‘save’ the photogenic landscapes and exotic animals industrialised people like in their documentaries. But I never had the slightest intention of joining the locals on their side of the poverty line. I didn’t stop enjoying the benefits of the destruction. Two weeks of hand sanitiser and SUVs, a stop over in a luxury hotel, and I was gone - on a freedom bird back to luxury land.  

This is the truth behind the speech made by the fictional Col. Nathan R. Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson, in the movie A Few Good Men.

“We live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s going to do it? You?...You don’t want the truth because in places you don’t talk about at parties you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. [You] rise and sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, and then question the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said ‘thank you’ and went on your way.”

If you replace the word “freedom” with “affluence” or “convenience” then you get the full picture. 

Colonel Jessep’s job is to fend off our victims. 

Imagine you stole your neighbours' lawn mower and burned down his house. Maybe you killed his children, or other members of his family. Then he comes round to ask if he can mow your lawn for minimum wage. So you set your dogs on him. 

The question must be, when do we abandon the walls? How do we deal with the consequences of doing so? 

War is a central feature of our society, and like many of the central features of our society, it is surrounded by lies. It’s impossible, for example, for the US and its allies (including clean green kind New Zealand) to ‘lose’ a war like the one in Afghanistan. The many recent foreign invasions perpetrated by industrial nations are actually just armed robberies at scale. So long as we set up enough ‘inside men’ to let us rip off the oil concessions and other resources we’re happy. We can then make more money rebuilding and re-arming the place. Netflix can make movies about how heroically torn our soldiers were by their experiences, and we can all go on buying budget toasters.

It doesn't matter that it sometimes looks like a retreat, or a blood bath. It doesn’t matter to the real mission if lots of our soldiers get horrifically injured or killed, providing it doesn’t happen fast enough to stop the raid. 

The idea that these actions are ‘humanitarian’ is completely and obviously ridiculous. And we all know it. The idea that this is just the best we can come up with for ‘defense’ is similarly laughable. You might have thought these comforting lies would wear out over the centuries, but they just seem to be a gift that keeps on giving. 

Consider the first day of the invasion of Iraq in 1991. Let’s call it Operation 'Price at the Pump'. The US-led coalition of 35 nations mobilised at least one million trained personnel. They used trillions of dollars worth of equipment. All in a matter of weeks. Did you see that happen for famines in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Rwandan genocide? 

A particular robbery might not work out entirely as planned. We might even lose control of some resources for a while. But to suggest the people who actually control the wars ever lose is like saying Cadbury’s loses Easter. Our only moral hidey hole is that everybody else is doing it. But really we just fear that if we don’t do it first, we might not have an electric toothbrush.  

So here’s my new marketing idea for campaigners. Why don’t we just go ahead and admit that the people we keep in power, the ones doing all this hideous stuff on our behalf, know pretty much exactly what they are doing, and why. And we do too. That's why we allow them to go on doing it and reward them for it. That’s the horrible ball bag that is poking out of our sweat shop sports shorts. Let’s just own it. Bullying and killing poorer people is what made us rich and keeps us that way.  

This would seem a far more honest and realistic position. It cuts straight through the circumlocutions we employ to try and throw off the disconcerting scent of blood in our nostrils. 

Hysterically pointing out the ‘failings’ of this system is play-acting at best, or collusion at worst. It’s not going to change anything, any more than the Krays would have been stopped by the revelation that stabbing people through the eye is not an appropriate sign of affection. 

People like me benefit hugely and continuously from this gigantic game of pretend. We pretend not to know what we do know. We pretend to believe what we do not believe. Then, when someone tells us something different enough times we eventually pretend to ‘realise’ what we already knew. Then we pretend that we don’t know what we can do about it. Or we pretend we are doing it, when we’re not. Or just forget all about it. And we get to stay rich, in our pretend little world defended by real people with real guns pretending to be freeing the people who they are actually shooting in the face. 

Which all makes me wonder. Shouldn’t those of us who say they want to change things be operating closer to the truth than the people we think of as the bad guys?  

It makes me feel sorry for the ‘whistleblowers’. Because until ordinary people get with reality, the likes of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden will be blowing their little whistles into a hurricane. They simply tell people in detail what they already know in general.

Before the leaked Collatoral Murder video, who didn't know that members of the US military sometimes gleefully gun down innocent people? Before Snowden, who didn't know that our government spies on us? How could we not know this? There’s an avalanche of information documenting and even celebrating this, in books, films and websites, strewn across our culture like discarded pornography.

These things aren’t the system failing, they're the system’s normal operations. It’s not a hidden agenda, it’s just the agenda. It’s our agenda. And it will remain so until we change it. 

Our society silences and convicts whistleblowers not because they tell us things we don’t already know. It’s because they insist on telling us things we already know but have agreed to ignore. The silence outside of Assange’s prison is the sound of ordinary people all over the industrialised world rolling over and gratefully going back to sleep. 

So that’s my suggestion. NGOs and journalists in the industrialised world should immediately and finally abandon the self-righteous charade of ‘exposing’ ecological and social inequities, ‘bearing witness’ or ‘raising awareness’ about them. It’s like shouting fire in a tone of feigned surprise when we reek of petrol and our pockets are jammed full of matches.

While we’re at it, here’s something to think about for those of us who prefer to think of ourselves as “lucky”, and teach our children to do the same. We might want to check whether we aren't just suggesting that the poor and disenfranchised of the world are simply victims of “bad luck”, instead of our victims. Picture yourself leaning out of the windows of an SUV as you pass by the smouldering shanty towns, calling out “Oh, shame, terribly bad luck you fellows...” 

And those who pray to their God or gods for all the many ‘blessings’ might want to ponder a couple of questions too. Are you sure the beings you believe you’re communicating with would really approve of how you came by those ‘blessings’? Is it possible that you might simply be perpetuating this slaughter and mayhem by pretending it's ordained by a spiritual power?