The End of the Golden Weather: Terrorism and New Zealand's Loss of Innocence

The End of the Golden Weather*

"The golden weather has nearly gone and the funerals have begun but what is immutable is the alchemy of goodness and love."

It is early autumn now here in New Zealand. We have had a strange discombobulating summer marked by climate change – volatile weather daily, a heatwave, cyclones, and scorched pastures but with the classic features of a halcyon NZ summer still – bright sunshine, happy crowds, barbecues for family and friends, a torrent of colourful flowers and native plants, tumbling gentle waves, bigger surf and mugginess, but, oddly, no flies or mozzies. New Zealanders are an outdoorsy lot. Why wouldn’t we be? We live in this small Island nation in the deep South Pacific surrounded by tropical native bush and scenery, vast near-empty beaches, hiking trails, mountains, and glorious views. The envy of the world. The pohutukawa tree however is no longer in bloom. Those blood-red blossoms have been gone since Christmas. But we are not envied anymore. We have joined “the Club” as one counter-terrorism friend of mine from overseas put it.

Instead, blood has flowed in an actual stream from a Christchurch mosque. Last Friday internationally-fueled hate struck. The choice of a multi-cultural country renown for its diversity and inclusiveness as well as, in some unreconstructed quarters, racism and nationalist nostalgia, was no accident. It was planned as a form of far-right terrorist schadenfreude and a warning to showcase far-away New Zealand as not immune after all to the virtual power of white supremacy in the dark web whose long-term aim is race wars and ethnic cleansing. The garbled, rambling ‘manifesto’ of the not-to-be-named Australian killer referenced secret signs, memes and winks to a vile online community of cockroach viewers who rapidly ensured the video of the killings with a semi-automatic went viral.

Prof. Kathleen Belew of the University of Chicago in her book, “Bringing it Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America”,** traces the evolution of what she calls the “white power movement” in the United States from disaffected veterans of the Vietnam War to the yearning backwards towards the Old Confederacy of the South and Nazi Germany. It uses the ironic memes of Nordic “Odinist” myths and faux-historical tales of battles against past Muslim empires to create a “brotherhood” of “crusaders” or “warriors” that fight against the so-called “replacement” of the white race. It is a deeply paranoid and dangerous creed because it hypes up anxieties, a vein of racism in societies, already present to various degrees (and yes, in New Zealand too), and reaction, building since 9/11, against the horrendous religious and political hatreds and vicious acts of ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

The Christchurch Mosque Massacres are New Zealand’s 9/11. For New Zealanders, their effect will perhaps be even more devastating long-term if possible than the multiple Islamophobic strikes in the US, from the Oklahoma City bombing, Houston, Gainsville, Dearborn, New York City to Charlottesville, horrendous and ugly as they are. In 2017, on average, 9 US mosques per month were targeted, according to CNN.

But something has broken in New Zealand that cannot be fixed. It is not only the sense of safety and security of New Zealanders, including our Muslim brothers and sisters, but our national identity has been attacked as well as our illusions of immunity and of ourselves. The vision of a paradise has gone and our illusions are shattered but our cracked identity will heal stronger at the break. Perhaps it is time for innocence to be let go of. The world is interconnected so closely now that nostalgic visions of the past are fueling racism, far-right violent extremism, nationalist movements like Brexit within the UK and other countries in Europe and Eastern Europe. Russia’s fingers are at the base of such movements of hate against the West; Russia is its ‘Motherland” of evil.

On 15 March 2019 The New York Times reported:

“Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, said that Muslims around the world were in mourning and that the attacks were part of a rising intolerance in the United States and abroad.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/us/mosque-security.html

Read also: The Huffington Post piece on how Muslim community leaders are responding: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jacinda-ardern-new-zealand-mosque-attack_n_5c8fa7fce4b0db7da9f608d9

Most importantly, read 'This is New Zealand's Muslim way of doing things' - Kiwi Muslims respond to massacre with kindness, not anger:, NZ Herald, 19 March 2019; https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12214386

These strikes are a fundamental shock to our whole way of life and national identity. Others more inured to such strikes may have considered us complacent in our luck not to be targeted earlier. We are so tiny that the scale of the reverberations unfolding is enormous and will be with us for a very long time to come. “Grief is the price we pay for love” (Elizabeth II’s words to the US after 9/11).

These attacks were intended to be a monumental hit against Muslims, Islam and the values New Zealand and other multicultural countries stand for. It has caused massive pain, but its narrative has back-fired in no small part to the swift actions and statements of Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister. She has out-memed them with hashtags like #theyareus that has gone viral. She leads the news everywhere. The attempt to influence a broader society beyond the already-converted online terrorist supporters has fizzled, despite the millions of viewers on Facebook and YouTube, simply because those haters were already hating. The main narratives in New Zealand and in societies all over the world remain those of courage, love and compassion, moving stories of the heroism of survivors and first responders, doctors and pathologists and, most of all, the Muslim community in Christchurch who have maintained their love of New Zealand. That in itself is a miracle. Admiration for our Prime Minister and the unified response of the New Zealand Government and New Zealanders themselves has been exponential. The phenomenal embrace of New Zealand in all its multicultural glory to its Muslim people is being expressed in vigils all over the country and in the lone Haka performed outside one of the mosques. The Memorial to come will be extraordinary in its power. New Zealand has already seen one after the Christchurch Earthquakes. This will be as powerful, if not more so, as this was not a natural disaster, it was a long-planned act of unspeakable evil. It must and will be overcome. The golden weather has nearly gone for now and the funerals have begun, but what is immutable is the alchemy of the transmission of goodness and love across our communities maintaining the sacred trust from our forefathers to our children and to those of our newest residents soon to become citizens.

*Bruce Mason, ‘The End of the Golden Weather: A voyage into a New Zealand childhood”, New Zealand University Press and Price Milburn, Wellington, 1962.

This is an iconic NZ text on the end of childhood and summer:

"Highly cultured and literate, he nevertheless longed to make contact with the ‘average New Zealander’, and did so in the inexhaustible performances of The End of the Golden Weather. As he puts it, recalling his Takapuna childhood in his monologue Not Christmas, but Guy Fawkes, ‘I in my flaxbush and the people on the lawn, form a context: if I could not communicate with them, it was because they refused communication with me, or the likes of me. And the reasons for this refusal have become the mainspring of my work.’ Mason was therefore fascinated by ‘mid-racial’ people who fit in neither culture..

?https://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writer/mason-bruce/

** Kathleen Belew, “Bringing it Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America”, Harvard University Press; 1st Edition edition (April 9, 2018);

This is a slightly shorter version of this piece that was published on 26 March 2019 in stuff.co.nz, New Zealand's national online site:

NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence has also published it on their Twitter:

https://mobile.twitter.com/STRATCOMCOE/status/1110511317897617408?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

Published on Linkedin: https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6516411952045056001

Pamela Williamson LL.B MCTS

(Bachelor of Laws, Master of Conflict and Terrorism)

Auckland, 20 March 2019

All Rights Reserved

Pamela is a retired lawyer and a recent graduate of the Master of Conflict and Terrorism Studies program at the University of Auckland. She is part of an international analyst network.