Reviewing colonialism

Auckland Council is finally reviewing the future of its colonial statues:

A review of colonial-era monuments is underway to determine whether they should be removed, given their link to racial inequality in New Zealand’s past. The move comes after three monuments were vandalised in June, including a statue of former prime minister Sir George Grey in Albert Park which lost its finger and nose. Auckland Council will engage with local iwi before deciding on whether to keep the statues later in the year.

Hopefully the review will see them removed and replaced with monuments that celebrate the New Zealand we have become, rather than the one we were. Its not like we're short of options: The Spinoff has lists of both Māori and Pakeha who we could be celebrating. And if not, well, I guess people will just have to keep chipping away at it.

Gone by lunchtime

Earlier in the week, inspired by events in the UK and USA, New Zealand finally started talking about our toxic legacy of racist, colonial monuments. And that conversation has already paid off, with Hamilton City Council removing a statue of Captain John Fane Charles Hamilton. They were told it would be taken down by local iwi this weekend, and so it is literally gone by lunchtime.

Who was Hamilton? A murderer and a thief. He commanded a British ship during the Second Opium War - when Britain used military force to keep China addicted to drugs - and then died at the Battle of Gate Pā in Tauranga, when the colonial government tried to expand its campaign of land theft from the Waikato to the Bay of Plenty. Why would any modern New Zealander want to celebrate and glorify someone like that?

Now it has been taken down, the statue can be put in a museum, with an appropriate historical context. Alternatively, it could just be returned to the local racists who funded it.

We should not celebrate racists, thieves and slavers

Following the removal of a number of racist monuments overseas by Black Lives matter protesters, the Māori Party has called for a review of similar monuments and symbols in New Zealand:

Māori Party Co-leader and Te Tai Hauāuru candidate Debbie Ngarewa-Packer is calling on the Government to establish an inquiry that is focused on identifying and getting rid of racist monuments, statues and names from our colonial era.

[...]

“We still honour some of the most racist and oppressive figures from our colonial history with monuments, statues and place names in towns and cities across the country.

“I am calling on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her government to work alongside hapū and iwi Māori and other communities of colour in Aotearoa to undertake a comprehensive inquiry into colonial monuments and statues, place names, and street names.

As for why, all over the country Māori have to walk down streets named after people who literally murdered their ancestors. We have place names and public monuments celebrating land thieves, slave-owners, and torturers. The town I live in, Palmerston North, is named after the fucker who started the opium wars and who evicted and starved his tenants to death during the Great Hunger.

Place names and monuments are not about history. They are about what we glorify and celebrate. And who we (or rather, our ancestors) have chosen to glorify and celebrate as a society is sick and wrong. We can, we should, change that. As for how, given the scale of the problem, a national inquiry seems more than justified. The alternative is to leave it to people to chip away locally. And in the case of monuments, that will probably be literal.

Protecting our history

Its Suffrage Day, the 126th anniversary of women winning the right to vote (but not stand in elections) in New Zealand. And to celebrate, the government has bought Kate Sheppard's house in Christchurch:

The government has bought Kate Sheppard's former home in Christchurch for more than $4 million.

The Ilam villa will be used as an educational centre for university research projects and school history trips, and made available for public access and events.

It was bought for $4.5 million at the start of September and it will be managed by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga in partnership with the University of Canterbury.

Which is fair enough. Alongside the Treaty House at Waitangi, its one of our most important historical monuments, and something we should preserve as part of our national story. At the same time, it raises an obvious question: if the government can buy Kate Sheppard's house, what is stopping it from buying Ihumātao?

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A hundred years

Today marks the centenary of the end of the first world war. While it wasn't quite the world's stupidest war - that title probably goes to the Football War or the War of Jenkins' Ear - it ranks among them. Greedy, self-important aristocrats piled up the tinder for decades, with their bullshit concerns about empire and prestige and spheres of influence, so that in the end all it took was one spark. One dead Archduke killed 17 million of us.

Not that they did well out of it. Their empires fell, and in the "winners", their class was almost annihilated (I guess noblesse oblige was good for something). But we got the worse end of the deal. Their selfish war fucked up the entire twentieth century: the Russian Revolution, the inevitable rematch with Germany, and the subsequent Cold War can all be traced to the First World War. And we're still living with the aftermath, in the shape of the contradictory promises made by Britain to conquer the Middle East, and the artificial countries it left there.

The First World War is a warning of the danger of giving our political elites the power to wage war. While their stupidity couldn't kill all of us then, it can now. Stupidity, greed and selfishness being inevitable amongst elites, the only way we can defend ourselves from them is to disarm them. Peace is our only protection. And next time they tell us to fight, we should tell them to go fuck themselves.

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How New Zealand was stolen

Stuff has a major interactive piece today on our history: New Zealand Made is effectively a story of how New Zealadn was stolen. It looks at the Treaty of Waitangi, the way it was systematically breached, and how much land was stolen. There's interactive maps of every Treaty settlement, explaining the government's crimes and the (puny) level of compensation. A subsidiary article looks at the methods the government used to steal Māori land, and its effects.

This is something that should be taught in every New Zealand school, so that we know who we are as a nation and why we need to fix this and make sure it never happens again (instead, we get the Tudors and Stuarts: interesting, but safely irrelevant). If you haven't already, you should check it out.

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800 years of freedom

Today is June 15. 800 years ago today, the Magna Carta was signed. Much of its detail was decidedly medieval - stuff about fish weirs, and feudal duties, and whether wards could be given in marriage (that is, sold or used as political bargaining chips). But one clause stands out:

No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right.

That clause (naturally, repealed in the UK) is still on the books in New Zealand today. Its a bit tattered, with the passage of asset forfeiture and refugee detention and the abolition of jury trials for most crimes, but its still there as a reminder that the government must act within the law. 800 years on, we should be strengthening these provisions, not repealing them.

As for the UK, the British government appears to want to celebrate 800 years of freedom by repealing their major legislative guarantee of it, the Human Rights Act. Which tells you just how far from Magna Carta they've strayed. 800 years ago, a group of barons claimed freedom from an over-mighty King at swordpoint; now its time for the people of the UK to save it from their over-mighty Parliament.

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A History of the First World War in 100 Moments: A conqueror shows his respect for the holy city

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Digging a deeper hole

National responds to John Key's appalling ignorance of New Zealand history by claiming that he has been quoted out of context and releasing his full statement:

We may be many voices but ultimately we are one people. One of the unique things about New Zealand is that we are not a country that's come about through civil war or a lot of fighting internally. We're a country that peacefully came together - Maori and the Crown decided from both partners' side that it was in their interests to have a peaceful negotiation. That's what the Treaty was, a founding document - a development document - for New Zealand, and I think that we could work things out in a peaceful, sensible and mature way has actually been a defining part of New Zealand's history. It's very important, and it's important we honour that now.

(Emphasis added) Maybe Key should try telling that to the people the settler government murdered at Parihaka, or to those whose land was stolen at gunpoint in the Waikato and Taranaki, or to those clubbed by Massey's Cossacks for standing up for their right to earn a decent wage. Rather than demonstrating his understanding of our history, Key is simply digging himself a deeper hole.

But then, can we really blame him? He's simply repeating the myths he was told at school back in the 60's and 70's, an era when our education system wasn't exactly known for its accurate portrayal of New Zealand history. And OTOH, this is a man who wants to be Prime Minister, who will have to negotiate with those who suffered those terrible injustices if he is to advance his ambitious Treaty settlement programme. And he can't possibly do that in good faith while pretending for his almost exclusively Pakeha supporters that those injustices never really happened.