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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

The Politics of Prejudice

The Politics of Prejudice

The politics of Mr King-Ansell are not a problem to me. I doubt if they are a problem for anyone in the country, apart from the few disturbed characters he has briefly been able to lead by the ears, and the number, perhaps a little larger, of people from our local Jewish community who felt old wounds open when they heard him express traditional Nazi sentiments in a Gallery TV interview. It is chiefly on behalf of the second group of sufferers that I use his name in opening a public examination into the politics of prejudice in New Zealand.

One of my lifelong complaints against my own countrymen is that our prejudices, political or otherwise, seem to move so obstinately in anti-human directions. It would be easy to stir up a body of violent prejudice in favour of the re-institution of capital punishment. The prejudice against capital punishment, though it must certainly have existed for our law to change, is a milder thing, less strenuously pronounced. I define prejudice broadly as opinion held on emotional grounds, with little or no intervention of reason.

I would grant that there are a number of rational grounds for the abolition of capital punishment, and a few, though very few, rational grounds for its continuance or re-institution in any country in the world. But I take it that without some degree of prejudice no social or political change is likely to occur, since nearly all people take sides in a controversy on emotional grounds, before they examine or justify their stand by the use of reason. That is the main reason why our laws regarding the local use or distribution of marihuana and hashish are unlikely to be rescinded in the foreseeable future.

A long, emotional conditioning has predisposed our people to regard these drugs as the natural property of Arab villains (perhaps our people see most Arabs as villainous), Islamic assassins and American gangsters. They page 200 regard them much as the keen abolitionist in the last century regarded the Demon Rum. No rational evidence that, for example, the inhabitants of certain Indian villages regard alcohol as the villain and hashish as the friend, yet go about their business as capably and calmly as we do, will ever reverse the prejudice, since prejudices are not based on reason.

It would be necessary for policemen, doctors, businessmen and politicians to imitate the Arabs in smoking the occasional pipe of bhang, in place of or along with their daily nips of whisky, before the emotional tone could change and this particular prejudice be dissipated or at least modified.

I confess that my own views regarding these drugs include an element of prejudice, since I am strongly prejudiced in favour of certain young people who have been physically maltreated during interrogation concerning drug use or possession, and equally strongly against the policemen who maltreated them. Yet my own prejudice is certainly not anti-human in character, and it does not overturn my reason or prevent me from distinguishing the precise degrees of harmfulness or harmlessness that belong to particular drugs.

Without some detonator of prejudice I doubt if my mind would ever be stirred to think without a humanitarian prejudice on behalf of the various Jewish people, some elderly, all scarred mentally or emotionally by the European Nazi persecutions who must have lain awake and sweated in the grip of an old horror and loathing after seeing the swastika-decorated Mr King-Ansell on their TV screen and hearing him openly express accord with Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semite political attitudes – without this pro-human prejudice I doubt if I would now be writing these words.

I wish to distinguish between pro-human and anti-human prejudices. If Mr King-Ansell had used a four-letter word in the course of that recent interview, one could have guaranteed the flood of letters to the newspapers, and perhaps even questions asked in Parliament, on the issue of public decency. Members of my own Church (God help them) might well have marched down Lambton Quay with banners waving. Yet to use a four-letter word is in some circumstances a positive way of communicating with one’s fellows, whereas the nature and fruits of anti-semitism are undeniably frightful and written already across Europe in letters of fire. One is driven to ask why our pro-human prejudices are not more active than they are.

Mr King-Ansell was a very stupid spokesman for his local brand of Nazism. He should not have claimed Adolf Hitler as his political ancestor. New Zealanders fought a war against the German Nazis and have not forgotten it. He should not have worn a swastika. Swastikas are for boys on motorbikes, not necessarily anti-Semite, who wish to express a non-political aggression. He should have called his party the Civil Order and Decency League. He should not have expressed his anti-Semitic prejudices publicly.

All but the most maniacally prejudiced anti-Semites of this country were long ago shamed into a sulky silence by the Nazi massacres. He could have page 201 talked privately about the advantages of keeping New Zealand for the non-Asian, non-European, and possibly non-Polynesian New Zealander, and have still been regarded as a respectable politician.

If he had then chosen the P[rogressive] Y[outh] M[ovement] as his special scapegoat, and spoken solemnly and vaguely about a supposed local menace to the life and property of New Zealanders from the direction of the Left – if, after this careful spadework, he had produced out of a hat his cherished project to use members of the Civil Order and Decency League as auxiliary policemen to stamp out urban crime and thump Leftist demonstrators and spy on lovers in cars and report drunks for swearing – then, he could have remained a Fascist and climbed the rungs up the political ladder.

But Mr King-Ansell did not know the temper of the minds of his fellow-countrymen. They would only follow a respectable Fascist. He was too flamboyant, too obvious, too naïve. He scuttled his political boat before it was truly set floating. The members of his party have reason to be annoyed with him.

Mr King-Ansell, if he had been wiser, might have gained considerable political support – from those whose peculiar cast of mind is equal to his own, from those who rage in genuine and heart-felt fury at every minor departure from the vacant Kiwi norm, from people who liked killing in wars and want to do a bit of it at home, from heads of militarist schools, from boys driven mad by the dullness of suburbia, from housewives driven mad by the clinical isolation of their over-polished homes, from shop-keepers who hate to serve long-haired customers, from members of our society who hate racial or cultural groups because they secretly and unconsciously hate themselves.

The Fascist death wish was not absent in New Zealand. But fortunately Mr King-Ansell lacked the skill required to top that thermal bore. It waits for another less patently paranoid, less outspoken political technician.

The PYM will never tap it. They crusade on behalf of racial and cultural minorities. They want to have theatres in the streets. They worry about the disintegration of mining communities when the mines close down. They are anti-collectivist in [an age of] collectivisation, and therefore lack support from the majority Parties either of the Right or the Left. They have inflamed social consciences.

They weep as they talk about young Maoris or Islanders being beaten up in police cells. They will never be members of any police force, present or future, not even as auxiliaries. They will remain at the receiving end of the baton. They are ferociously anti-Establishment. They sometimes write good poems. They think our local political and business Establishment is massacring the population in slow gas chambers of boredom.

I confess to a prejudice in favour of the PYM, because their anguish is felt mainly as pain on behalf of down-trodden persons, whereas the Fascist anguish remains permanently claustrophobic and through self-loathing emerges as an page 202 unbreakable tendency to treat other people as garbage. Perhaps the two kinds of anguish have the same root, in the mental dangers of a society that fails to understand itself. But they separate almost at their beginning.

The great Jewish saint and theologian Martin Buber understood both kinds of anguish very well. He suggested that endlessly patient dialogue among persons was the only answer to the twin evils of brutal collectivism and a lacerated individualism. And he made it plain that he knew that the only permanent basis for the dialogue was respect and love. When that spirit is paramount, the anti-human prejudice will begin to die like a serpent stung with its own venom.

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