1/7 Sir Oswald Mosley was Hitler's closest UK ally. When he was released from internment in 1943, thirty thousand Britons protested. In NZ, too, there was protest. But Mosley was a part of the British establishment, which had many supporters of Nazism. Mosley soon got a shock.
2/7 Only months after the end of WW2, Mosley began holding rallies & marches in London. But he hadn't counted on the Group of '43, a collection of Jewish war veterans & Holocaust survivors. The UK state was uninterested in stopping Mosley, so the Group turned to direct action
3/7 Last year Daniel Sonabend published We Fight Fascists, a history of the Group of '43. Sonabend shows how WW2 continued on the streets of London, as Mosley held rallies & turned his thugs loose. But the trained fighters of the Group pulverised Mosley's movement.
4/7 The Group broke up Mosley's street parades & hospitalised his thugs. By 1950 the Group dissolved; Mosley had been defeated. He re-emerged in the '60s, when he waged a campaign against black migrants to the UK. A new outfit, the '62 Group, fought him then.
5/7 Many hope the police & SIS will stop our resurgent fascist movement. Both groups have a history of taking fascists' sides. The police who fought for apartheid in '81. The SIS was founded to counter the radical left. The cops & the army have been infiltrated by far rightists.
6/7 The bankruptcy of the police & the SIS is shown by the way they failed to stop not only Brenton Tarrant's massacres but a long series of arsons & murders by white supremacists in the '90s & early 2000s.
7/7 7/7 In this covid era NZ has, for the first time in 88 years, a significant movement led by open fascists. There is much to ponder in the story of the '43 Group, & in their direct action against fascists.
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1/4 Convicted neo-Nazi terrorist & Brenton Tarrant supporter Phil Arps says he's joining the protest outside parliament, so he can lend his hand as a 'ZOG removal specialist'. Arps' language might seem bizarre, but it opens a window on many protesters' anti-semitic ideology.
2/4 On the far right, ZOG is an acronym for Zionist Occupied Government. People like Arps believe that states like NZ have been taken over by Jews, aka Zionists, & that they are therefore 'occupied'. Arps' language has been common at the protest camp.
3/4 The Liberty NZ podcast has cohered & promoted many of NZ's key anti-vaxxers. John Ansell & Pem Bird & Liz Gunn have been guests on the podcast. Tellingly, Liberty NZ says that it is operating from inside 'occupied NZ'. Like Arps, they believe Jews have taken over NZ.
1/9 Everyone knows about Japan's war 'stragglers' - those soldiers who hid out for years or even decades on jungle islands in the Pacific, unwilling to believe that the war was lost. But after both World Wars, NZ had its own strange stragglers.
2/9 During the World Wars thousands of NZers avoided conscription by hiding. Many went into the mountains and bush, where they improvised camps & lived by hunting & fishing. A few of these inner emigres raided farms for food, or made money by selling liquor from bush stills.
3/9 In Southland alone, forty-eight war resisters' camps have been located. When a journalist visited a highland camp known as Shirkers Bush in 2016, she found relics: a sheet or iron, an axe head, an old fireplace.
1/10 Wendy Pond is a great scholar & a great rebel. Because of her adventurousness & non-conformity, few NZers know of her work. In a new podcast, though, Pond tells the story of her revolutionary work in Tonga's most remote islands.
2/10 In 1966 Wendy Pond & her husband & fellow anthropologist Garth Rogers sailed a small yacht to Niuafo'ou, Tonga's northernmost island. They were escaping the Eurocentrism & moralism of postwar NZ society, & seeking alternative ways of living.
3/10 Pond & Rogers studied the sociology & dances & poems of the island. Niuafo'ouans have their own language & culture, but they were colonised centuries ago by Tonga. Pond was a socialist, & she shared Niuafo'ouans' anger at oppression by the monarchy in distant Nuku'alofa
1/9 In 2018 Joan Druett published a sympathetic, revisionist history of slaver & paedophile Bully Hayes. Reviewers criticised Druett for her lack of awareness of indigenous history & contemporary scholarship. Druett's piece on Matauranga Maori has similar flaws.
2/9 Writing for Stuff late last year, Druett paid tribute to Polynesian seafaring feats & to the achievement of Maori in settling Aotearoa, but suggested that 'pigs & chickens' did not survive the voyage to these islands.
3/9 Druett seems to imagine the settlement of Aotearoa as the result of a one-off journey. This view was common amongst scholars for much of the 20th C, & is reflected in Goldie's powerful but inaccurate painting 'The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand'.
1/7 The great writer JG Ballard said that he believed in the power of imagination to change reality. Looking at images of Kanton Island, I wonder whether the place somehow escaped from Ballard's mind.
2/7 As a kid Ballard watched the Japanese capture Shanghai's International Zone & destroy the Western society that had prospered there. His books are filled with images of ruined modernity: weedy swimming pools, crashed airplanes, gutted hotels.
3/7 Kanton was uninhabited until the US & UK covered it in a runway, hangars, barracks, & hotels in the middle of the 20th C. Pan Am airways used the island as a stopover on trans-Pacific flights. Vice-president Nixon visited in '53, on his way to NZ.
1/16 In the UK four men who pulled down the statue of a slaver have been acquitted. Australians are renaming Ben Boyd Park because Boyd was a slaver. Here in NZ we have a number of place names that are forgotten relics of the Pacific slave trade.
2/16 2 Brissenden Stream flows into the Waitakere River a kilometre or so from Te Henga/Bethells Beach on Auckland's West Coast. The stream is named for businessman Edward Brissenden, who brought Melanesian slaves to Auckland in 1870.
3/16 In 1869 Brissenden leased 400 acres of land in Te Henga, & built a flax mill there. Flax was a booming business in NZ. But Brissenden needed workers. He paid a man named Young to take the recently built schooner to Melanesia to find them.