The genocide that inspired the Christchurch shooter

March 24, 2021 by
ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP via Getty Images)

This article was written for Fightback’s magazine issue on the far right. Subscribe here.

Article by Byron Clark.

At the start of the livestream video that accompanied the terror attack in Christchurch, (quickly deemed an objectionable publication) the shooter plays the song “Karadžić, Lead Your Serbs”. Karadžić refers to a Serbian war criminal dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia” by the media in the 1990s. The song is also known as “Serbia Strong” and “God Is a Serb and He Will Protect Us”, or in the online far-right spaces the terrorist frequented, as “Remove Kebab”. It’s a jingoist folk song dating back to the conflict that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, which culminated in the largest genocide on European soil since the Holocaust.

The Royal Commission report into the shooting notes that while the terrorist travelled in the former Yugoslavia in late 2016 and early 2017 it’s “at least possible that he visited some places because of their association with historical events in which he was interested”1 describing his travels as not the cause of his mobilisation to violence, but as the setting for it.

The individual was thus in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina between 25 December 2016 to 31 January 2017. It was during this time that he wrote to the Bruce Rifle Club, which we see as the first tangible indications of his mobilisation to violence.

This article will examine how a nationalism with a specifically anti-Muslim character, and a lack of historical remembrance of the Bosnian genocide created an inspirational story for the modern far-right, specifically the man who murdered fifty-one Muslim worshippers in Christchurch.

Historical background: constructing a nationalist narrative

The Balkan region was a kind of geographic midpoint for the different religious groups of Europe and the near east. After the great schism in Christianity in the eleventh century, the region contained the Eastern Orthodox Serbs and the Western Catholic Croats. There has been a history of armed conflict between these two groups, largely confined to the 20th century.

The region’s Muslim population dates back to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, the idea that Slavic Muslims and Serbs are ancient enemies, prominent during the wars of the 1990s, is much more recent; it was constructed by nationalist Serbs in the nineteenth century and projected back to the 1389 battle of Kosovo (and then back even further.)2In the five centuries following the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, Muslims and Christians coexisted in what was a relatively tolerant environment for the times. Under Ottoman rule a formal charter guaranteed the freedom of the region’s Christians to practice their religion, and Ottoman Sarajevo provided sanctuary to Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.3The battle of Kosovo was fought between the invading Ottoman Empire and a Serbian army led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović, who ruled the most powerful state on the territory of the disintegrated Serbian empire. The way history remembered these events has changed in recent times.

The battle was not the central theme of Serbian historical stories. Prince Lazar would become a significant historical figure only in the nineteenth century, when his story was taken up by Serbian nationalists. It was later also taken up by the Christchurch shooter, who wrote Lazar’s name on one of his guns.4Nations are not things that occur naturally; they are always socially constructed. The Serbian nationalists of the nineteenth century could have taken a cross-cultural, cross-religious view, and based their nationhood on language. This was the approach of philologist and linguist Vuk Karadžić (1787-1865). For him, Serb nationality was a function of the language; all speakers of the South Slavic dialects, whether Catholic, Muslim, or Orthodox, were considered Serbs.5This contrasts with the views of poet and prince-bishop Petar II Petrović-Njegoš (1813-1851) For Njegoš, the region’s Muslims could never be part of the nation. By converting to Islam , Njegoš insisted, Slavic Muslims had “Turkified,” adopting not just the religion of the Ottomans, but actually transforming themselves into Turks. By converting to a religion other than Christianity, Njegoš believed people were converting from the Slav race to an alien race.6After gaining its autonomy and then independence from the Ottoman empire in the 1910s, Serbia as a state expanded. In his book Genocide in Bosnia, Norman Cigar writes of what this meant for the region’s Muslim population.

In the territories acquired during this phase, the Muslims were forced to convert, leave, or be liquidated. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Serbia had been largely cleansed of native Muslims and of the Turkish minority. The problem re-emerged, however, after the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, when Serbia was able to seize and annex two predominantly Islamic provinces from the hapless Ottoman Empire: Kosovo and the Sandzak, as well as Macedonia, which had a large Muslim population.7The establishment of Yugoslavia in 1918 united all Serbs in a single state, but significantly this wasn’t a Serb nation state. In 1933 during a reshuffle of internal borders, Yugoslav President Milan Srskic explained changes saying it was “Because of the Turks [Muslims]. I cannot stand to see minarets in Bosnia; they must disappear.”

By the late 1930s, these ideologues were encouraged by the rise of intolerance in many parts of Europe, and the situation had reached the point that plans were drafted for the mass expulsion of Yugoslavia’s largely Muslim Albanians. Yugoslavia, at the time, didn’t have the political or military power to put this plan into action.

During World War II, fascist states allied to Nazi Germany were established in Croatia and Serbia. In addition to the pro-Nazi state established in Belgrade, other Serbian nationalists organised the Chetnik movement, led by Draza Mihailovic. The goal of the movement was to establish a Greater Serbia in the Balkans.8Operational orders provided by Mihailovic to his field commanders made the Chetniks’ intent toward the Muslim population clear:

Point 4. To cleanse the state territory of all national minorities and anti-national elements. Point 5. To create a direct, continuous, border between Serbia and Montenegro, and between Serbia and Slovenia, by cleansing the Sandzak of the Muslim inhabitants and Bosnia of the Muslim and Croatian inhabitants.

The objective was clarified further in instructions sent from Mihailovic’s headquarters to the commander of a Chetnik brigade:

It should be made clear to everyone that, after the war or when the time becomes appropriate, we will complete our task and that no one except the Serbs will be left in Serbian lands. Explain this to [our] people and ensure that they make this their priority. You cannot put this in writing or announce it publicly, because the Turks [Muslims] would hear about it too, and this must not be spread around by word of mouth.

The defeat of the Chetniks by the Communists in World War II left them unable to complete their nationalist programme, but as a compromise Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito granted Serbia control over several areas in the region, and Serbs were given a disproportionate share of posts in the federal bureaucracy, military, diplomatic corps, economic infrastructure, judicial system, and Communist Party – a situation which prevailed until the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Modern History: Nationalism in the late 20th century

By the time Yugoslavia disintegrated, a ready-made nationalist ideology was available for exploitation. But the re-emergence of nationalism was not inevitable. Cigar writes:

The transformation in interethnic relations needed for the mass mobilization of the Serbs in support of a more confrontational relationship, including vis-à-vis the Muslims, was neither spontaneous nor unavoidable. Instead, a preparatory phase, marked by an intensive and methodical top-down political and information campaign in the 1980s, was required to change the value system of an entire generation of Serbs.

Well before the actual breakup of Yugoslavia, influential figures in Serbia had begun to shape a stereotypical image of Muslims as alien, inferior, and a threat. The novelist Vuk Draskovic in his book Noz, wrote Muslim characters as treacherous, cold-blooded murderers. The book even contains an explicit denial of the Muslims’ existence as a legitimate community. One future commander of the Serbian Guard militia spoke of the influence the novel had on him:

I beat up many Muslims and Croatians on vacation in Cavtat because of his Noz. Reading that book, I would see red, I would get up, select the biggest fellow on the beach, and smash his teeth.

Anti-Islam ideology become prominent among Serbian intellectuals. When, for example, Belgrade’s Muslim community requested land for a cemetery, political scientist Miroljub Jevtić responded:

From land for the dead, the next step is to conquer land for the living. They will then seek a mosque, fully legitimately, but then, around the mosque, they will seek land on which to settle Muslims. Then, it will not be long before non-Muslims will leave, initially voluntarily but later under pressure. . . . What is planned is to settle Muslims in those areas, and to then step up the birth-rate in order to achieve numerical superiority gradually.

This concern about birth rates among Muslims is a precursor to the modern ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, which posits that there is a deliberate plan to overwhelm white populations with people of colour (often Muslims specifically) – the Christchurch shooter went so far as to name his manifesto ‘The Great Replacement’. Much like the modern far-right’s claims of a “white genocide” being imminent, Serb nationalists in the 1980s claimed a genocide against Serbs by Muslims in Bosnia and predominantly Muslim provinces of Serbia was a real possibility. In his book The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia Michael Sells writes:

By the time the Bosnian conflict began, the national mythology, hatred, and unfounded charges of actual genocide in Kosovo and imminent genocide in Bosnia had been shaped into a code: the charge of genocide became a signal to begin genocide.

In the late 1980s Serbian nationalists marched in Bosnian cities with the bones of prince Lazar, and the proclamation “We will do our utmost to crush their race and descendants so completely that history will not even remember them.”

The Bosnian war

Beginning in 1992 Serbian militias began to put this plan into action. When Serbian nationalists came to a predominantly Muslim town, the first people they targeted were intellectual and cultural leaders. Religious authorities, teachers, lawyers, doctors, business people, artists, poets, and musicians. According to Michael Sells, the goal of this was to destroy the cultural memory of the Bosnian Muslims.

In an incident recounted by the Bosnian writer Ivan Lovrenovic, a Serb army officer had entered the home of an artist in Sarajevo. This artist was Serbian but among his works was a piece that depicted a page from the Qur’an. Infuriated, the officer had all the artwork taken out into the street, lined up, and shot to pieces with automatic weapon fire.

The Serbs destroyed the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, which was home to the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in the region, and later the National Library and National Museum. Mosques were another target. Between them, Serb and also Croat nationalists destroyed an estimated fourteen hundred mosques. In many cases the site of the mosques were ploughed over and turned into car parks, all evidence of their prior existence removed. Graveyards, birth records, work records, and other traces of the Bosnian Muslim people were eradicated.

Prior to destroying the recorded history and culture of Bosnian Muslims, Serbian nationalists had been emphasizing their own historical narrative. The 1389 Battle of Kosovo had been elevated to the level of national lore by the nationalists of the nineteenth century. That was still very much the case a century later. In his speech commemorating the six hundredth anniversary of the battle, Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic proclaimed :”Today, it is difficult to say what is true and what is legend about the Battle of Kosovo. Today, that is not even important.”

Norman Cigar wrote of this nationalist use of history, not as an actual chronological record of the past and its scholarly study, but as an “ideological club” whose greatest utility was as “a potential mobilization vehicle.” The story was influential not just in the region but worldwide. Cigar writes:

One cannot explain today’s developments, much less the occurrence of genocide, simply by taking a mechanistic linear view of such a milestone as, say, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, in which the Ottomans defeated the medieval Serbian state. This battle, however, has been perceived by many Western observers as the root of an enduring Serbian-Islamic struggle and, ostensibly, the mainspring of the current situation.

Michael Sells writes that when the national mythology was appropriated by political leaders, backed with massive military power, and protected by NATO nations, it became an “ideology of genocide.” A set of symbols, rituals, stereotypes, and partially concealed assumptions that dehumanize a people as a whole, and justify the use of military power to destroy them.

In the city of Banja Luka, it was announced on local television that one thousand Muslims would be allowed to remain in the city (out of over 28,000). All the others would have to go, “one way or another.” By the end of 1993, of the 350,000 Muslims living in the Banja Luka region before the war, only 40,000 remained. In Bijeljina, Serb officials set the appropriate quota of Muslims who could continue to live in the town – 5 percent of the pre-war number. And in the town of Kozarac, houses were color-coded according to the owner’s ethnicity and then “destroyed systematically.” Samantha Power, a journalist covering the Yugoslav wars at the time who later became the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, writes:

Sometimes Muslims and Croats were told they had forty-eight hours to pack their bags. But usually they were given no warning at all. Machine gun fire or the smell of hastily sprayed kerosene were the first hints of an imminent change of domicile. In virtually no case where departure took place was the exit voluntary. As refugees poured into neighbouring states, it was tempting to see them as the by-products of war, but the purging of non-Serbs was not only an explicit war aim of Serb nationalists; it was their primary aim.9

For the next three years as this euphemistically named “ethnic cleansing” went on, the West did little to stop it, and in fact, did much to facilitate it.

Passing on September 25 1991, UN Security Council Resolution 713 imposed an arms embargo that locked into place the vast Serb army advantage in heavy weapons, reinforcing the power imbalance that allowed genocide to be carried out with impunity. The Serbs had access to the resources of the Yugoslav army, who, supported and financed by the Western powers, had stockpiled immense stores of weapons in anticipation of a Soviet invasion that never came The five permanent members of the Security Council; the US, Britain, France, Russia, and China all voted for the embargo.10In the following years it become increasingly clear that what was happening in Bosnia was not a civil war, but a genocide of one ethnic group by another. The international community didn’t completely ignore what was going on. The UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions, deployed peacekeepers, and helped deliver humanitarian aid. What the United States and its NATO allies did not do until it was too late, however, was intervene with armed force to stop genocide.11According to Samantha Power, the US was reluctant to intervene as they had no national interest in the region, unlike in the Gulf War of 1991.

Iraq had eventually threatened U.S. oil supplies, whereas Yugoslavia’s turmoil threatened no obvious U.S. national interests. The war was “tragic,” but the stakes seemed wholly humanitarian. It met very few of the administration’s criteria for intervention.

Within the US establishment there were numerous high-profile resignations in protest at the administration’s inaction. On August 25, 1992, George Kenney, the acting Yugoslav desk officer resigned from the State Department. News of Kenney’s departure made the front page of the Washington Post. “I can no longer in clear conscience support the Administration’s ineffective, indeed counterproductive, handling of the Yugoslav crisis,” Kenney wrote in his letter of resignation, which the newspaper quoted. “I am therefore resigning in order to help develop a stronger public consensus that the U.S. must act immediately to stop the genocide”12It was not as if the atrocities were unknown in the West; rather, they were simply ignored by those with the power to stop them. One of the most poignant demonstrations of this was the 14 January 1994 letter to the New York Times from Louis Gentile, a Canadian diplomat who at that time was working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Bosnia:

The so-called leaders of the Western world have known what is happening here for the last year and a half. They receive play-by-play reports. They talk of prosecuting war criminals, but do nothing to stop the crimes. May God forgive them. May God forgive us all.“13

The Bosnian war

On 6 July 1995 the Serbs attacked the UN safe zone of Srebrenica. There had been attacks before, but what made this one different was that the Serbs did not just attack the Bosnian Muslims, but surrounded the positions of the UN peacekeepers. Knowing about the UN soldiers’ ‘don’t shoot unless shot at’ mandate, the Serbs never directly attacked them.

Colonel Tom Karremans, the Dutch commander of UN troops, requested NATO air support from his superiors. But because the UN soldiers were not directly under threat, his request was denied. On July 9th, Ratko Mladić, general of the army of Republika Srpska, the Serb- held territories in Bosnia, took over the Srebrenica operation. The next day, the Serb forces pushed forward, with the goal of taking over the enclave. Two subsequent air support requests were rejected, the first because the Serbs stopped advancing until the planes ran out of fuel and had to return to base, and the second because when the planes were refuelled and the Serbs started advancing again, it was too dark. Karremans met with Muslim military leaders that night and assured them that forty to sixty NATO planes would arrive at 6am the next day to stage a “massive air strike.” But that didn’t eventuate.

There is no agreed-upon account of why the planes didn’t come that morning, but they didn’t. Karremans made another request over the phone, and was told he needed to submit a paper form. So a form was filled out, then returned because it was the wrong form. Once the right form was submitted, he was told air support would arrive within 45 minutes, but at 9:45am it was denied. The misunderstanding was that command support said air support *could* arrive in 45 minutes, not that it would. Another request was made at 10am. Again though, Karremans was told he had to submit a form. By the time the air strike could be approved, the planes again had to refuel. This bureaucratic back and forth arguably prevented a decisive change in the course of events.14Mladic summoned Karremans for a pair of meetings at the local Hotel Fontana; he warned that if NATO planes reappeared, the Serbs would shell the UN compound in Potocari, where refugees had gathered. Later, with Karremans looking on, Mladic asked the Muslim representative of the Bosnian government who had been called to negotiate whether the Muslims wanted to survive or “disappear.”

The Serbs had chosen that the Muslims would disappear. What followed was the largest massacre of the war, later ruled a genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. One survivor described what he experienced:

They took us off a truck in twos and led us out into some kind of meadow. People started taking off blindfolds and yelling in fear because the meadow was littered with corpses. I was put in the front row, but I fell over to the left before the first shots were fired so that bodies fell on top of me. They were shooting at us … from all different directions. About an hour later I looked up and saw dead bodies everywhere. They were bringing in more trucks with more people to be executed. After a bulldozer driver walked away, I crawled over the dead bodies and into the forest.

In the town of Kravica, north of Srebrenica, Muslim men were herded into a large warehouse. Serb soldiers positioned themselves at the windows and doorways, fired their rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and threw hand grenades into the building, where the men were trapped. After the soldiers shot bullets into any bodies that were still twitching, they left a warehouse full of corpses to be bulldozed.

Eventually, there were NATO air strikes which did lead to the end of the war in Bosnia. It came too late, though, for the eight thousand dead in Srebrenica. When Serbia began to ethnically cleanse the province of Kosovo, NATO was not as slow to act as it had been in Bosnia.

There was a section of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto about that Kosovo conflict. It wasn’t quoted in any New Zealand media, but it was in Balkan Insight, the website of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. The terrorist criticised NATO forces for what he saw as attacking Christian Europeans who were attempting to remove “Islamic occupiers” from Europe.

This view was held not just by extremists like the terrorist, but by mainstream politicians in Europe and elsewhere. In 2008, the Austrian MP Heinz-Christian Strache argued that Kosovar independence was an attack on Serbia’s identity, that European nations had to band together to protect the “Christian Occident” and that a failing to do so would entail that “Europe is likely to experience the same fate as Kosovo”.15 When the attack happened in Christchurch, Strache was Austria’s vice chancellor.

In the quarter century since the Bosnian genocide the events of the early 90s haven’t taken their rightful place in our collective memory, where we can recognise Islamophobic rhetoric and fearmongering about birth rates and know the end point of this rhetoric is genocide. Instead, we have seen publications such as Renaud Camus’ Le Grand Remplacement (2011) a book whose English title is shared with the shooter’s manifesto, and Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe (2017).

Perhaps more significant though has been the deluge of far-right content on social media, in particular on YouTube. The Royal Commission report into the Christchurch shooting noted that “[the shooter’s] exposure to such content may have contributed to his actions on 15 March 2019 – indeed, it is plausible to conclude that it did.”16 The commission also found that the shooter had donated money to Rebel Media, which employed Lauren Southern, who produced a documentary on the supposed Great Replacement, and Stefan Molyneux, whose YouTube channel promoted discredited ideas about race and intelligence.

Southern and Molyneux travelled to New Zealand in 2018. While they were eventually unable to find a venue to host their speaking tour, the event had sold a significant number of tickets, showing that their rhetoric is resonating here. If we do not learn from the atrocities of the past, we are never far from similar atrocities happening again.

1 https://christchurchattack.royalcommission.nz/the-report/firearms-licensing/the-regulation-of-semi-automatic-firearms/

2 Sells, Michael. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, University of California Press, 1998.

3 Cigar, Norman. Genocide in Bosnia, Texas A&M University Press, 2000.

4 https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/christchurch-shooter-s-manifesto-reveals-an-obsession-with-white-supremacy-over-muslims-20190315-p514ko.html

5 Sells.

6 Sells.

7 Cigar.

8 Cigar.

9 Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, Basic Books, 2002.

10 Sells.

11 Power.

12 Quoted in Power.

13 https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/14/opinion/l-in-banja-luka-terror-seems-uncannily-normal-870200.html

14 Untold Killing podcast, episode 2: “The Fall”

15 Zdravko Harmens, Hans. Karadžić Lead your Aussies?, 2020. https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/137654

16 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack in Christchurch: https://christchurchattack.royalcommission.nz/the-report/firearms-licensing/assessment-of-the-individual-and-the-terrorist-attack/

Filed Under: Far Right / Fascism, History, Racism

What is the base of right-wing populism?

March 17, 2021 by
Image via BBC.

This article was written for Fightback’s magazine issue on the far right. To subscribe to the magazine, click here.

By Ani White.

Given the global surge of the populist right in recent decades, it’s worth investigating the demographic base of this political phenomenon. Probably the most prominent example of right-wing populism, largely due to prominence of the United States in general, is Donald Trump’s former presidency. This article will therefore examine Trump’s base, before moving on to international comparisons.

Trump and the ‘white working-class’

It’s a commonplace claim that Trump appeals to the “white working class.” This is almost too commonplace to need a source, but an article in UK conservative rag The Times typifies the claim:

Trump was elected for a reason. He spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class that had been forgotten by the elites raking in money from the global economy. By re-engaging these outcasts with the political system, he…turned politics upside down.

It’s worth teasing out what is meant by ‘white working-class’ here. According to a Marxist definition, workers are those who do not control the means of production, and must work for a wage. This definition includes educated white-collar workers, among other groups not commonly stereotyped in the term ‘working-class.’ By this definition, any successful candidate in a mass electoral system will have a majority of working-class supporters, regardless of their other demographic features. But the Times‘ claim is more specific: that Trump appeals to an economically insecure section of the working-class, a section of the working class that has been left behind, those affected by increasing inequality.

Yet this notion of Trump voters as economically left-behind is not borne out by the numbers. According to exit polls in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, Trump appealed to higher-income households, while Democrats appealed to lower-income households:

Voters from wealthy households swung further towards Mr Trump in 2020. Just over half of those whose family income was more than $100,000 a year supported the president, compared with 45 per cent in 2016.

By contrast, those making family incomes of less than $50,000 voted Democratic by an 11.5-point margin (55 to 43), compared to an 8.2-point Democratic margin in 2016 (50 to 42)1

These numbers do not measure class in the Marxist sense (unfortunately exit polls do not gather data on voters’ relation to production) but they do undermine the thesis that Trump’s base is the most economically left-behind of the working-class. The average Trump voter is economically better-off than the average Democrat voter, and better-off than the average American. This played out prominently when participants in the January 6 Capitol coup attempt checked in at five-star hotels such as the Grand Hyatt,2 Wealthy racists support wealthy racists.

Trump’s base is substantially petit bourgeois: small-business owners. A poll of small-business owners in the US in 2016 found that the majority supported Trump3, and this majority only increased in 2020.4 Admittedly, Trump lost support from big business in the 2020 election5, but the point remains that Trump’s base is substantially petit bourgeois (this is also the classical base of fascism).

A common mistake conflates geography with class. Red States are portrayed as working-class, obscuring that lower-income voters, particularly people of colour, still largely do not vote Republican – with many suppressed from voting at all. Many commentators highlighted the segment of Wisconsin voters that swung from Obama to Trump, with the apparent assumption that everybody in Wisconsin is a factory worker. But the demographic makeup of Trump support in Wisconsin was much the same as it was nationwide, with the Democrats attracting lower-income voters and Trump attracting higher-income voters.6,7 The focus on Wisconsin, as a swing state, also reflects the narrow electoralist logic of the US system, which both encourages parties to chase ‘the middle’ (a common feature of liberal electoral systems), and gives certain states disproportionate weight (a more distinctive feature of the US Electoral College). Focusing so heavily on ‘swing voters’ is a recipe for rightward drift.

Another argument maps education on to class. An article on popular academic non-profit blog The Conversation, with the headline “Who exactly is Trump’s ‘base’? Why white, working-class voters could be key to the US election”8, quotes political scientists Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes defining working-class as “those who do not hold a college degree and report annual household incomes below the median”,9 and explicitly goes on to say that small-business owners may be included in this category. However, while education does factor into economic access, to define working-class status based on education assumes that workers are uneducated and lets reactionary petit bourgeois off the hook. Additionally, even by Lupu & Carnes’ cultural definition of the “white working-class” as those on low incomes without higher education, only a minority of Trump’s base qualifies.10

So, what are the defining features of the populist right’s base, if not working-class status? Trump’s base is primarily white and wealthy,11 and more consciously motivated by cultural than economic factors: nationalism, race, and religion.12 Even if we were to argue that economics are self-evidently more important than culture, we would still be left with the point that Trump’s base is substantially petit bourgeois (though also drawing in the more reactionary and privileged sections of the working-class). This petit bourgeois, culturally conservative character of right voters has international parallels.

Right-wing populism in Europe and Australasia

Before moving on to international examples beyond Trump, it’s worth defining a term: right-wing populism. Populism in general can be defined as a contentious politics that polarises the field between a broad “people” and a “narrow elite”’13 – this has both left and right variants, but the question of left-populism will be set aside for now. Right-wing populism tends to define its “people” in national rather than class terms, and its “elites” in cultural terms – not necessarily the rich, so much as the liberal or cosmopolitan. Nazism is the far end of right-wing populism, with Jewish people defined as the “elites” that must be purged from the nation. My analysis of right populism is focused on the ‘imperialist core’ countries – the Anglosphere and Northern Europe, as centres of white supremacy – but similar dynamics can play out in the majority world, as with India’s Hindutva movement.

The base of populism in Europe correlates with the base of populism in the US. Political scientists Ronald F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris conducted a meta-analysis of the voters most likely to support populist parties in Europe, and their motivations. Comparing the cultural backlash thesis (“support can be explained as a retro reaction by once-predominant sectors of the population to progressive value change”) and the economic insecurity thesis (emphasising the impact of neoliberalism on working-class voters), they found more support for the cultural backlash thesis. Conservative cultural attitudes were the strongest predictor of support for populist parties, to a much greater degree than economic insecurity. Unsurprisingly, populist support was strongest among “the older generation, men, the less educated, ethnic majority populations, and the religious”. Moreover, support for populists was strongest among the petit bourgeoisie, not among workers or unemployed.14

Australia has also seen a surge of support for minor populist parties. In the 2016 federal election, more voted for minor parties than at any other point since the Second World War. Unusually, the Australian minor party vote increased most strongly during periods of wage and income growth15 (this contrasts with an international pattern, measured over 140 years across 20 developed countries, whereby political polarisation increases most after financial crises16). In Australia, as elsewhere, support for populist parties was most correlated with conservative anxieties about cultural change.17 Australia has also been ahead of the curve with the mainstreaming of racial populism, with its Mandatory Detention policy for refugees initially emerging as exceptional for the OECD, but increasingly echoed internationally (as with Trump’s detention camps).

In Aotearoa/New Zealand, 2020’s General Election saw newly-formed populist parties roundly defeated.18 Labour PM Jacinda Ardern was able to sell herself as a competent crisis manager, winning over a broad swathe of the electorate including many traditional right voters.19 Ardern was successful where Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the US were not, despite the dreams of some on their populist-left flank20: win over the base of the right. In doing so, she demonstrated why this is not a viable left strategy: Labour is unwilling to alienate their new friends with any radical measures, or even moderate measures such as property taxes to address the housing crisis, which would cut into the wealth of the property-owning middle-class.21 22 23 Although Ardern’s strategy is centrist rather than populist, it demonstrates a central danger in appealing to the right’s base: the danger of successfully becoming the sort of party right-wingers want to vote for.

What does this mean for left strategy?

The simplest strategic point to draw from all this is the following: the left should not build a strategy on appealing to the most culturally conservative, economically wealthy section of the electorate. While this point may seem blindingly obvious to some, it’s apparently not obvious to ‘left’ commentators such as Glenn Greenwald, who recently commented that he considered (millionaire right-wing Fox anchor) Tucker Carlson and (Trump strategist) Steve Bannon to be ‘socialists’, explaining that “you have this kind of right wing populism, which really is socialism.”24 Although this statement may be patently absurd, it’s also reflective of the mindset that the far-right are potential allies of the left.

Although there are conservatives that can be won over, this should not be our primary orientation. Moreover, those that can be won over should be won through a politics of solidarity, rather than pandering.

The claim that the populist right’s base is primarily “white working-class” is both misleading, and inherently beneficial to the right. The claim gives conservatives a stamp of authenticity, given their discrediting association with business interests, and generally unpopular social policies. The circulation of this claim among leftists and liberals is an own-goal at best, and a gateway to reactionary politics at worst. The outsize focus on the “white working-class” also obscures that the working-class are disproportionately people of colour.

The good news is that we don’t need to win over the base of the right to win. In the US, crudely rounding the numbers, Republican voters make up about 25% of the population, with about 25% voting Democrat, and about 50% not participating in elections (the actually left-behind). A strategy appealing to that 75% working-class majority, rather than the wealthiest and most reactionary 25%, has more transformative potential. And beyond the USA, the global working-class are mostly people of colour.

1 Zhang, Christine; Burn-Murdoch, John. “By numbers: how the US voted in 2020.” Financial Times, November 8, 2020 (tinyurl.com/trump-2020-base). Web. Accessed 17/02/2021.

2 Bradley, Diana. “Hyatt faces backlash for ‘harboring domestic terrorists’ following Capitol riots.” PR Week, 7 January 2021 (https://tinyurl.com/h5j0i7k1). Web. Accessed 17/02/2021.

3 Ioannou, Lori. “Small business says Trump is their pick for president.” CNBC, 5 October 2016 (tinyurl.com/sm-biz-4trump). Web. Accessed 17/02/2021.

4 De Leon, Riley. “President Trump’s approval rating among small business owners hits all-time high of 64%, survey reveals.” CNBC, 20 February 2020 (tinyurl.com/smbiz/4trump20). Web. Accessed 17/02/2021.

5 Edgecliffe-Johnson, Andrew. “Business breaks up with Trump.” Financial Review, 1 November 2020 (tinyurl.com/bbiz-trump). Web. Accessed 17/02/2021.

6 CNN. “Exit Polls: Wisconsin Presidential Election 2016”. CNN, last updated 9 November 2016 (tinyurl.com/2016-wisconsin-exit). Web. Accessed 17/02/2021.

7 CNN. “Exit Polls: Wisconsin Presidential Election 2020”. CNN, n.d. 2020 (tinyurl.com/2020-wisconsin-exit). Web. Accessed 17/02/2021.

8 Ketchell, Misha. “Who exactly is Trump’s ‘base’? Why white, working-class voters could be key to the US election.” The Conversation, 29 October 2020 (tinyurl.com/trump-wwc). Web. Accessed 18/02/2021.

9 Carnes, Nicholas; Lupu, Noam. “The White Working-Class and the 2016 Election.” Perspectives on Politics, First View, pp. 1-18, 2020. American Political Science Association.

10 Carnes et al. “The White Working-class…” Perspectives on Politics, 2020.

11 Carnes, Nicholas; Lupu, Noam. “It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class.” Washington Post June 5, 2017 (https://tinyurl.com/ybmv7lel ). Accessed 22/04/2018.

12 Rubin, Jennifer. “Trump’s voters were more motivated by nationalism than economic hardship.” Chicago Tribune June 19, 2017 (https://tinyurl.com/yypnrreg ). Accessed 22/04/2018.

13 Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. Verso. 2005.

14 Inglehart, Ronald. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton Legacy Library. 1977.

15 Wood, Danielle; Daley, John; Chivers, Carmela. “Australia Demonstrates the Rise of Populism is About More than Economics.” The Australian Economic Review, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 399-410, 2018.

16 Funke, Manuel; Schularick, Moritz; Trebesch, Christoph. “Going to extremes: Politics after financial crises, 1870-2014.” European Economic Review, vol 88, pp. 227-260, 2016.

17 Wood et al. “Australia Demonstrates…” Australian Economic Review, 2018.

18 Clark, Byron. “Conspiracy theorists big losers in NZ election.” Fightback, 5 December 2020 (tinyurl.com/nz-losers). Web. Accessed 18/02/2021.

19 Malpass, Luke. “Forget left and right, Jacinda Ardern’s in the middle.” Financial Review, 23 October 2020 (tinyurl.com/ardern-middle). Web. Accessed 18/02/2021.

20 Lawless, Daphne. “Left Populism at the dead end: where to after Corbyn and Sanders?” Fightback, 25 August 2020 (tinyurl.com/dead-populism). Web. Accessed 18/02/2021.

21 Sachs, Justine. “Jacinda Ardern Is Not Your Friend.” Jacobin, 12 February 2021 (tinyurl.com/jacobin-ardern). Web. Accessed 18/02/2021.

22 White, Ani. “’Lawmakers, not lawbreakers’”: Jacindamania as a bastion of the Third Way.” Fightback, 1 September 2020 (tinyurl.com/fightback-ardern). Web. Accessed 18/02/2021.

23 Green Left Radio. “New Zealand Elections: Left Response.” Green Left Radio, 24 October 2020 (tinyurl.com/greenleft-ardern). Web. Accessed 18/02/2021.

24 Richardson, Reed. “Glenn Greenwald Describes Tucker Carlson, Bannon and 2016-era Trump as Right Wing ‘Socialists’, Mediaite, 4 March 2021 (https://tinyurl.com/wow-greenwald). Web. Accessed 05/03/2021.

Filed Under: Electoral Politics, Far Right / Fascism, Revolutionary Strategy

Fightback Conference talks online now

March 16, 2021 by

In January 2021, Fightback hosted a series of online public talks as a part of our annual conference. Recordings of these talks are now all online at the Where’s My Jetpack podcast:

Unfortunately, the audio files from our most popular session on union and workplace struggle were corrupted. However, you can find interviews with the two speakers on our blog here:

Filed Under: Audio, Events, Far Right / Fascism, International, Revolutionary Strategy, The Workplace, Union movement

The crowded mess on NZ’s populist Right

September 22, 2020 by
New Zealand’s New Conservatives promote conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 virus being bacteriological warfare by the Chinese Communist Party; Facebook attaches a warning label.
By BYRON CLARK. From Fightback‘s upcoming issue on Electoral Politics. To subscribe, please visit https://fightback.zoob.net/payment.html

The 2020 election has shown that New Zealand is not immune to the wave of right-wing populism that we’ve seen overseas. In June Fightback covered the entry of various far-right ideas and individuals into the New Conservative Party.[1] Newshub picked up the story in July.[2] Right Minds founder Dieuwe de Boer, who has described his movement as having overlapping goals with the content of the Christchurch shooters manifesto is standing for the party in the Botany electorate.[3] Deputy leader Elliot Ikilei talks about the superiority of Western culture, and has repeatedly denied that the shooter was a white supremacist.[4] (Leader Leighton Baker usually appears more moderate.)

The party is a rebranding of the old Conservative Party led by Colin Craig, which in 2014 came close to getting representation in parliament with 4% of the vote. In 2017 though, without Craig’s leadership -and without his substantial financial backing, their vote plummeted to 0.2%, just over 6,000 votes. In the intervening years, however, they have built a sizable following on social media, especially Facebook, and typically poll at around 1%.

While their zero net migration policy dates back to the Craig era, New Conservative courted a particularly xenophobic base through their involvement in the campaign against the UN Migration Compact which had been started by far-right groups in Europe.[5] That campaign had been worryingly successful, with mainstream right-wing parties adopting opposition to the compact as policy. When the man who carried out the mass shooting in Christchurch was revealed to have had “here’s your migration compact!” written on one of his guns, National and ACT backtracked on their opposition. This resulted in a minor scandal after National removed a petition against the compact from their website in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, claimed it had been removed weeks earlier, and when that was shown to be false, scapegoated a former press secretary who then leader Simon Bridges described as an “emotional junior staffer”.[6] The New Conservatives however have dug in their heels on the issue.

The party has fomented a panic about transgender “ideology” being taught in schools,[7] and has a policy to put solo mothers in “residential accommodation with a suitably trained/experienced couple as hosts.”[8] Despite their ideal New Zealand sounding like The Republic of Gilead from Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, the New Conservatives avoid referring to themselves as an explicitly Christian party.

In March 2019 Ikilei told The Spinoff that “Despite not being a Christian party, we are the only party who has universal values that Christians hold to.”[9] However, as Ikilei gave that interview, Destiny Church, the evangelical ministry led by Brian Tamaki, was also launching a party. They had done so before, with the Destiny Party gaining 0.6% of the vote in 2005. The new party, today called Vision New Zealand after the electoral commission rejected the name ‘Coalition New Zealand’, is led by Hannah Tamaki (wife of Brian).

Vision has come out with numerous alt-right friendly statements, with Tamaki calling for a 97% cut to immigration numbers,[10] suggesting that rather than accepting refugees New Zealand should pay them not to come here[11] and vowing to ban the construction of new “mosques, temples and other foreign buildings of worship” if elected.[12] Her husband Brian had previously claimed that broadcasting the Islamic call to prayer across the country during a remembrance service in for the Christchurch mosque shooting would turn New Zealand into an Islamic state,[13] and in a sponsored Facebook post stated “we can not accept the proliferation of Islam in our country”.

Despite Vision’s obvious links to Destiny Church, Tamaki, much like the leaders of New Conservative, has claimed that her political vehicle is not a Christian party. This makes it possible for the newly registered ONE party to somewhat accurately make the claim that they are the only Christian Party running in the 2020 election.

ONE offers, according to their website, “a fresh wave of political forerunners who uphold not only the Christian values, but the Christ that we value”.[14] To hammer the point home, the party launched at the site of the first Christian service held in New Zealand.[15]

On immigration, ONE stops short of the dramatic cuts proposed by Vision and the New Conservatives (though they would slash the annual refugee intake from 1500 to just 350). Aspects of the policy appear to have been written with Muslim immigrants in mind, appealing to those concerned about potential ‘Sharia law’ with the position that “Immigrants entering New Zealand cannot advocate or practice alternative law courts contrary to New Zealand law courts”.[16]

Surprisingly for a party their size, one of their ten policies is on Israel (there is no detailed policy on relations with any other country).[17] ONE would like to see New Zealand establish an embassy in Jerusalem and apologise to Israel for New Zealand’s sponsoring of UN Resolution 2334, which states that Israel’s settlement activity in the occupied territories constitutes a “flagrant violation” of international law. These views are shared by the New Conservatives, who list New Zealand–Israel relations as one of their eight policy pillars.[18] Presumably in both cases the policy and the priority given to it results from the influence of Christian Zionism in these groups.[19]

For the New Conservatives, this policy upset the anti-Semitic supporters they had picked up by speaking at rallies attended by the far-right. “Jews are a threat to the Goyim, that’s their name for non-Jews, it means ‘Cattle’.” wrote one commenter on the Facebook post announcing the policy.[20] “I was a huge supporter until this. This is your true colours laid bare. Total Ziocon shills.” wrote another.[21]

The Outdoors Party

The Outdoors Party was formed in 2015, so will be contesting their second election this year. In 2017, they won 1,620 votes, just over half of the 3,005 gained by the single issue Ban1080 party. With that party gone, The Outdoors Party has picked up the issue and plans to ride a wave of opposition to the use of “1080” poison for pest control to parliament.[22] (They have yet to register in any polls)

The party also seeks a moratorium on the roll out of fifth generation mobile technology (5G).[23] Fears about the technology, including conspiracy theories linking it to the Covid-19 pandemic, have become widespread, resulting in a number of arson attacks on communications infrastructure.[24] In a statement on the arsons, party co-leader Sue Grey was quoted as saying “The New Zealand Outdoors Party understands the frustrations felt by New Zealanders as unwanted new cell towers have emerged like pimples around New Zealand, without consultation or consent from local residents or councils”.[25] (The mobile towers that have been set alight were not 5G towers.)

The party made headlines in June, but perhaps not for the reasons they would like. At a rally where supporters were encouraged to share thoughts by writing in chalk on the pavement, a woman (not involved with the rally) rubbed out the phrase “it’s okay to be white” a slogan that began as a trolling campaign on 4chan and was soon adopted by white supremacists.[26] An Outdoors Party supporter chased the young woman, who is Asian, yelling “You are racist! You are racist against us New Zealanders, now get out! Look at you rubbing out all of our words – go back to your own country!”[27]

In March the party had absorbed another small right-wing populist group, The Real New Zealand Party, with founder David Moffet being appointed to their board. “When it became apparent that the Real NZ Party was not going to reach the 500 member threshold to form a party, it engaged in discussions with the NZ Outdoors Party. It quickly became evident that they are a great bunch of people with almost identical aspirations to ours.” he said in a press release.[28]

Moffet, a former New Zealand Rugby CEO, had previously been on the board of the New Conservative Party (it’s unclear why he left to form his own party). Stuff reported that he was motivated to get involved in politics by the campaign against the UN Migration Compact. Moffet claimed that the pact would lead to “plane loads” of violent rapists from East Africa arriving in New Zealand and that a “boatload” of 200 Indians was on its way.[29]

“I don’t think they are refugees.” Moffet told Stuff in January 2019:

…immigrants is not the right word. I don’t want to use the word invaders because I don’t want this to be right in everybody’s faces. But they are seeking to land in a welfare country such as New Zealand and they are doing it illegally…what the people smugglers tell them [is] if you get to Australia or New Zealand… they’ll give you a house, they’ll give you medical, free schooling, free everything else.

Moffett’s imagined boatload of Indians never arrived; in fact, no asylum seekers have reached New Zealand by boat. When asylum seekers do arrive in New Zealand by plane, they are not given houses, medical care and schooling. They are detained in prisons. “You know the last 20 years of policy and action on this issue is actually pretty shameful.” Amnesty International’s Anneliese Johnson told The New Zealand Herald in January. “I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that we have asylum seekers currently in our prisons in New Zealand.”[30]

The New Zealand Public Party

A late comer is the New Zealand Public Party, led by Billy Te Kahika Jr, son of a famous blues-rock guitarist and a noted musician himself.[31] Te Kahika started the party after his Facebook live videos claiming that the public wasn’t being given the true facts about the coronavirus gained a large audience. The government’s support for the goals of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, is also a concern for him. “Where this is all going is Jacinda wants to sign us up to the UN programme Agenda 2030 and that’s a complete destruction of Kiwi freedoms and democracy.” he told Waatea News.[32]

These goals, which relate to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice, were agreed upon by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 and are intended to be achieved by the year 2030. Its predecessor, Agenda 21, which came out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is a popular target of right-wing conspiracy theorists.

“The demonization of Agenda 21 began among extremist groups like the John Birch Society” reads an article on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a US based organisation that tracks extremist groups. “The Birch Society and an array of other radical-right groups see Agenda 21 and virtually all other global efforts as part of a nefarious plan on the part of global elites to form a socialistic one-world government, or “New World Order.”“[33] This “Bircher” rhetoric is echoed by the NZ Public Party: “It does not matter which of the two main colours you vote for” reads their website. “They are both in bed with the UN, despite the fact that YOU, the public, never voted for this”.[34]

Right-wing unity?

Billy Te Kahika made overtures to the other right-populist parties to merge with his NZ Public Party. An arrangement with Vision New Zealand looked close to happening. “Our proposal to Vision was simple & consistent with what we had discussed with members and other parties” wrote Te Kahika in a statement posted to Facebook by the party. “1. Merge with NZPP and rebrand to NZPP. 2. Hannah could be Deputy Leader 3. We would take all of and respect their candidates.”[35]

But in a “last-minute meeting” Vision had apparently decided Hannah Tamaki would remain leader with Te Kahika as deputy. Te Kahika rejected this arrangement. “This would have destroyed all that NZPP stood for and built. We were astounded at the lack of integrity and forthrightness of a ‘Christian’ organisation.”

An attempt to merge with the Outdoors Party also failed, according to Waatea News.[36] A statement published on the Outdoors Party Facebook page claims “There is almost mass hysteria on facebook begging us to join with Billy Te Kahika and the Public Party.” and lists eleven questions they want answered before any possible merger. Among them:

We understand Michael Stace (formerly known as Michael Leon) who proposed the Reset NZ Party is involved in marketing Billy. We need clarification as to why he changed his name and an explanation about his “Master Mason” title and his work for and any ongoing relationship with the Freemasons so our team can better understand and implications this may have.[37]

It seems promoting UN Agenda 2030 conspiracy theories isn’t enough to get other conspiracy theorists on side if your organisation has a Masonic connection. “I’m gonna tell you right now, I’m not going to be voting for the New Zealand Public Party” states Damien de Ment, an American expat who has become New Zealand’s biggest promoter of the Qanon conspiracy on YouTube.

I have too many concerns, too many red flags have come up in the last couple of weeks. For instance, party manager Michael Stace, his background in Free Masonry (sic) – he was the director of communications and marketing for the Free Masons of New Zealand, that’s a pretty big title for an organisation that has tentacles in a lot of places”.[38]

De Ment is voting for the New Conservatives, he explains:

They may not be jawboning the whole truth movement that I’m very passionate about, ya’ know, crimes against humanity, Qanon, taking down the cabal and the deep state, but I promise you, Elliot and Leighton know that these – this paradigm exists, that these conspiracies are absolutely real, but they have to run an effective campaign to get as many votes as they can and appeal to a wider audience. So you may be frustrated right now that they’re not talking about these truth topics as much as the New Zealand Public Party, but I don’t see how the New Zealand Public Party right now is benefiting the political landscape if they’re not even registered yet.

On YouTube, still the video platform of choice for voters who have rejected the “mainstream media”, the differences between the various minor parties are debated and defended. “Billy’s a really charismatic guy, I like him.” says Elliot Ikilei, appearing on The Vinny Eastwood Show. “From the very first time we had lunch it was really cool. I like the way he thinks about – in terms of specific agenda items and the UN.”[39]

Eastwood is a New Zealander, but his show is broadcast on American Freedom Radio (as well as on YouTube), AFR shows cover all the usual topics for conspiracy theory enthusiasts – chemtrails, UFOs, the New World Order etc. When I visit for researching this article, their website tells me that there have been over 21,000 other visits from New Zealand this month.

“When it was discussed about the idea of a merger” continues Ikilei “or at least the model that was put forward, we politely declined.” The New Conservative Party believes joining with the New Zealand Public Party would have resulted in them doing most of the work, but Billy Te Kahika getting the publicity. This episode of the show is sponsored, somewhat ironically, by The New Zealand Public Party, who seem to know where to find a receptive audience.

Te Kahika: a polarising figure

Aside from petty sectarianism and clashing egos, a significant divide on the populist fringe is race. To some Pākehā social media personalities Billy Te Kahika appeared to come out of nowhere with a large following, but conspiratorial ideas have been gaining a foothold among Māori for some time. That a Māori populist leader would emerge parallel to but independent from the likes of New Conservative, who favour abolishing the Māori seats in parliament and call institutional racism a “well debunked myth”[40] is not wholly surprising.

“Amid this pandemic, the conspiracy theories are like a virus on social media…Māori are really susceptible, it seems to me, to these kinds of really bad information and fake news” That was how Bay of Plenty regional councillor Toi Iti put it in a livestreamed korero with Waiariki MP Tamati Coffey in April. “It’s driving me crazy, is it driving you crazy Tamati?”

“It is driving me crazy” replied Coffey “it’s driving me crazy, in fact I was asked about it this morning, the whole 5G thing…I don’t believe in chemtrails, but I know plenty of my whānau that have brought into it, and subscribe to the Facebook pages and get updates regularly.”[41]

Karaitiana Taiuru, a Māori cultural adviser in the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) area, and a doctoral student at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, told The Spinoff that Māori communities are vulnerable to believing these kinds of ideas because of widespread, generational mistrust in the government.[42]

For Terry Opines, a far-right YouTuber who is supporting the New Conservatives, Te Kahika’s connection to te ao Māori is a big red flag:

I want some real questions answered, like who’s funding him, is he being funded by Iwi? And why is he so closely associated with Mark Solomon? The former leader of Ngai Tahu, is he funding him? and given the fact that his business interests have focused explicitly on Māori interests as opposed to New Zealanders in general we must ask this question, is he a separatist?

These questions were asked in one of what are now several exposé style videos on Te Kahika. [43]

Lee Williams, the man behind another local far-right YouTube channel; ‘Cross The Rubicon’ spoke of the backlash he received for sharing Opines’ video “I got a backlash for backing up Terry’s video and sharing Terry’s video…a lot of people got on to me calling me a racist, racist against Māori – and some of these people have been my subscribers in the past”.[44]

Williams has posted numerous videos where he scaremongers about immigration, particularly of Muslims. He was visited twice by police following the attacks on Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic centre, and has used that incident to further his popularity on YouTube, today he has over 13,000 subscribers. The Māori share of that audience were evidently on board when he spoke about foreigners, but have now changed their opinion of him.

“I’m getting so much push back from my last video with concerns of Billy TK’s NZPP.” Williams wrote in a text post on YouTube. “Some real venom showed here calling me racist and Māori hater. It’s like I’ve asked questions of someone from the left, and the cultural Marxists have come out to do what they do.”[45]

Where next for the populist right?

Williams reneged on his opposition to Te Kahika after meeting with him at his motel room in Christchurch. On the 15th of July he posted a video titled “For the greater good of this nation we should join together”:

For the greater good of New Zealand sacrifices have to be made by the leaders of the smaller parties [he wrote in the description]… Put your differences, and egos aside to be stronger as one United force. The most important thing now, with two months to go to the election is getting this UN, CCP, WHO, Soros, Gates backed puppet out of power. Jacinda has to go![46]

William’s rhetoric is detached from reality, as the combined vote for these five parties is at best 2%, but commenters on his video turn the detachment dial up to 11: “Māori and European nationalists must join to defeat the radical left who will destroy New Zealand’s traditions and way of life…2020 is the most important election NZ has ever faced.”

On July 26, Billy Te Kahika announced an alliance with Jami-Lee Ross, parliament’s only independent MP. Ross was elected on the National Party ticket and is expected not to retain his electorate seat. Te Kahika will stand in the Māori electorate of Te Tai Tokerau, where his Christian ministry is based. A win is unlikely but not necessarily impossible.

Ross told media that the goal was to form a “centrist version” of the Alliance, a left-of-Labour grouping that existed in the 1990s and 2000s. The New Conservatives and the Outdoors Party reiterated their disinterest in this idea. Geoff Simmons from the Opportunities Party, a populist party that unlike the aforementioned could fairly be called centrist, was even less keen: “no way would I ever stand on a stage and shake hands with those snake oil salesmen.” he told The Spinoff.[47]

Social Credit, who were part of the original Alliance, have been approached, as has the Heartland New Zealand Party led by former Franklin District mayor Mark Ball. Vision New Zealand appear to have burnt their bridges. Even if some sort of alliance is cobbled together in the weeks leading up to the election, it looks like there will be multiple parties competing for the same target audience of right leaning conspiracy theorists.

Most voters will go to the polls and wonder who all these parties are. Those who sympathise with these group’s views will make a decision as to which one will get their tick, or in some cases cast a vote for National or ACT out of concern a minor party vote would be ineffective.

By the time the 2023 election rolls around, it’s unlikely the exact same parties will be there. Conservative Christianity has always had a small political presence in New Zealand, so it’s probable that at least one party will be around to represent those voters. With the decline of New Zealand First, the traditional choice for voters motivated by xenophobia, it’s possible New Conservative could fill that niche – perhaps while also being the choice for Christian fundamentalist voters.

Diewue de Boer, who straddles both those demographics, has indicated he is in this for the long haul. “I hope to learn lots from this campaign season, contribute as much as I can, and look forward to being part of conservative politics in the coming decades” he wrote in the introduction to his speech at the New Conservative campaign launch.[48]

As social media platforms do more to prevent the spread of misinformation – Twitter recently removed 7,000 accounts associated with the Qanon conspiracy, for example[49] – the growth of these movements will slow. Research has shown that as a tactic to limit the spread of disinformation, deplatforming works.[50] Nonetheless, conspiracy theories and far-right beliefs existed prior to the rise of social media, so deplatforming won’t make them disappear entirely. Applying a false information label to content shared by the New Conservatives (as Facebook did last April) might deter a few potential supporters, but not those already convinced that fact-checking is part of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

The hard-right in New Zealand is inspired and motivated by events overseas: Brexit in the UK, the election of Donald Trump in the US and the success of various ideologically similar parties in Europe – Hungary in particular- so to some extent what happens in this country will depend on what happens elsewhere.

The perfect storm of factors that led to five different right-wing populist parties – or even more, depending on how loosely one defines right-wing populist – gaining enough members to be on the ballot (even if only the largest of them managed to register in polls) is likely to be confined to 2020, but the views these groups espouse will continue to be a part of New Zealand’s political landscape. The question is whether they will return to the margins, or inch closer to the mainstream. Dr M. R. X. Dentith, a philosopher and conspiracy theory expert, told Newsroom that we shouldn’t ignore these movements because of their small size.

Part of the problem with the growth of the alt-right in Europe and the US, for a long period of time we said these people are minor parts of the population, they’re always going to be around, but they’re not particularly big and they’re not particularly popular. We can ignore them in political debates…

And that allowed them to grow in the background with no one paying any attention to them to the point where they actually emerged as a big problem. Actually, if we had dealt with this years ago, this wouldn’t be an issue now.[51]

[1]              https://fightback.org.nz/2020/06/12/how-the-far-right-found-a-home-in-the-new-conservative-party/

[2]              https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/shows/2020/07/new-conservatives-defend-western-culture-as-greatest-in-the-world-warn-nz-sliding-toward-socialism.html

[3]              https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111387889/radical-losers-and-lone-wolves-what-drives-the-altright

[4]              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUwlWlRQzeU

[5]              https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/31-12-2019/summer-reissue-the-furious-world-of-new-zealands-far-right-nationalists/; https://www.politico.eu/article/united-nations-migration-pact-how-got-trolled/

[6]              https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/emotional-junior-staffer-national-worker-who-deleted-petition-not-so-junior

[7]              https://fightback.org.nz/2019/08/23/a-report-from-the-new-conservative-meeting-in-christchurch/

[8]              https://www.newconservative.org.nz/welfare-policy

[9]              https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin/23-05-2019/the-bulletin-christian-and-conservative-party-field-gets-crowded

[10]             https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/05/hannah-tamaki-calls-for-97-percent-immigration-cut.html

[11]             https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/10/hannah-tamaki-wants-to-pay-refugees-not-to-come-to-new-zealand.html

[12]             https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/11/hannah-tamaki-s-vision-nz-says-it-will-ban-the-construction-of-mosques-temples-and-other-foreign-buildings.html

[13]             https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12241008

[14]             https://oneparty.net/faq/

[15]             https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503450&objectid=12340560

[16]             https://oneparty.net/priorities/immigration/

[17]             https://oneparty.net/priorities/israel/

[18]             https://www.newconservative.org.nz/nz-israel-position-statement

[19]             https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/18-08-2020/a-revelation-in-marton-the-spinoff-meets-new-zealands-newest-christian-party/

[20]             https://www.facebook.com/NewConservativeNZ/posts/2368235069919483?
comment_id=2368617633214560

[21]             https://www.facebook.com/NewConservativeNZ/posts/2368235069919483?
comment_id=2368640313212292

[22]             https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/11-01-2020/outdoors-party-reckons-it-can-ride-an-anti-1080-wave-to-parliament-in-2020/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080_usage_in_New_Zealand

[23]             https://www.outdoorsparty.co.nz/nz-outdoors-party-policy-on-5g/

[24]             https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/18-05-2020/how-5g-and-covid-19-mixed-to-make-a-toxic-conspiracy-cocktail/

[25]             https://suegrey.co.nz/index.php/2020/05/18/cell-towers-burning-off-democracy/

[26]             https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/its-okay-to-be-white

[27]             https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/06/race-relations-commissioner-blasts-appalling-racist-abuse-towards-young-woman-at-outdoors-party-rally.html

[28]             https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO2003/S00246/former-rugby-ceo-david-moffett-joins-the-nz-outdoors-party-as-executive-director.htm

[29]             https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/110099964/former-nz-rugby-boss-david-moffett-now-tackling-populist-politics

[30]             https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12339908

[31]             https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_TK

[32]             https://www.waateanews.com/waateanews/x_news/MjQ5NjI/Paakiwaha/COVID-19-gives-Billy-TK-the-UN-red-flag-blues

[33]             https://www.splcenter.org/20140331/agenda-21-un-sustainability-and-right-wing-conspiracy-theory

[34]             https://www.nzpublicparty.org.nz/un-agenda-21-and-agenda-2030

[35]             https://bit.ly/32HVYnM

[36]             https://www.waateanews.com/waateanews/x_news/MjUwMTc/Public-Party-praying-for-electoral-lifeline

[37]             https://www.facebook.com/nzoutdoorsparty/posts/3390632597661581

[38]             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyL0jLqvskY

[39]             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGlnVrwtkuI

[40]             https://www.facebook.com/NewConservativeNZ/photos/a.552878204788521/3080786001997716/

[41]             https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=553179278654470

[42]             https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/14-07-2020/why-Māori-communities-are-more-vulnerable-to-5g-conspiracies/

[43]             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L113FB319_o

[44]             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yoMxSs3oVQ

[45]             https://www.youtube.com/post/UgynPk8_11oi5CJD3JF4AaABCQ

[46]             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTfiPO0mQNQ

[47]             https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/26-07-2020/jami-lee-ross-billy-te-kahika-and-the-rebel-alliance-of-election-2020/

[48]             https://www.rightminds.nz/articles/doing-what-works-my-speech-new-conservative-2020-campaign-launch

[49]             https://www.euronews.com/2020/07/22/qanon-twitter-bans-7-000-accounts-linked-to-conspiracy-theory-group-thecube

[50]             https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2019/10/04/deplatforming-works-lets-get-on-with-it/

[51]             https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/26-07-2020/jami-lee-ross-billy-te-kahika-and-the-rebel-alliance-of-election-2020/

Filed Under: Electoral Politics, Far Right / Fascism

How the far-right found a home in the New Conservative Party

June 12, 2020 by

by BYRON CLARK

Candidates | newconservative

“We’ve got some awesome candidates that are stepping up for us,” announces New Conservative Party deputy leader Elliot Ikilei in a video posted to their Facebook page on March 27, 2020. “This is going to be one person over here. Now he is a little bit over there, a little bit over to the far-right…” (Ikilei moves to his left.) “So here we are, and this is a great man, this is a man who many of you will know, and we are so excited to have him on board! Now I’m just going to give it over to him. Sir! What is your name, and tell us a little about yourself?”

“My name is Dieuwe de Boer, and I am a candidate for the New Conservative Party.” announces de Boer. “I’m rather infamous at this point, for my conservative political commentary,” he says to giggles from Ikilei. The joke about de Boer’s infamy, and the earlier double entendre about his location on the far-right, is in reference to an article published by RNZ in January which described him as a “far-right activist”, when reporting on a police raid of his home over a suspected illegal firearm.

Not everyone saw the humour in that headline. Max Shierlaw complained to the Media Council about the use of the term “far-right”. He noted that de Boer was a Christian, a conservative, and a family man who supports gun ownership; these things did not, in Shierlaw’s opinion, make him a “far-right activist”, a term he argued was more properly used for neo-Nazis and racists, which de Boer is not. The Media Council did not uphold the complaint, noting in their response:

It is RNZ’s view that Mr de Boer’s statements put him somewhere on the far-right continuum and the Council agrees that, while ‘far-right’ is an inexact term, it was not an unreasonable description. While not everyone who opposes immigration has far-right views, Mr de Boer has also been openly critical of Islam, saying it was ‘fundamentally incompatible with western values and culture’, has expressed support for nationalism and had supported visiting speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, whose views have consistently been described as far-right. It was also telling that Mr de Boer himself had been quoted as saying that ‘far right’ might not be a bad description of his views.

“All of that makes far-right a rather meaningless and harmless slur.” commented de Boer in an article on his Right Minds website. He’s not necessarily wrong; the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish NGO based in the United States which combats anti-Semitism and other forms of hate, describes the term as “more vague than extreme right or radical right”, the terms they use to describe violent hate groups that exist outside of mainstream conservatism.

While begrudgingly accepting that the far-right label is going to stick, in that same article de Boer announces that his barrister had issued a cease and desist letter for what he describes as “a series of libellous tweets” about him, including one noting that he “regularly appears on Australian hate-monger Tim ‘Pinochet did nothing wrong’ Wilms’s podcast”. Dieuwe de Boer is indeed a regular guest on the podcast in question, The Unshackled, appearing in a weekly “trans-Tasman talk” segment. The slogan quoted in the tweet, “Pinochet did nothing wrong” is one that appears on a t-shirt that Wilms has worn in YouTube videos.

Augusto Pinochet was military dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990, and is known for his  persecution of leftists, socialists, and other political critics. In particular his regime is remembered for death flights, a method of extrajudicial killing where dissidents were thrown to their deaths from helicopters. The phrase “free helicopter rides” has become a meme on the alt-right, a dog whistle to those who know the meaning, and a seemingly nonsensical joke to those who don’t.

Wilms’ t-shirt belays another meme to those in the know: the letters RWDS printed across the sleeve stand for Right-Wing Death Squads. While originally coined to describe paramilitaries in Colombia in the 1980’s, the term has been adopted by the modern alt-right. Searching for the phrase will bring up a SoundCloud track by that name featuring a picture of an armed man in silhouette in front of a Black Sun, the symbol featured on the cover of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. One SoundCloud user comments: “Remember lads: Subscribe to PewDiePie”, quoting the shooter’s livestream and echoing another meme appropriated by the alt-right.

Of course, there are several degrees of separation between de Boer and these commenters; he can easily distance himself from them, and even from Wilms. “I am not responsible for Tim’s wardrobe.” he writes, before going on to say, “Tim’s views are generally not too different from mine”.

The Right-Wing Death Squads meme is noted in another of de Boer’s articles. Reporting on a protest he attended in Auckland’s Aotea Square where the right clashed with anti-fascist activists, he writes:

On our side there was someone in a t-shirt that said “Right Wing Death Squad” with a helicopter on it. No one on the other side knew the meaning of the joke, and it is unlikely that everyone reading this would get the joke too, which is why I think it is a terrible one.

He notes that this protestor can’t be labelled a white supremacist because while he would occasionally “yell something in German and talk about physical removal of leftists”, he was ethnically Chinese.

The Unshackled podcast and YouTube channel was previously a joint effort between Wilms and Sydney man Sukith Fernando, but Fernando was dropped from the project after it became widely known he was a Holocaust denier following an article published by Honi Soit, the student paper at the University of Sydney where Fernando was studying at the time. Fernando repeatedly claimed that he “didn’t know” whether the Holocaust happened when confronted by liberal students on campus. He had been part of a ‘Holocaust Revisionism’ Facebook group and had commented “Wow Hitler really did nothing wrong” under a video questioning the holocaust that was posted on his page.

The Unshackled has on numerous occasions provided a platform for one of Australia’s most notorious far-right extremists, Blair Cottrell. Cottrell is the founder of the United Patriots Front (UPF), and later the Lads Society. As reported by ABC News, the man who perpetrated mass shootings at two Christchurch mosques in March 2019 had been an admirer of Cottrell, frequently commenting on his Facebook live streams, referring to him as “Emperor” and donating to the UPF.

Tom Sewell, president of the Lads Society, had – prior to the shooting – tried to recruit the man who was later to perpetrate the Christchurch mass shooting to join a group looking to create a society of only white people. The man, who at this point was about to move to New Zealand, declined. “The difference between my organisation, myself and [the shooter], is simply that we believe, certainly at this stage, that there is a peaceful solution for us to create the society we want to live in,” Sewell told Newshub“If we are not given that opportunity, well, time will tell. I’m not going to give you any explicit threat but it’s pretty fucking obvious what’s going to happen.”

Again, de Boer maintains a degree of separation from these figures, but he has spoken openly about the overlap between the content of the Christchurch mass shooter’s manifesto and his movement. “The overlapping views obviously are that we favour nationalism and have an opposition to the United Nations,” de Boer told Stuff. “We want stronger controls on immigration. We haven’t talked much about replacement, but I would definitely highlight that Western nations in general have low birth rates.”

And highlight those birth rates he has. A 2017 article on Right Mindsis headed with a line graph showing the declining birth rate in New Zealand since the 1960s. Despite saying that Right Minds haven’t talked much about replacement, this article heavily implies that something akin to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, after which the Christchurch mass shooter named his manifesto, is going on. “Every single one of our childless liberal leaders wants to import more immigrants to be the children they don’t have” writes de Boer. “Perhaps these parties should remove their gender quotas, official or otherwise, and replace them with some offspring quotas.”

Coming into the New Conservative fold

Initially de Boer was less than enthusiastic about the New Conservatives. In a June 2018 article he describes them as “boring” and lambasts them as “more green than the Greens” for missing an opportunity “to stand out here to and straight up call out the global warming lie”. In reference to an income splitting policy he asks rhetorically “does that mean a Muslim man can split income between all four of his wives and pay no tax?”, and concludes that the party has “run-of-the-mill socialist policies, much like every mainstream party in New Zealand.” By eighteen months later he had completely changed his attitude.

I got a message from deputy leader Elliot Ikilei, who told me that he had read my critically dismissive review, he thought I had some good points, and he wanted to meet up to talk about it. That one simple olive branch changed my life and I know he’s extended many more like it to others. Perhaps enough to alter the course of this nation.

Rather than ignoring the fringe blogging of a young man who said his party was not pushing climate change denial hard enough while dismissing every mainstream party as “socialist” and throwing in some barely hidden Islamophobia, Ikilei had specifically sought out de Boer. It may be that the politics of New Conservative are not as different from Right Minds as de Boer originally thought. His article endorsing the party praises Ikilei for saying that western culture is superior to all other cultures: “That’s a line you won’t hear from any politician”.

Other figures from New Zealand’s far-right have also been drawn to the New Conservatives. Canterbury man Lee Williams, whose YouTube channel boasts over twelve thousand subscribers, posted a video on July 19th 2019  calling for the small “right of centre” parties opposed to the United Nations Compact on Safe Orderly and Regular Migration (commonly known as the UN Migration Pact) to unite together. Underneath the video, one commenter writes: “A party has been formed”, “New Conservative Party (NZ) Good people here. Check it out.” Williams replies, “I’m in touch with Elliot”.

A few weeks later, he was in Auckland to speak at a Free Speech rally, along with Elliot Ikilei and others. Speakers were introduced by Dieuwe de Boer. In his speech, Williams begins “Well here we are, the white supremacists of New Zealand, according to Patrick Gower and the lying New Zealand mainstream media!”, eliciting laughter from the crowd.

Williams is referencing a Newshub piece that reported on members of the far-right attending a protest against the UN Migration Pact in Christchurch. Newshub reports that at that rally the notorious while supremacist Phillip Arps had called for Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters to be hanged. Arps has served a prison sentence for sharing the livestream video of the mass shooting at Al Noor Masjid, and had left pigs’ heads at the same mosque in 2016.

Williams was not mentioned in the piece, but has reason to gripe about the story. He was the one speaking at the rally when Arps, who had been standing beside him waving a New Zealand flag, yelled out “Hang him! Publicly hang him!” when Williams mentions Peters. In his speech, Williams states that “Europe and its people are being replaced”, referencing the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, a phrase that New Zealanders would become familiar with a few weeks after that rally when it was used as the title of the Christchurch mass shooter’s manifesto.

It’s likely that the content of that speech, and other videos such as one uploaded two weeks later where Williams claims “these [Muslim] wives are just knocking out babies with baby factories, you know, and vastly outnumbered the birth-rate of native populations – this is in every country in Western Europe”, were the impetus for police visiting him on two occasions after the Christchurch shooting.

After attending a public meeting in Christchurch in August, Williams made a video announcing his endorsement of the New Conservatives.

Anybody who’s informed and they watch what’s happening in Western Europe and they know what’s happened in the United States with the Democrats, Donald Trump if you – if you support Donald Trump, if you’re on one of the secret supporters of New Zealand then I would say you’d probably like New Conservatives. If you’re pro-Brexit, if you’re pro-freedom of speech, if you’re anti-mass migration, anti-United Nations Global Compact on migration, then the New Conservatives is for you.

When a commenter asks if the New Conservatives are “of a similar persuasion to A-M Waters and the ‘For Britain’ party in [the] UK?”’ Williams replies: “yes similar”. The For Britain Party was founded by the anti-Islam activist Anne-Marie Waters after she was defeated in the UK Independence Party leadership election in 2017. Their platform includes reducing Muslim immigration to the UK to near zero.

The New Conservatives have a zero net migration policy that doesn’t single out any particular ethnic group or religion. But the comments from their Botany candidate are not the only time the party has been associated themselves with that kind of ideology. On April 2nd 2019, the New Conservative Facebook page shared a video promoting Douglas Murray’s 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam,describing it as “a powerful understanding as to why our culture is suffering,” and noted: “We absolutely agree.” The book claims that Europe is under threat from Muslim immigration and higher birth rates, and is popular on the far-right.

Much like Ikilei’s olive branch to de Boer, the party didn’t ignore the endorsement of a fringe YouTube personality who believes – among other things – that the United Nations is run by an “unholy alliance” of Islam and “cultural Marxists”, and that there is a deliberate plot to emasculate western men to weaken white majority countries. Instead, they shared Williams’ video on their Facebook page with the comment: “we are so humbled and encouraged to see critical thinkers jumping onboard.”

In a video uploaded to his channel in September 2019, Williams and an unnamed friend, who also attended that same meeting in August, call on people to vote for the New Conservatives, describing them as “the closest we’ve got to a Salvini or a Viktor Orbán”, referring to far-right politicians in Italy and Hungary. Lee Williams is wrong about a lot of things, but in that instance, he’s probably correct.

Filed Under: Elections, Electoral Politics, Far Right / Fascism, Racism
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