Are refugees from 'Obamanation' heading downunder?

Near the end of Michael Mann's Heat, the best movie to come out of Hollywood in the nineties, the jaded bank robber played by Robert De Niro urges his sweetheart to leave Los Angeles behind and emigrate with him to New Zealand. For De Niro's disillusioned villain, New Zealand is a distant paradise where the sirens and gunshots of America can be forgotten.

In the aftermath of last week's presidential election, some Republicans are also fantasising about making new lives in New Zealand. As I  noted last week, many right-wing Americans were confident that Mitt Romney would thrash Barack Obama, despite a long series of opinion polls which suggested that the Democrats' man was on track win four more years in the White House. Now that Romney has gone down to defeat, the mood on many Republican blogs and messageboards has turned apocalyptic. A few bloggers have claimed, on the scantiest evidence, that Obama 'stole' the election through ballot-stuffing or some more high-tech form of trickery; others have blamed the result on demographic changes with have made 'takers' like African Americans, Hispanics, and young people into a majority of the population, and rendered the 'makers' who support the Republican Party powerless.

For most relatively detached observers, Obama is a moderate social democrat who has, like Franklin D Roosevelt in the thirties and Jimmy Carter in the seventies, used Keynesian measures like quantitative easing to try to deal with an economic crisis created by his predecessors. For many on the right of Republican Party, though, he is an Islamo-communist who is well on his way to destroying America. Warning of the sharia law, nationalisation of all property, and slaughter of whites which are coming, many right-wingers have talked of fleeing the 'Obamanation' that their beloved homeland homeland has become for some remote arcadia.

Although it was produced before the election, an article at a site called Activist Post  about the five best sanctuaries for refugees from America has been circulated widely over the last week by distraught Republicans. Activist Post ranks New Zealand as the world's third most desirable bolthole, after Uruguay and Costa Rica but before Argentina and Iceland. According to the Post, New Zealand 'might be the most isolated fully developed nation in the world', and boasts both 'friendly people' and 'many remote places to hide away'.

Activist Post hints that American refugees might like to make homes in one of New Zealand's 'smaller islands', like 'the Cook Islands or Chatham Island'. I can't see the Cook Islanders being happy at once again being made subjects of Wellington, and I wonder whether the perennial Antarctic winds and extraordinarily tangled local politics of the Chathams might make even the most fervent Obamaphobe long for the good old US of A.

If angry Republicans do head our way, they won't be the first group of American refugees to seek sanctuary in the Pacific. When the Civil War ended with the liberation of slaves and the break-up of many big plantations in 1865, diehard Confederates tried to recreate their old lifestyle in other parts of the world. Thousands of Dixielanders tried to gouge colonies out of Mexico and Brazil, but others headed for the South Pacific, and began growing crops like sugar, cotton, and coffee in places like Fiji and Queensland.

In his fascinating but depressing book called The White Pacific, the African American scholar Gerald Horne shows how the Confederates brought their old racial attitudes with them when they fled to the Pacific. In Fiji, they put locals to work as virtual slaves on their plantations, and formed a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to destabilise the government of the indigenous King Cakobau. The Klan's violent rhetoric and actions won it wide support from Fiji's white community, until Cakobau decided in 1873 to accept British sovereignty rather than risk Confederate hegemony.

Both Confederate and Yankee war veterans settled in small numbers in New Zealand. The great Kiwi poet Kendrick Smithyman remembered a couple of old men from opposite sides of the war who saw out their days at the retirement home his parents managed in the small Northland town of Te Kopuru. Whenever the two veterans ran into each other in the hall they would shout ancient insults and begin fencing with their canes.

In the twentieth century American refugees to the South Pacific tended to espouse left-wing rather than conservative politics. Back in 2008 I blogged about Robert Ford, the Spanish Civil War veteran and nephew of the famous film-maker John Ford who came here in the fifties to escape Joseph McCarthy's anti-reds crusade. In the sixties other Americans preferred a few years in New Zealand to a tour of Vietnam.

In its coverage of America's election, the Guardian found the time to mention the many Republicans talking about resettling in New Zealand. Britain's favourite liberal newspaper quoted a Kiwi tweeter called Ali Ikram, who doubted whether Republicans would feel at home downunder:

4 Republicans moving 2 New Zealand here Romney is a sheep breed, we haven't had a revolution yet & The White House is a strip bar 

I can think of a few additional reasons why refugees from 'Obamanation' who wash up in New Zealand may be disappointed with their new home. Our healthcare system is considerably more statist than anything envisaged by Obama, our gun laws are relatively strict, our political representatives do not, with the exception of John Banks, take the Book of Genesis literally, and our premier summer game is, let's face it, a lot slower and more complicated than baseball. Perhaps those would-be refugees should think their decision over for four years or so?

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Grounded at Ardmore

We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world...We will sing the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag...we will put an end to the seemingly indomitable hostility that separates our human flesh from the metal of engines. After the animal kingdom, the mechanical kingdom begins! 

- from The Futurist Manifesto, 1909, and an additional statement by Marinetti, 1912

That ordinary midweek Ardmore winter night,
air-to-air combat film, all camera gun stuff,
no sound of course, no commentary,
just one clip spliced on to another,
Name of pilot, date, Type of (target) aircraft.
Poor quality film, visibility impaired.
When fire was opened synchronised camera jumped
spastically. studio simulation does the job 
much better.
                   An ME 109 came into sight,
pursued through evasive tactics making use
of cloud. He knew he’d someone on his tail
before the screen began to jump,
ranging bursts.
                        In cloud, and out, swung
then pulled back climbing on a curve
off-screen. Which steadied, like a postulate.
Held, a moment long enough, you felt
a prediction coming true, it came
from top right headed lower left,
dead on course to centre screen
which jumped again, erupted. That was
all.
     People talk about inevitability
of the work of art. This was
inevitable, purpose purely stated,
then complete. A kinetic art,
like ballet? Language as gesture?
                                                  That night
the huntsman, not aware beforehand, was
in the audience. He had to take a lot of barracking.
"Come on," he protested, "lay off, eh. It’s a bit 
blush-making, isn’t it? It’s not like rhubarb."
Rhubarb was then a technical term.

- from Kendrick Smithyman's 'Silent Movies'

Can the Republicans accept defeat?

Opinion polls suggest that today's American presidential election will be settled by a narrow margin. According to the great majority of pollsters, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are set to win similar shares of the popular vote, but Obama is likely to prevail in enough states to secure a majority of electoral college votes and book another four years in the White House.

Given the tightness of the race for President, it is understandable that Democrats and Republicans are both predicting that their man will win today. Opinion polls are not infallible, as John Kerry learned when George Bush beat him in 2004.

What is surprising is not Republican optimism about today's result, but the sheer scale of the victory that many of Romney's supporters expect. On the right of the Republican Party, especially, pundits and grassroots activists alike have been predicting that Romney will win by a landslide.

According to conservative pundit Michael Berone, Obama will take a thumping, as Romney prevails even in traditionally Democratic states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Romney needs 270 electoral college votes to win the keys to the White House; Berone expects him to score 315. Dick Morris, a former adviser to Bill Clinton who has drifted rightwards over the last decade, is even more optimistic. He predicts that Romney will take 325 electoral college votes, 'in the biggest surprise in recent American history'.

Over at Pajamas Media, a sort of watering hole for right-wing bloggers, almost everyone seems to expect a blow-out win for Romney, and some commenters are predicting that Obama will lose all but a handful of east and west coast states. If the Republican pundits and activists are correct, then an awful lot of opinion polls must be wrong.

On the rare occasions when they have considered the possibility of an Obama victory, right-wing pundits have insisted that such an outcome could only be the result of a massive, coordinated campaign of fraud by the Democratic Party and other sinister forces. Conspiracy theorists already accuse Obama's team of putting corpses on electoral rolls, taking billions in secret donations from foreign regimes, and planning to bus Mexicans across the border to polling booths.

To understand the gap between electoral reality and Republican expectations, we have to consider the ideological bunker the American right has built for itself in the Obama era. For the last five years Republicans have accused Obama of being at odds, both personally and politically, with the great majority of the American people. Obama's cosmopolitan background, academic experience, and popularity in 'socialist' Europe have all been cited as evidence of his 'anti-American' character. Mildly social democratic policies like Obamacare, quantitative easing and the bailout of General Motors are said to reflect the President's alien heritage and affinities.

Grassroots Republican groups have insisted that Americans voted for Obama out of ignorance in 2008, and that now that they understand his anti-American nature they will reject him decisively. The right believes that Obama's only reliable long-term support comes from 'minority' groups which are themselves at odds with mainstream American culture and values - groups like intellectuals, liberals, feminists, illegal immigrants, gays, Muslims, and racially obsessed African Americans.

Because they have equated their ideology with mainstream America, it is very hard for the Republican right to appreciate that Obama retains considerable support across their country. If they acknowledged that half of Americans still back Obama, then right-wingers would have to recognise that their own political programme, with its emphasis on moral conservatism and economic liberalism, is increasingly unpopular. Bans on abortion, the teaching of Creationism in schools, and tax cuts for the wealthy are hardly winning policies in an increasingly diverse country stricken by unemployment and a declining manufacturing sector.

 It is interesting to compare the attitude of right-wing Republicans to Obama with the response of left-leaning Democrats to George Bush junior. When Bush won the 2004 election, many Democratic activists reacted not by denying the result, but by pondering the nature of the American electorate. In an influential book called What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank argued that cultural conservatism had led many white working class Americans to defy their economic interests and vote for Bush.

Democratic activists have generally been able to acknowledge and analyse electoral defeats because they are not committed to equating their politics with the culture and values of the American majority. The Republican right, by contrast, has become convinced that its ideas are identical with those of mainstream America, and that its political opponents are inherently anti-American.

If Obama wins today's election, then the Republican right will face the choice of either acknowledging reality, or else hunkering down in the ideological bunker it has built over the past five years. It is likely that many Republicans will convince themselves that Obama stole the election from their candidate. A large minority of Americans will consider a democratically elected President an illegitimate usurper. The delusions of the Republican Party do not bode well for democracy.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Alternate histories

When I was thirteen I discovered The Warlord of the Air, the first of three novels in which Michael Moorcock recorded the adventures of Captain Oswald Bastable, an Edwardian Englishman who is blessed or cursed by the ability to move through alternative versions of the twentieth century.

In the first Bastable novel, which reads like a half-affectionate, half-scornful pastiche of one of Rudyard Kipling or John Buchan's fin de siecle romances, the good captain is sent by his superiors to investigate Kumbalari, an ancient civilisation tucked away in a conveniently remote Himalayan valley. Bastable enters Teku Benga, the capital of Kumbalari, where 'crazy spires and domes' mock 'the very laws of gravity', becomes lost in a vast building called The Temple of the Future Buddha, whose dark walls are covered with ugly gargoyles, and is thrown into the future. Bastable ends up in 1973, but his version of the seventies is very different from the one we remember. European empires still cover much of the globe, airships rather than airplanes ply the skies, Winston Churchill is best-known as a former viceroy of India, and Mick Jagger is a well-groomed officer in the British colonial service.

In the two sequels to The Warlord of the Air Bastable visits further alternate versions of the twentieth century. In one version of the future Bastable discovers that the Confederacy won the American Civil War; horrified to see slavery thriving in the 1970s, he joins an invasion of America by a technologically superior African Empire. In an another version of the seventies Bastable encounters Stalin, who has become Tsar of Russia and is about to launch a nuclear war against the rest of the world.

Oswald Bastable helped create a fashion for alternate histories amongst novelists. Over the past decade or so the interest in alternative history has spread to academia and to the mass media.

It is tempting to see a correlation between the popularity of alternate histories and the near-absence of utopian literature in the twenty-first century. A century or so ago the utopian tract was a thriving part of Western literature. Socialists, atheists, religious zealots, suffragettes, prohibitionists, anti-imperialists, and ultra-imperialists all flocked to the genre, and novelists like HG Wells and Jules Verne found bestsellers there.

The utopianism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the confidence of an era when economic expansion and new technologies seemed like they might liberate humanity from want and injustice, if only they were administered according to the tenets of this or that -ism. In the twenty-first century such hopes seem naive to many of us. Rather than look forward to a glorious future, we seem increasingly inclined to look back at opportunities lost and dangers ignored.

In a piece for the London Review of Books, Slavoj Zizek argues that alternate histories are especially popular amongst right-wingers, who like to fantasise about shooting Lenin at the Finland Station, or giving the American Civil War to the South, or letting Charles I keep not only his head but his crown. Zizek insists that the left as well as the right should be interested in alternative history. Denouncing determinist views of change as 'dreary', he argues that left-wing revolutionaries like Lenin have been aware of the necessity of taking daring actions to force history onto a new course.

Both Zizek the Leninist and the would-be assassins of Lenin seem to assume that, once its course is determined, history is something homogenous. Like Aristotle and Hegel, they see history as a stream that flows steadily in one direction, without eddies or countercurrents or forking channels. Once an historical epoch has been inaugurated by a dramatic event like Lenin's arrival at Finland Station, this epoch characterises the whole world. Such a view is unfortunate, because it ignores the different ways that time and history are experienced in different societies, and the inevitable existence of exceptions to every historical trend.

I've argued that the Tongan past is important, because it offers us an exception to a very big and bad historical trend. Unlike every other Polynesian society and the great majority of southern hemisphere societies, Tonga was never colonised by a northern hemisphere power in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. To study Tonga, then, is to study a real-life alternate history. A friend recently asked me why I was taking a job in Tonga, rather than looking for work in New Zealand or some larger, wealthier nation. He looked slightly bemused as I tried to explain that, whenever I step off the plane onto the tarmac of Fua'amotu airport, I feel like Oswald Bastable stepping into an alternative reality.

Over the last week or so I've been creating some papers to teach next year at Tonga's 'Atenisi Institute.
I've decided not to try to teach this particular paper, because it seems too detailed for an undergraduate course in sociology. Perhaps somebody would like to steal it, improve it, and offer it to a few Masters students back in New Zealand?

ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NEW ZEALAND AND TONGA 

Many young Tongans spend years in New Zealand studying or working, or both, but few arrive with much knowledge of the society that will become their second home. For their part, too many Pakeha New Zealanders regard Tonga as little more than an occasional rugby opponent and a possible destination for a cheap holiday.

Because Tonga and New Zealand are societies with strong similarities amidst strong differences, and because they have histories which mix similarities and differences, they are ideal for comparative study.

1. Aotearoa and Tonga: same origins, different paths 

Tonga and Aotearoa were both settled by Polynesian peoples. Despite the similar cultures of their founders, though, the two societies followed very different paths. Tonga developed over millennia into a highly stratified society, with some of the institutions of a state and with colonies in neighbouring lands like Samoa and 'Ouvea. Maori society, by contrast, was fragmented and relatively egalitarian. There was no larger social unit than the iwi, and iwi fought amongst each other regularly.

Using Patrick Vinton Kirch's acclaimed general theory of Polynesian history as well as the detailed investigations of archaeologists like David Burley and Dennis Sutton in Tonga and New Zealand, we will seek to understand why such different societies could have developed in pre-contact Tonga and pre-contact Aotearoa.

2. Losers and keepers: Aotearoa and Tonga in the nineteenth century 

Tonga's unique record as the only Polynesian society to avoid colonisation makes it a window through which we can see an alternative history of the Pacific. Tonga's Tupou I was, after all, only one of a clutch of leaders who tried to defeat the designs of European and American imperialists by building a strong modern society on Polynesia foundations. In Aotearoa, King Tawhiao created a thriving nation in the central regions of Te Ika a Maui, but was unable to unify Maoridom, which lacked Tonga's history of political unity, and was defeated in the Waikato War of 1863-65. Later attempts to create an independent Maori state, like the Parihaka movement in Taranaki, were also crushed.

Looking at narratives of nineteenth century Tonga by Ian Campbell and Sione Latukefu, and accounts of New Zealand history of the same period by the likes of James Belich, we will try to discover why  Tonga remained independent when Maori protonations like the Waikato Kingdom suffered colonisation.

3. Different roads to the future: modernisation in Pakeha New Zealand and in Tonga

By the late nineteenth century both Tonga and New Zealand had been brought under the control of a centralised state. In New Zealand Pakeha controlled the state, but in Tonga Polynesians held the reins of power. Both New Zealand and Tonga's governments sought to move their countries into the modern era, but they chose radically different methods in their pursuit of modernity. While New Zealand followed other white settler-states like Australia and Canada in erecting a capitalist economy on the ruins of indigenous societies, Tonga's King Tupou I tried to find a compromise between the feudal economy which had existed in his country before contact and capitalism.

Under the series of reforms for which Tupou is famous, feudal chiefs lost their serfs and their right to tax the harvest of small farmers. Small farmers got the right to security of tenure on their land, which was effectively nationalised by Tupou, and the right to pass the land on to their offspring. The nobles got their own estates, which they ran on a semi-feudal basis, as a sop, and also the right to administer the tenure system on behalf of the state.

Tupou's reforms created an odd sort of ceasefire between Tonga's classes, and the country soon developed a hybrid economy, which featured a feudal mode of production based in the nobles' estates and a traditional Polynesian lineage mode of production based in the small farms and in the villages. How successful was Tupou alternative to capitalist modernity?

4. Waves from the north: the experience of globalisation in New Zealand and in Tonga

Although New Zealand was a capitalist nation by the last decades of the nineteenth century, its economy developed in relative isolation from those of larger capitalist powers like the United States. The social democratic reforms of the Savage and Fraser governments of the 1930s and '40s strengthened the country's insulation from global capitalism, by placing many large companies in state hands, limiting and tariffing imports, and developing a domestic manufacturing sector.

At the same time that Savage and Fraser were protecting New Zealand from the ravages of the free market, Tonga's Queen Salote was working to lessen her country's dependence on imported goods, and to shrink its cash economy. In the 1940s, though, Tonga's economy was suddenly liberalised by the arrival of thousands of free-spending American military personnel. The American demand for local goods and services enticed many Tongans to give up traditional activities like subsistence farming and enter the cash economy. Queen Salote's successor, King Tupou IV, was an enthusiastic supporter of capitalist development, and dreamed about turning his country into a 'Hong Kong of the South Pacific'.

Tupou IV's reforms of the Tongan economy in the 1970s and '80s coincided with the rise of the ideology of neo-liberalism the United States and other large capitalist powers. The term 'neo-liberal globalisation' is used to describe the way Western governments and multinational financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund have sought to open the economies of Third World nations like Tonga to exports and foreign investment.

In the twenty-first century, both the IMF and nations like the US urge Tonga to undertake new reforms to make its economy still more open to foreign goods and investors. Tonga has been urged, for instance, to change its constitution so that its land can be sold to foreign investors.

Neo-liberal globalisation came to New Zealand as well as Tonga in the 1980s and '90s, as successive governments removed the state ownership and regulatory frameworks which had insulated the local economy from the global capitalist market. In Tonga as well as New Zealand, neo-liberalism has been a controversial doctrine. We will examine the Tongan and Kiwi experiences of neo-liberal globalisation.

5. Thinking differently: intellectual and artistic pioneers in Tonga and New Zealand

Both New Zealand and Tonga have produced many significant intellectuals, but the first modern intellectual movements to appear in the two countries could hardly be more different from one another.

In 1930s New Zealand, a group of young writers and artists declared themselves cultural nationalists, and began to produce work which emphasised New Zealand's distance from the rest of the world, and the need to produce uniquely New Zealand forms of expression.

Tonga's first major modern intellectual movement coalesced around Futa Helu and his 'Atenisi Institute. Where New Zealand's cultural nationalists emphasised the isolation of the South Pacific from the rest of the world, and the inadvisability of trying to use northern hemisphere ideas to deal with South Pacific experience, Helu and other 'Atenisians believed that Tongans needed to strengthen their society by assimilating some of the concepts of classical Europe. Helu abhorred the notion of a uniquely Pacific style of writing or art, and argued that the region should be one of the tributary streams feeding a 'world culture' that includes Plato and Italian opera as well as tapacloth and the lakalaka. Tongan intellectuals who have worked outside the 'Atenisi tradition, like the social anthropologist and satirist Epeli Hau'ofa, have also tended to reject the notion of Tongan cultural nationalism.

Relating Tongan and New Zealand intellectuals to the history of their respective nations, we will discuss why the Kiwi cultural nationalists and the Tongans have differed so dramatically over so many issues.

6. Oceanic currents: Tongans and Kiwis abroad

In his classic essay 'Our Sea of Islands' Epeli Hau'ofa discussed the massive movements of people which have been such a feature of postcolonial Pacific history. Hau'ofa argued that, far from fleeing their cultures or selling out to capitalism, Polynesians who move to large foreign cities in search of work and other opportunities are breaking out of the narrow political and conceptual boxes colonialism made for them, and resuming the tradition of inter-island travel which flourished in pre-colonial times. Why, Hau’ofa indignantly asked, should people be criticised for refusing to be bound by lines on a map made by their colonisers? Why shouldn’t they take themselves and their culture wherever they want?

Today increasing numbers of New Zealanders are leaving their nation, and seeking work in Australia or other larger and more prosperous countries. There is controversy about this emigration, with some older Kiwis seeing it as a betrayal. What can New Zealand learn from Tonga, a country which has for decades now watched its young men and women fly off to larger nations offering more opportunities?

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Studying the Pacific - and the whole world?

I spent the middle of 2005 in Britain, researching my doctoral thesis on EP Thompson by asking elderly men and women in provincial towns like Worcester and Hull about their memories of the great man. Sometimes my interlocutors grew tired of answering my pedantic questions, and directed a query of their own at me. They wanted to know why I had crossed the world to study the life and work of a British historian and political activist, instead of finding a PhD subject closer to home. I could offer no convincing answer to this question.

I had considered choosing some New Zealand intellectual as the subject for my thesis. Keith Sinclair, who shared Thompson's love of scholarship, poetry, and the rough and tumble of political life, had seemed like a lively and complex target. But I sensed that there was a chasm between what we might call the intrinsic and extrinsic significance of Sinclair's oeuvre. Sinclair's books are compulsory reading for anyone with a passion for New Zealand history and culture. He was one of the first academics to study carefully the origins of the Pakeha-Maori wars of the nineteenth century, and he also wrote an important account of the creation and maintenance of New Zealand national identity. But few scholars who are not directly engaged in the study of New Zealand read Sinclair. His investigations of our past are not often seen as relevant to the histories of other nations.

By contrast, EP Thompson's lapidarian studies of various episodes in English history, like the rise of Methodism in the nineteenth century and the depredations of poachers in Windsor forest a century earlier, have long had massive international audiences. When Thompson toured India in the mid-'70s, giving lectures on the apparently antiquarian subject of class conflict in the eighteenth century English countryside, he was treated like a pop star. By the beginning of the 1980s Thompson had become the world's most-cited living historian, despite the narrow geographic focus of books like The Making of the English Working Class and Customs in Common.

Thompson's popularity owes something to his genius, but it is also a reflection of the way that many scholars, in the southern as well as the northern hemisphere, view English history. England was the first industrial society, as well as the heartland of an empire which covered a quarter of the earth by the beginning of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, then, England has often been viewed as the prototypical modern nation, and scholars have been keen to discover parallels between English history and stages in the development of their own countries. Thompson himself was well aware of the way in which his work could be read. In his preface to The Making of the English Working Class he suggested that, because 'the greater part of the world today is still undergoing problems of industrialisation' his book might seem directly relevant in 'Asia or Africa'. Thompson told stories which had extrinsic as well as intrinsic significance. He could write about England and the world at one and the same time.

The Pacific has often been regarded as a peripheral part of the world. Most of the region's central and eastern islands remained unpopulated until several thousand years ago, and some of them, like New Zealand, have human histories not much longer than a thousand years. When Europeans reached the Pacific in force a couple of hundred years ago, they saw it as a place without history. For missionaries like Augustus Selwyn and artists like Gauguin, Pacific Islanders were people who lived in a perpetual present, innocent of the chronologies and innovations which were part of human life in more northerly latitudes. Some Europeans, like the syphilitic Gauguin, saw Islanders as noble savages pursuing lives of guiltless hedonism in southern Edens; others, like the appalling Selwyn, talked darkly of heathenism and cannibalism, and presented the Pacific as a place of dangerous ignorance rather than blessed innocence. Whether they were seen as noble or ignoble savages, though, the people of the Pacific were contrasted with their counterparts in the northern hemisphere. The Pacific was the antithesis of Europe.

Even today many inhabitants of the north find the nineteenth century view of the Pacific compelling. Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania, which accuses Pacific peoples like the Samoans and Tongans of a willful, comical ignorance about the outside world, is the most popular contemporary study of our region.

Since the late nineteenth century most New Zealanders have been white, but this country has nevertheless often been viewed through nineteenth century cliches about the Pacific. In the early 1930s and '40s, 'literary nationalists' like Charles Brasch, Monte Holcroft, and the young Allen Curnow bemoaned their homeland's supposed lack of anything resembling a history. This 'far-pitched perilous place' was the antithesis of ancient, sophisticated Europe. In recent decades a set of images summed up in the phrase 'New Zealand Gothic' has infected film, television and media portrayals of rural regions of our nation. Gothic New Zealand is a place of dark, continually raining skies, brooding rot-green hills, and homicidally paranoiac farmers born of incestuous unions. In the northern hemisphere imagination, the Gothic Kiwi is the white equivalent of the Fijian cannibal or the Tahitian nymphomaniac.

Serious scholars of the Pacific have long since shucked off cliched representations of the region. In the early decades of the twentieth century, scholars like Bronislaw Malinowski, Raymond Firth and Te Rangi Hiroa revealed the social complexity and intellectual vitality which even small Pacific societies like Tikopia, Mangaia and the Trobriands possess. Since World War Two historians, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnomusicologists and art historians have produced a vast and sophisticated literature on the Pacific.

Yet the Pacific, with its small nations and isolation from centres of power, has remained an economically and politically marginal part of the globe. The obscurity of the Pacific has allowed the perpetuation of old stereotypes in the popular imagination of the north, and has also dissuaded many northern scholars from studying and thinking about the region. Where EP Thompson benefited from the centrality of his society to world history, Pacific scholars suffer from the marginality of the homelands they study.

I steered away from studying Keith Sinclair partly because I feared that nobody outside my part of the world would be very interested in his work. I didn't consider studying other Pacific intellectuals for the same sort of reason. My thesis on Thompson was eventually published by Manchester University Press. I can't imagine that a study of an antipodean intellectual like Keith Sinclair would have been anywhere near as easy to place with a northern hemisphere publisher.

Shortly after I'd finished my PhD I discovered the work of the Hawa'iian-born anthropologist Patrick Vinton Kirch. As soon as I'd read the introduction to Kirch's magisterial 1986 book The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms, I realised that he had found a way to overcome the marginalisation of Pacific history. Kirch acknowledges that the Pacific is a relatively isolated region which has played only a small role in world affairs, but argues that these facts make the region more rather than less worthy of study. Kirch believes that we can treat the Pacific as a sort of laboratory, where conflicting theories about the pattern and meaning of human history can be tested.

Kirch's 1995 book The Wet and the Dry finds him at work in his laboratory. Deciding to test Karl Wittfogel's 'hydraulic hypothesis', which holds that societies dependent on irrigation tend to be hierarchical and statist, Kirch considers the West Polynesian island of Futuna, which was traditionally divided into an extensively irrigated 'wet' region called Sigave and a 'dry' area called Alo, where irrigation is much more difficult. Kirch notes that, contrary to what Wittfogel's theory might lead us to believe, Alo has traditionally been a much more hierarchical, centralised, and martial society than Sigave. Kirch turns to other Polynesian societies like Hawa'ii, and argues that they also contradict the 'hydraulic hypothesis'.

Wittfogel's ideas, which derive partly from Marx's very problematic notion of an 'Asiatic mode of production', had a considerable influence on the study of Eastern societies in the twentieth century. Testing Wittfogel in the laboratory of the Pacific, though, Kirch finds him wanting. I'd like to think that The Wet and the Dry has contributed to the decline of Wittofgel's reputation in the twenty-first century.

Patrick Vinton Kirch's research interests are very different from mine. He is an authority on the pre-European history of the Pacific, whereas I have tended to study the ideas and culture of modern palangi societies like Britain and settler New Zealand. But it seems to me that Kirch's notion of the Pacific as a laboratory might be adapted and used by scholars of modernity.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both indigenous and palangi inhabitants of the Pacific imported not only technologies and consumer goods but ideas from wealthy, populous nations of the northern hemisphere. In the Pacific, modernist ideas from the northern hemisphere were transmogrified, as they were reinterpreted to meet local conditions and augmented and amended with locally produced concepts. Because the Pacific has been relatively isolated from other regions, even in the modern era, imported ideas have sometimes developed in peculiar ways here.

By studying the careers of some important modern ideologies in the laboratory of the Pacific, we can view familiar concepts and arguments from new and strange angles. That, at least, is the idea behind a a research project I've been trying to plan this week. I want to pursue the project next year, when I'll be spending some quality time in Tonga.

THINKING UPSIDE DOWN: EXAMINING MODERNITY AND IDEOLOGY IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

Like Europe, only different: Tupou I and the making of modern Tonga

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a chief named Taufa'ahau waged a long series of military and political campaigns to unite his country and make himself Tupou I, the first king of modern Tonga. With the help of anti-imperialist Britons and Americans, Tupou I proclaimed the emancipation of Tonga's peasants, turned his country's chiefs into civil servants, established a parliament, and created an unusual economic system that prevented the alienation of Tongan land.

Tupou I's reforms were inspired partly by the bourgeois revolutions which transformed Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they helped Tonga maintain its independence from a host of would-be colonisers. Scholars disagree, though, about the extent and meaning of Tupou's achievements. Was he a democrat or a tyrant? What does his rule of Tonga tell us about the content of the bourgeois democratic ideas he imported from Europe?

Ruthlessly improving the natives: hypermodernist ideology and New Zealand rule in Samoa

Many thinkers in early twentieth century Pakeha New Zealand society venerated industry and science. Groups on the left as well as the right of the political spectrum embraced utopian visions of scientifically-guided economic and social progress. HG Wells' scientific utopias were enormously popular, and were imitated by homegrown writers like John Macmillan Brown. The new 'science' of eugenics excited many Kiwis.

Hypermodernist ideology was never a strong influence on a New Zealand government, but for more than a decade it guided Kiwi administrators in the colony of Samoa, which had been taken from Germany during World War One. Determined to turn Samoa into a modern capitalist country and consign traditional Polynesian culture to museums, New Zealand administrators tried to break up collectively owned blocks of land and replace the ancient villages of 'Upolu and Sava'ii with new, 'rational' settlements laid out in grid-like patterns. New Zealand's attempt to transform Samoa led to opposition, bloodshed, and failure. What does this ill-fated experiment tell us about the hypermodernist thinking which was so pervasive in the West during the first decades of the twentieth century?

Mixed blood and foreign soil: the strange story of Samoa's Nazis

The Samoan Nazi Party was formed in 1934 by a German settler with a Tongan wife, and its members and supporters included many afakasi. The party, which called for Germany to reclaim its Samoan colony from an unpopular New Zealand administration, hung portraits of Adolf Hitler on the walls of its headquarters on Apia's waterfront, and established a paramilitary wing which trained secretly in the countryside.

The Samoan Nazis were recognised by Hitler's regime, and even sent two representatives to a world congress of fascists held in Hamburg in 1937, but their unusual understanding of racial purity ensured that they were frequently engaged in fraught discussions with their German allies, who refused to consider Polynesians members of the Aryan race. After the outbreak of World War Two many members of the Samoan Nazi Party were interned on Wellington's Somes Island, and the organisation never reestablished itself. Samoa's Nazis offer us some fascinating insights into the contradictions and limitations of fascist ideology.

A 'communist state' in rural Fiji: the Bula Tale movement 

At the beginning of the 1960s four villages in the western backblocks of Viti Levu announced their intention of seceding from Fiji. Led by Apimeleki Ramatau Mataki, a former junior civil servant, the Bula Tale movement rejected the authority of both the British colonial administration in Suva and traditional Fijian culture. Members of the movement refused to recognise colonial laws, eschewed kava drinking and other traditional cultural practices, collectivised many of their possessions, and abolished money. Ramatau said that he wanted to create a 'communist state' in the villages where he had influence, and his movement was sometimes known as the Bula Tale Communist Party.

At its high point in 1961, the Bula Tale movement had one thousand members and support in many parts of Fiji, and was being denounced by both colonial administrators and high chiefs. What place should the Bula Tale movement have in the history of the diffusion of radical left-wing ideas? What does the movement tell us about the relationship between communist ideology and Fijian tradition?

Blood in the kava bowl: Epeli Hau'ofa's confrontation with Marxism

In the years before Sitiveni Rabuka's coups in 1987 the Suva campus of the University of the South Pacific was an exciting place, where scholars from around the world taught and argued. One of university's stars was Epeli Hau'ofa, a short story writer, novelist, poet, and anthropologist who had grown up in Papua New Guinea, where his Tongan parents had been missionaries. Hau'ofa is best-known today for his 1990s essays 'Our Sea of Islands' and 'The Ocean in Us', which changed the direction of Pacific studies by insisting that peoples like the Tongans and Fijians should be considered not as isolated denizens of small societies but as the frequently mobile citizens of a single vast region.

During the late 1970s and '80s Hau'ofa often wrestled with the Marxist ideas which a series of palangi academics promoted at the University of the South Pacific. Like a number of other important Pacific thinkers, Hau'ofa was both attracted and repulsed by the materialism and universalism of the Marxism he encountered in Suva. In his great poem 'Blood in the Kava Bowl' Hau'ofa dramatised a debate with Michael Howard, an American scholar who taught at Suva until 1987 and in 1991 published a Marxist history of Fiji. What can we learn from Hau'ofa's confrontation with Marxist ideas?

To Import the Enlightenment: Futa Helu, 'Atenisi, and Tonga's pro-democracy movement

In the early 1960s Futa Helu, a young Tongan who had studied at Sydney University with the philosopher and satirist John Anderson, founded a private school in a swamp near the western edge of Nuku'alofa, and called it 'Atenisi, the Tongan word for Athens. Helu's school would become a bridge over which much of the Western tradition in philosophy, literature, and music would reach Tonga. Like his hero Socrates, Helu was unafraid to speak truth to power, and in the 1980s and '90s his school became the headquarters of Tonga's pro-democracy movement. The historian Ian Campbell has argued that, by training thousands of young Tongans in critical thinking, 'Atenisi had a 'devastating' effect on notions of the divine right of kings and the union of church and state promoted by the twentieth century Tongan elite.

Up until his death in 2010 Helu insisted on the universality of reason and science, and condemned both moderate and radical forms of cultural relativism. He repeatedly argued that Tongan culture lacked a critical spirit, and needed an infusion of Greek and Enlightenment ideas. Although Helu was passionate about Tongan poetry and dance as well as Greek philosophy and Italian opera, he has been accused of Eurocentrism by some of his fellow Tongan intellectuals. What can we learn from Futa Helu's attempt to import the Enlightenment into Tonga?

Giving time an end: Tonga's Tokaikolo Fellowship and the 'coup' of 1990

In 1978 a group of ministers split from Tonga's dominant Free Wesleyan Church and established their country's first pentecostal sect. The Tokaikolo Fellowship preaches the importance of subjective religious experience, and at its gatherings worshippers often talk in tongues, move wildly, and utter prophecy. In the 1980s the Fellowship aligned itself with Tonga's nascent pro-democracy movement, and against the country's political and religious establishment.

In April 1990, the Fellowship baffled its liberal friends by hosting two pentecostal preachers from New Zealand who warned that Satanists and communists were preparing to stage a military coup in Tonga. Acting on the advice of the Kiwis, the Fellowship turned its churches on the island of Tongatapu into armed compounds and prepared to wage a campaign of resistance against the coming coup. The Fellowship's actions caused general panic, and forced the Tongan government to issue a statement rubbishing claims about a coup. Arguably, the Tokaikolo Fellowship's strange behaviour in 1990 tells us a great deal about the contradictions between traditional Tongan and modern Western notions of time and history.

All that should help keep me out of mischief next year...

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Choosing new homelands

Last night Skyler and I watched The Tamarind Seed, a slightly cheesy seventies spy thriller starring a smouldering (that, at least, was Skyler's adjective) Omar Sharif. At the end of the film Sharif's character, who was a Russian spy defecting to the West, had to choose a country to inhabit for the rest of his days. He'd be provided for by his new hosts, but he wouldn't be able to leave his adopted homeland, or to see old friends and family.

Omar's situation made us wonder: if we had to live in a single country for the rest of our lives, where would it be? Our obvious first choice would be New Zealand, because of friends and family and memories here, but what if this country were ruled out, and we had to find a new homeland?

In The Tamarind Seed, Omar Sharif's character turned down the offer of Britain as a permanent abode, and instead picked Canada. I think this was a sound choice: Canada is a bit more spacious than old Blighty, which could quickly get claustrophobic, especially for a Russian used to the endless steppe.

I love Tonga, and am excited about living there for most of next year, but I think I would get cabin fever if I were to spend every day of the the rest of my life in a country the size of Lake Taupo with a population of one hundred thousand.

After a good deal of agonising, I picked Brazil as the place I'd make into a new permanent homeland. Learning Portugese would be tricky, but Brazil is huge, with an exciting mix of cultures, a tangled history, a weird and wonderful literary tradition about which I know far too little, and a broad, sophisticated political left. I think we could live in Brazil and treat the country as a microcosm of the wider world.

Skyler was undecided, but thought we might have a good time in Sweden, which she considers the most civilised country in the world. I love Swedish poetry, and Stockholm sounds like an improved version of Auckland, with its harbour setting, picturesque wooden architecture, and efficient public transport system, but I couldn't tolerate the cold.

Ted Jenner is a man who adopted a new homeland decades before he ever set foot outside New Zealand. When I interviewed him several years ago, in the lead-up to the publication of a major selection of his writings, the classicist and poet explained that he'd developed a fascination with Greece while growing up in  Dunedin back in the fifties. Inspired by Homer and Aristophanes, the young Jenner would lie awake at night listening to waves wreck themselves on the dunes of St Kilda, and imagine that they belonged to the wine-dark Mediterranean of the Odyssey, rather than the cold green Southern Ocean.

Ted's early enthusiasms were by no means unusual: several generations of Kiwi writers and artists grew up obsessed with classical antiquity, until Greek and Latin were pulled from school syllabuses and Kerouac's America rather than Homer's Greece became the spiritual homeland of young Bohemians. Greek heroes and Gods swagger through the poems of James K Baxter, Charles Brasch and Denis Glover like handsome gangsters.

Ted Jenner has published versions of many ancient Greek poems over the years, and he's currently travelling through his adopted homeland researching a new set of translations. Modern Greece has become sadly dependent on its tourist industry, but over the past six months the sunbathers and snorkellers have been augmented by journalists and aid workers, as the country's economy has gone into freefall and its people have taken to the streets. Recent parliamentary elections saw an explosion in support for the radical left-wing Syriza coalition and, more worryingly, for the Golden Dawn, a collection of shaven-headed, beer-bellied, seig heiling thugs who absurdly claim to represent the spirit of ancient Greece.

A confirmed social democrat, Ted Jenner is horrified by the rise of the Golden Dawn and sympathetic to the anti-austerity protesters on the streets of Greece. He has not made his latest visit to the country, though, to engage in politics. Even as Greece burns, he is focused on scholarship. He reminds me a little of the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges' famous short story 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' who, seeing the world in tumult around him, busies himself with a translation of an obscure text by the seventeenth century writer and antiquarian Thomas Browne. If anyone questioned his priorities, Ted might plausibly argue that his translations help keep the spirit of ancient Greece alive, at a time when that spirit is being misrepresented by the sinister Golden Dawn, and forgotten by generations who have grown up, in New Zealand and elsewhere, with little education in the classics.

Ted has spent the last week or so in Thebes, a small market town north of Athens. Thebes may be an insignificant place today, but in Greek literature it is the setting for the sorrows of King Oedipus and the revels of Dionysus. Here's a message Ted sent me on the weekend:

Scott,

will have to go without food today - am caught up in a general strike in Thebes of all places! Oh, and to add to my day, the museum is closed for months until restorations and extensions are completed. This will give you a little taste of what hardships a traveler in Greece occasionally encounters but I must say it has been very pleasant so far. The weather has been so kind to me, never below 25 degrees at midday.

Thebes is a natural citadel, a broad easily defended acropolis and one can trace the entry points the chariots must have made into what became known as the Kadmeia, i.e. the ancient citadel. Where the entry into the city spirals - and there are several of these - you can guess that the modern road follows the twists and turns of the ancient road up to one of the seven gates that defended Thebes. 

The Thebans still like to be known as Boiotians - after all these are the people that destroyed the Spartan army almost for good at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. 

You can blame the Macedonians for the fact that there isn't much to see in the modern city that is ancient  - Phillip II levelled Thebes after the Battle of Chaeronea leaving only Pindar's house standing. The main road in today's Kadmeia is called the Odos Pindarou. Other streets celebrate the names of  famous figures from Theban myth, history and legend, e.g. the Odos Oidipodos, the Odos Antigones etc. 

You will enjoy the mod. Greek for 'private property': KHOROS IDIOTIKOS!!

Don't see so many Greek men wielding their worry beads this time round - there's an accursed modern invention that is replacing the beads: the cellphone!!

Yia Sas,
Ted

I think that Greece is still Ted's adopted homeland. What country would you pick as a permanent abode, if you were forced to make the choice?

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Back to the future

 Some anonymous philanthropist has posted a long dialogue from 1983 between the left-wing historians EP Thompson and CLR James to Youtube. In between blasts of reggae Thompson and James talk about their scholarly work, the political situation in 1983, and the prospects of the left.

By the early eighties Thompson had become the world's most-cited living historian. His massive The Making of the English Working Class had changed the course of the discipline by inspiring young scholars to think about the past 'from the bottom up', rather than in terms of the cunning of diplomats and statesmen. Despite his success, Thompson had in 1980 given up historical research to campaign against the deployment of both American and Soviet nuclear weapons in Europe. He had soon became one of the best-known spokesmen for the wider peace movement.

While Thompson spent much of the eighties travelling from one meeting hall and protest site to another, making speeches and scribbling press releases, the octogenarian CLR James lived quietly in a shabby flat in Brixton, the south London suburb known for its large black population and riots. James' great works, like his epic history of the Haitian revolution and his politically engaged study of West Indian cricket,  had never achieved the mainstream renown of The Making of the English Class.

What is most remarkable about the dialogue between Thompson and James is the confidence both men have in the immediate future. Both see the eighties as a decade in which the forces of the left have every opportunity to advance. James believes that more and more Third World nations will follow the lead of revolutionary Iran and Sandinista Nicaragua, and break free of the domination of America. He suggests that India, with its huge, politically literate working class, will soon experience revolution, and become an important player in world politics.

Thompson is less sanguine than James about the state of the global left, but he believes that the peace movement which is building in both Western and Eastern Europe may be able to usher in a new era in history, by humbling both the Stalinist dictators of the Soviet Union and the Reagan government and uniting European peoples in some sort of egalitarian confederation.

Both James and Thompson seem to see the Reagan and Thatcher governments, with their aggressive brand of free market capitalism and antipathy to organised labour, as historical aberrations, rather than as harbingers of the future.

Before we mock the optimistic visions of Thompson and James, we should think carefully about the historical context of their chat.

For members of my generation, the eighties bring to mind a set of curiously contradictory images. The decade of our childhood and early teenage years was the era of yuppies, synthesiser-rock bands with extravagantly bad hair, and febrile sharemarkets, but it was also marked by mass unemployment, epic industrial disputes like Britain's miners' strike, and fear of nuclear war.

The eighties began with America and its allies recoiling from military defeat in Indochina and anti-imperialist revolutions in the Third World, and wondering how to deal with an economic crisis which had lasted for the whole of the seventies, and had prompted wave after wave of industrial unrest. Respected commentators prophesised the collapse of Western capitalism and the ever-increasing power of the Soviet Union and its allies.

By the end of the eighties the world seemed to have changed completely. America and Britain had enjoyed a decade of right-wing rule, during which Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had subdued insurgent trade unions, handed many formerly state-owned assets to the private sector, and stared down a visibly weakening Soviet leadership. Popular culture had lost much of its seventies insouciance, and reconciled itself to the hegemony of capitalism. The grimy radicalism of the Sex Pistols and The Clash had been replaced by Duran Duran's odes to superyachts and supermodels.

Through the nineties and much of the noughties, the triumph of Thatcher, Reagan and their many imitators seemed like an historical turning point. When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that the exhaustion of the Soviet Union and the popularity of Western capitalism had brought humanity to the 'end of history', and prophesised that America would be the model for all future societies, many formerly radical intellectuals nodded their heads with varying degress of sadness. Organisations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank set about applying the 'lessons' of the eighties to continents like South America and Africa, forcing government after government to privatise assets, eliminate subsidies, and submit to the erratic logic of the free market.

When Britain's Tories were finally voted out of office in 1997 they were replaced by the 'reformed' Labour Party of Tony Blair, a man who openly admitted his admiration for Thatcher. As Britain and much of the rest of the West enjoyed a period of strong economic growth in the late nineties and early noughties, it seemed that the changes of the eighties had created the basis for a new boom. The decade had become the first page of a new and glorious chapter in the history of Western capitalism.

But the contradictions of the eighties always survived in some of the memories and popular images of the decade. The struggle of Britain's miners, which saw northern towns placed under military occupation and pitched battles on the edge of coal pits, the riots by unemployed youth in Brixton and other poorer suburbs of big cities, and the persistent fear that nuclear-tipped missiles would come flying over the horizon from Eastern Europe were impossible to reconcile with the jejune visions of Fukuyama and his ilk.

In the early years of the eighties, especially, Thatcher and Reagan and the policies they promoted seemed destined for the dustbin of history. As Brixton burned and unemployment rose relentlessly, Thatcher fell far behind the Labour Party in the opinion polls. Labour itself was moving leftwards, as it adopted a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament and sent Trotskyists to parliament. It was the Falklands War, and not the success of Thatcherism, which turned the tide and gave the Tories their impressive victory in the general election of 1983. Reagan also struggled for much of his first term, as Americans came home in bodybags from Lebanon and unemployment crept upwards.

Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the beginning of what has become known as the Great Recession, the eighties of riots, strikes, and paranoia have made a comeback in popular consciousness. As Britain's dole stretch and riots return to London, newspaper columnists are warning about a return to bad old days. The economic growth of the early twentieth century seems to have owed more to dodgy accounting and debt than to a successful reinvention of capitalism by Thatcherites. Fukyama's sanguinity seems absurd.

The conversation between EP Thompson and CLR James is important because it returns us to a moment when the eighties seemed like they might be a continuation rather than a reversal of the pattern of the sixties and seventies. When they sat together in a television studio in 1983, Thompson and James could reasonably expect to see Thatcher and Reagan's experiments in extreme capitalism defeated, the Western trade union and peace movements strengthened, and more Third World nations shake off the hegemony of America.

And it is worth wondering whether the long run has completely discredited Thompson and James' speculations. Thatcherism may have triumphed in Britian in the late eighties, as the miners were defeated and the north was deindustrialised, but the hegemony of free market capitalism seems increasingly uncertain a quarter century on. America may have thwarted the revolutionaries of the Third World in the eighties and nineties, but it has seen the International Monetary Fund defied by a series of radical South American governments in recent years. The Iranian revolution may have been betrayed by a grotesque theocracy, but in nations like Egypt and Tunisia the Arab Spring now promises a new era. Watching Thompson and James, we can return to a moment which seems both remote and curiously contemporary.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]