Thousand-page Reich

I have just emerged, somewhat groggy, from the oppressive
experience of reading Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly
Ones, in which a former SS officer recalls his Second World
War experience on the Russian front and back in Germany
as the Third Reich crumbles. It’s a thousand pages long and
so densely detailed that the eye cannot help but skim at
times. But the detail is necessary to Littell’s purpose, which,
as far as I can tell anyway, is to get us inside the Nazi mind
and show us how it accommodated the idea of killing
millions of Jews, Poles, gypsies and other lesser breeds
without any single individual ever feeling, or having to feel,
fully responsible. There are so many committees and
councils and multi-layered operating procedures that the
book might well have been subtitled The Bureaucracy of
the Holocaust. The Jews were herded into concentration
camps not by humans but by acronyms, and gassed and
burnt there by a process of documentation. In triplicate.
Such, at least, was how the Germans under Hitler justified
or excused what was happening. A lot of it was apparently
done in the name of efficiency too. Personally, whenever I
hear the word efficiency I reach for my sense of history.

The Kindly Ones is not just a thinly disguised documentary,
though. It succeeds as a great novel should—as a
masterwork of the imagination, illuminating reality by the
force and scope of its conceptualization. Coleridge said of
the actor Edmund Kean that seeing him act was like reading
Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. Reading Littell’s novel
is like seeing the Nazi war that way, with sickening claps of
thunder to boot. Through the torturous twistings of the
mind of his narrator, Maximilian Aue, we witness, indeed
virtually experience, every possible shade of degradation of
the human spirit. The last hundred pages or so are a tour de
force, from the abandoned country house in western
Poland where Aue acts out, as it were, the history of the
Third Reich as a copro-erotic tragi-comedy, through his
flight across country ahead of the advancing Russians, to
the final days in Berlin—including, even, a previously
unrecorded encounter with Hitler in his bunker.

Many scenes remain engraved in my mind, but for some
reason the words I can’t shake are those—almost certainly
taken by Littell from a true event—on a sign hung around
the neck of a disembowelled farmer by Russian soldiers
who, having repelled the German invasion of their
homeland are now swarming unstoppably towards Berlin
to get this war over and done with: YOU HAD A HOUSE,
COWS, TINNED FOOD, it reads. WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU
WANT WITH US?

Exercise of benefits

Ah, the heady aroma of welfare reform: conservatives love
to drag it up their nostrils and inhale deeply. Nothing is
quite so satisfying to the political right as the pleasure of
telling the poor where to get off. The rest of us can only
envy the moral authority thereby asserted, as the righteous
remind the underprivileged and the unemployed that they
should be grateful for what they’re grudgingly given by the
state. It allows these moral giants to exercise their dogs,
those rhetorical rottweilers with names like ‘Handup-not-
handout’ and ‘Safety-net-not-trampoline.’ We can also
only gasp in awe at the legerdemain by which the pittance
the poor get from the state is called a ‘benefit’ and the
advantages enjoyed by the not-so-poor (the regressive
nature of GST, for instance) are so taken for granted that
they don’t have a name at all, least of all ‘benefit.’ For the
connoisseur of irony, there is pure delight in seeing the
victims of our economic system victimized over again:
how could anyone feel this to be unfair, knowing, as we all
do, that however inadequately these wretches manage
their lives, at the end of the financial year they will still get
a whopping bonus? Personally, I can't conceal a sneaking
admiration for the reactionary right when it rises from the
trough, stands on its hind legs and brays about
beneficiaries ripping off the state: assuming this semi-erect
posture is often the only real exercise it gets, and we all
know the benefits of exercise.

Here yourself

Wanting to tell your life story, exploring your own past
and trying to find out what really happened at the crime
scene of your childhood, and why, puts you in the same
position as the person in the street asking for directions
who accosts a passer-by, only to be told, 'Sorry, I’m a
stranger here myself.' Why, when seeking directions,
with a streetful of people to choose from, do we
unerringly single out the one who doesn’t know the
place—who cannot answer our question, who gives at
best a sympathetic shrug? It is then that you realize
afresh that, in trying to understand your own life, you are
both the asker and the asked, the seeker and the sought;
and will always be a stranger here yourself.

Sphere and loathing

When the blogosphere swims into focus for most people,
it’s usually because of some juvenile revelation that the
mainstream media, for reasons best kept to themselves,
seize on and beat up. I would rather not even dignify any
of the latest examples of this dismal genre. What I would
like to do is point out that some bloggers do first-class
journalistic work that ought to be acknowledged by the
msm: work that involves a bit of digging around and
connecting up of loose ends. Gordon Campbell, for
instance, sought to get to the bottom of the ‘$140 billion’
figure being bandied about as the supposed potential
worth of the minerals currently lying lonely, forlorn and
heartbreakingly unexploited beneath our national parks.
Campbell shows, convincingly as far as I’m concerned,
that the figure originates from a geologist with close ties
to the mining industry, which has an obvious interest in
talking up the amount. And No Right Turn used the
Official Information Act to establish just how people like
Brian Neeson are appointed to the Human Rights
Review Tribunal. No one in the msm, as far as I know,
followed those issues up to that extent. I mention it not
to diss msm journalists but because there's a risk that
the Cameron Slaters and Clint Heines of this world will
give blogging a permanently bad name with their antics,
making the blogosphere a byword for meretricious
maunderings and mouthings-off. G Campbell and N R
Turn are at the forefront of those who give the lie to that.

Undermining

Unfortunately, although the Government may have backed
away (a little) from some of the more egregious options for
mining in our national parks, it now seems possible that
they are looking at mining on Radio New Zealand land.
This would be a tragedy both from an environmental and a
broadcasting point of view. As is well known, Radio New
Zealand offers some of the most stunning scenery in the
country. The views from the tops of Mt Robinson and Mt
Plunket can be spectacular, in the right light. Native birds
are heard at regular intervals. Hourly, actually. On a clear
day you can see from nine to noon. And there are not only
mountains but hills too. Kim Hill, for instance. Plus
ancient landforms like Hewitt Humphrey, rugged and
weatherbeaten but still standing. These are national
treasures that require propping up, not undermining;
subsidy, not subsidence. Whatever mineral wealth lies
below Radio New Zealand—according to one stocktake,
there are rich seams of tannin under the cafeteria—it’s
not worth trashing a taonga for the sake of it. We here at
Thumbcorp say: No mining on Radio New Zealand land!

Resist them

What we must remember at all times is that the interests
of capitalism are not identical with the interests of
democracy; that the interests of business and commerce
are not identical with the interests of politics; and that
government is not identical with economic management.
Tremendous forces seek continually to persuade us
otherwise; resist them.

Some other group

You’ve got to love the guys affectionately known
throughout New Zealand as ‘the business community.’
They don’t mess around when it comes to letting you
know what they think, except perhaps in the few weeks
before a general election, when, like their political
representatives the National Party, they soften the
harsher outlines of their true agenda. Right now, they
grow more shameless every day, as evidenced by the
recent front-page headline of the appropriately titled
National Business Review:

GOING FOR GROWTH: DUMP MMP NOW

Right. Got that. What follows, in a report written by
Jock Anderson, is in effect a briskly outlined manifesto
for privileging business profits over the voice of the
voting public. Getting rid of MMP and replacing it with
what longtime anti-MMP campaigner Graeme Hunt
calls a ‘majoritarian system’ would, it seems:

• restore responsible decision-making
• minimize political compromise
• bring certainty to future development
• bring stable, definite and decisive government

What’s more, says that other dedicated anti-MMPer
Peter Shirtcliffe, still smarting from losing the fight to
retain the first-past-the-post system in 1993, ‘if we
retain MMP as it is, or in any form, we do not have a
snowball’s chance in hell of getting up with Australia.’

Minimize political compromise? Good grief. Correct me
if I’m wrong, but minimizing political compromise is
what great democrats like Vladimir Putin do, and it’s a
short step from that to eliminating political compromise
altogether, which is what beloved leaders like Kim Jong-
il do. As for bringing certainty to future development,
Hitler and Mussolini thought that was a good idea too.

All the goals listed above are thinly veiled—actually,
bare-ass naked—arguments for putting as few checks
and balances as possible in the way of unbridled
capitalism and ensuring that, as Hunt so helpfully says,
‘business can plan without worrying about the Maoris or
some other group coming in.’

‘Some other group’—that’s you and me, folks. Us. The
people of New Zealand, the majority who don’t have
‘business interests’ or big money to protect.

The fact that NBR can give such notions oxygen tells us
that (a) its idea of the level at which debate over MMP
should be pitched is abysmally low and (b) business
leaders like Shirtcliffe have learnt nothing from their
defeat in 1993 and remain insufferably arrogant about
what they think is best for this country. Interestingly,
Alasdair Thompson, frequently sought by the media as a
spokesperson for Auckland business, was reluctant to
comment to NBR because, in his view, over-emphasizing
the MMP ‘bogey’ last time caused a pro-MMP backlash.
Perhaps we should be grateful that Shirtcliffe still has no
problem with over-emphasis, as that 'snowball' quote
shows; as we approach another referendum on electoral
reform, it might even be that he will again be the best thing
MMP has going for it. Keep up the good work, Peter.

NB: The actual ‘business community’ and the people
purporting to speak for it are not necessarily, or even, the
same thing.