Then

I first encountered Māori nationalists in the mid 80s, when Donna Awatere’s Māori Sovereignty roadshow came to town. It is a long time ago, but I recall a clammy, lardy, Pākehā woman in a lime green, lampshade pattern caftan, who would get up on stage and work herself up into a state of hysteria with snot bubbling out of her nose, howling ‘I’m a ray-shist, when I think of doctors and teachers, I think of white doctors and teachers, not Māori doctors and teachers, white dogs and cats, not Māori dogs and cats…’ The comedy warm-up act was followed by Awatere’s lengthy harangue about how shit everyone else in the room was, feminists, anti-racists, socialists–especially those Māori who had anything to do with class-based politics, who were effectively ‘traitors’. Māori social problems were not a function of capitalist society , but rather by inherent traits of Pākehā–and the solution to these problems lay in a return to the values and ways of pre-European Māori society. I left New Zealand shortly after. Donna Awatere ended up an MP for the right-wing ACT New Zealand party in 1996, before being expelled from Parliament in 2004 and convicted on several counts of fraud in 2005. So it goes.

Now

Whether or not there is any basis to the firearms and terrorism charges laid against 17 people in New Zealand this week, the figure apparently in the middle of it all–Tame Iti–is another clown. To give one example, Iti travelled to Fiji to lend his solidarity to the coup led by the racist George Speight, which deposed the multi-racial government of Fiji’s first ever Indo-Fijian Prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry in the name of ‘indigenous rights’, the disenfranchisement of the Indo-Fijian minority … and the advancement of his business interests. The nationalists–petit-bourgeois chauvinists–do not seek to overturn the existing social order. They entrench their power by dividing workers along ‘biologically’ determined lines, setting–in the case of Aotearoa/New Zealand–Māori against Pākehā and diverting them from class struggle and effective political action.

Afterword

There was a time when the response of the SWP to anyone pointing out the communalist character of RESPECT was [in Cardinal Fang voice] you lie! lies! lies! all lies! The special kind of United Front–special because it doesn’t fit the definition of a United Front–is unravelling, with the SWP suddenly noticing that RESPECT is in fact a communalist party. The end of the affair can’t be far off. The little orange explodey sausage for Bethnal Green & Bow reportedly told SWP activists ‘off you go - fuck off, fuck off the lot of you’ last week.