REVIEWS: “AGAINST FREEDOM: The War On Terrorism In Everyday New Zealand Life”

Valerie Morse, Rebel Press, Wellington, 2007

Peace Researcher 36 – August 2008

- Jeremy Agar

The big wars of the 20^th Century, like the two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam, were “all wars about elite control”. Valerie Morse maintains that these elites have “common goals”. Readers will have their own views about the extent to which this is true, but in this context the questions are too big, and the answers can only be sketched. Morse might well have stuck to the more limited, but manageable topic suggested by her title.

Here she has some good points to make. The Terrorism Suppression Act, passed in 2002, was New Zealand’s response to 9/11. Morse discusses the notorious difficulty of defining “terrorism”. She notes that the law’s attempt to assess “intent” might not be a good idea. The concept, she argues, is too “broad and ambiguous”. Why not treat terrorism as a crime like any other? Even with good will, if the State tries to guess people’s intentions, the wrong people might be arrested.

Author Arrested In 07 “Anti-Terror” Raids

Insofar as she was herself arrested during the October 2007 terrorism raids around the time this book came out, Morse’s critique is restrained. Her crime would seem to have been that, as an anarchist and a feminist with a penchant for artistic forms of protest, she was the sort of person that irritates policemen. We all know that any connection between a Wellington librarian and international conspiracies of terror will turn out to be nil. The global enemy might be new and dangerous, but the authorities here have apparently not evolved from their previous ploddings. Since the 2007 raids we’ve been subjected to a public display of State confusion over their prime suspect. Is Tame Iti a guerrilla warrior, a performance artist or an actor? The Police raid him as an incipient danger. Later, another branch of the Government alters his bail conditions to aid his export as a cultural object.

Unlike the people who constitute the authorities (and too many of their critics) Morse can apprehend reality. She knows that 9/11 was “not an orchestrated conspiracy” but sees that it “delivered” an opportunity for the Bush regime to spread its own more powerful, because hugely more pervasive, terror. What impelled the American government’s response to the attack on New York? Morse quotes Bush’s press secretary, Scott McLennan: “The big priorities will focus on the security and economic side because they really go hand in hand”. They do indeed. Bush and Valerie Morse agree and the available evidence supports them. The elites use violence to gain economic leverage. McLennan has now come out with a book denouncing Bush. He had to spout lies, he now says, to justify an unjustifiable war. His career made him do it.

Western Fundamentalism

Morse has a problem with what she calls “Western fundamentalism”: “By this term I mean the elevation of Western modernity above all other ways of knowing and being and it includes adherence to capitalism, individualism, patriarchy, scientific rationalism, ‘Christian’ morality, commodification of the environment, private property and a belief in progress”. Here’s another too big question with too many abstract nouns. Some might find it a curate’s egg, good in parts, but it’s a stretch to conclude, with Morse, that “Western fundamentalism equals or surpasses in stridency that of its stated enemy, Islamic fundamentalism”. In a critique of present-day terrorism in which the Taliban figure prominently it’s perverse. Morse of course scorns Bush’s motives. Who doesn’t? He exemplifies all the obvious sins so blatantly that these days it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t despise him. He’s become too easy a target.

So let’s get back to the big assumptions. Bush does not represent the “West”. In fact nothing could be more Western than the criticism that activists like Morse direct at Bush. Morse asserts that in our societies “banished are collectivism, equality and intuition”. Inside the Oval Office they might be, but the reason Morse is cross - though she cannot say so - is that these ideals are hers. Equality is a “western” ideal. Neither are the Taliban, medieval bigots that they are, noted for their intuitive sensitivity. They’re not into global togetherness either. Eastern Muslim men, Morse laments, have been “cast in the role of the stereotypical enemy”. They’re certainly the villains currently favoured by pop culture, as endorsed by Bush, but, this, too, scarcely needs saying any more. Racist prejudice is not an aid to clear thinking. Neither does it help to stereotype all the heirs of the Enlightenment as bullying elitists.

Then the tone shifts. Morse is as frustrated as everyone else by security at airports, an assault, she thinks, on our freedoms. Is she saying that passengers and their baggage should not be checked, that there is no chance of more bombs and hijackings? It could well be that the routines are overly cumbersome, and lots of people doubt that future attacks will target planes. But that’s because the authorities are onto the danger. Having to take off your shoes is annoying, but travellers have to do that because of the shoe bomber. Will there be more shoe bombers? Who knows? The last one was a delusional Western man. There are plenty more copycat loonies out there.

Airline searches add to exporters’ costs, we’re told, a curious concern in that the rest of Morse’s book is unsympathetic to the needs of business. It’s directly contradictory in that she simultaneously criticises the Government for buckling to the corporate elites’ lobby to subsidise their trade by transferring the costs of security to the public. Any discussion of New Zealand’s border controls should include an assessment of our biosecurity, a topic which Morse ignores. Here, surely, public and private needs converge. We might not know if political terrorists have designs on us, but we do know that biological threats are real.

“Freedom” & “Good Governance”

The disproportionate worry about airports comes about because, for Morse, the right to personal privacy is basic, indistinguishable from systemic rights. Yet it’s a libertarian principle, putting the convenience of the individual ahead of the safety of planes, and impatience over a few minutes delay as you come back from your OE ahead of the general imperative to intercept invasive plants and insects. That’s nothing if not individualistic. Morse turns out to be a privacy fundamentalist, as “Western” as you can be. Her title’s privileging of “freedom” indicates the problem. For all of us within the Western tradition freedom is a high value, but as a political slogan in the 21^st Century it’s been captured by neo-cons and neo-liberals. This is infuriating all right and Morse will have good answers, merely suggested here, which would reclaim freedom as a progressive ideal, but in this monograph she doesn’t have the space to expound them.

Morse outlines how New Zealand’s policy has been taken over by the needs of the US. NZ’s Pacific aid, Morse says, grants more money for security than it grants for either regional education or health. So it’s understandable that she is suspicious of the talk about the need for “good governance” in the Pacific. In doing so, though, Morse equates a misuse of a concept with a reason to reject the concept itself. There is a lot of misgovernment in the Pacific. If only Wellington told Tonga, for instance, that it wouldn’t prop up a decadent feudalism, both countries would be better off. The Tongan elites misuse NZ’s aid. NZ’s government thinks it has to allow the corruption because it’s worried about “stability” and “security”. An honest insistence on clean politics would subvert this hypocritical support for “good governance”. Unfortunately Tonga is part of a global pattern. Western foreign policy, as led by the US, has long been marked by its very insistence on aiding and abetting bad governance. The State Department’s minders - Mobutu, Diem, Marcos, Batista etc, etc - have been a bunch of crooks.

So while its timely to remind us that the call for “good governance” can be a code to justify Western manipulation the fact remains that Tonga’s people do suffer because their country badly governed. A better response would be to call the bluff of the elites and agree that it would be a good idea to make policy in the interests of the peoples in whose name what is called “development” occurs.

We’re given a useful list of New Zealand firms which profit from war, but - it’s a habit - we’re soon diverted into idiosyncrasy. There are lots of other businesses that could be critiqued, but Morse mentions only one, and that’s because Fonterra “is a company built on a behaviour no other species on Earth pursues - drinking another species’ milk”. Worse, Fonterra sells its milk products to “lactose-intolerant Maori, Pacific Islanders, Asians, Hispanics and African Americans”. Morse could consider that it might matter more to the people under the thumb of the Tongan royals - and the mullahs - that they’re denied Western-style democracy. It’s easy to decry rational thinking and modernity when you’ve inherited its benefits.

Another problem is that Morse prefers bashing Helen Clark to presenting a consistent argument. In her chapter devoted to showing that the Government is playing a dubious game in Afghanistan, Morse buttresses her case by citing the National Party and, worse, the New Zealand Herald. This isn’t a good idea, not in a book which has a whole section urging us not to trust any Fairfax or Murdoch media, bastions of Western fundamentalism.

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