Poor newspaper proprietors, poor journalists

The Commerce Commission refused to allow the merger of NZME, owners of the NZ Herald, and Fairfax media, owners of the DominionPost. They, very reasonably, argued that the merger of the country's two major newspapers would create a monopoly that is bad for the country. The proprietors of the two media empires cried foul. They invested their money in these businesses, reaped large profits, now that the profits are drying up they want to squeeze a few more drops of juice from their investments. They lost sight of the purpose of newspapers, to disseminate news, not to create a vehicle for advertisers. There will be always news, and there will always be an appetite for well informed reporting and analysis. If the Herald and the DominionPost have to change the way they operate and work out a new, more appropriate business plan so be it. Now the vultures, investors out for a quick buck are circling these two wounded behemoths. It is likely that they would strip the assets of these businesses, cut their staff, but it is very unlikely that they would do much to improve the standards of journalism.

Down by the river side

I had such a good time last night. Our neighbours, Val and Bob, jazz enthusiasts, organised a jazz concert in our Village. They invited the New City Stompers to play for us as a fundraiser for the Wellington Free Ambulance. Jazz can cover a multitude of genres, Swing, Dixie, Big Band, Individual Virtuosos like Theolonius Monk, Stephane Grappelli, Dave Brubeck. I didn't know what to expect,
The Stompers were seven elderly men who would easily qualify as residents in our retirement village, and a slightly younger woman vocalist, but they are all very skilled musicians,
There was a trumpet, a trombone who drew a wonderful rich sound from his instrument, a nimble fingered pianist, who to show off  played a Winifred Atwell number for an audience that still remembered Winfred Atwell. There was a guitar, a drum who also played a washboard to the amusement of all, and a sousaphone, an instrument that could have been designed by the cartoonist Gerard Hoffnung. I went partly to support Val and Bob and make sure that there were at least some in the audience for the concert. I needn't have worried, the room was so full that we had to bring in more chairs from the dining room. There must have been some 80 people there and when I arrived almost all the seats were taken. After a while some of the women and then a few couples got up to dance. Some were dressed casually, some of the women were dressed up for an evening out in long evening dresses. The woman in casual trousers who got the others to get up and dance shimmied over to me and got me to join in and dance. (A round of applause) I was never much of a dancers and my dancing days were over at least fifty years ago, but I didn't want to seem stand offish, too proud, or too high and mighty so I got up and did my best to dance. It took me back to when we were newly married and I attempted to shuffle around on the dance floor. The music, some of the numbers they played, took me back sixty years or more. The song 'I left my little bright eyed doll down by the river side' was the hit of the day in 1948 when we arrived in New Zealand. I knew the tune, I hummed and whistled it at the time, but could never get the words. Last night we were given song sheets and we all joined in in the singing. I suppose when friends said that Judy and I would be happy in our retirement home this is the sort of happiness they had in mind.  I thought that seeing people, my contemporaries, enjoying themselves, despite all having their personal baggage was wonderful. Most of the women are widows, some perhaps retired and successful professionals. They all have had lives full of sorrows, tragedies, yet here they were making most of the moment. I thought that there is a story in last night's concert, In fact there are many stories, a film like The Quartet about the retirement home for old musicians could be made from the stories in this Village. 

Looking back sixty years when I last  joined in in the singing and dancing, trying to be one of the guys, trying to belong, I thought of the promise of happiness and success that lay ahead, and the disappointments and hardships that we encountered later. I thought of the music and the good times. I am not sure whether my children and their generation still play music and sing when they get together. When Bartok collected folk songs from all parts of the Balkans, he was aware that these songs were about to disappear as the feudal societies with their peasant culture were disappearing. The coffee house gypsy music that he so despised has also disappeared except as a tourist attraction.
As the whole world becomes one global village, dominated by Hollywood and mass produced culture, old men playing music of the 1920s and 1930s is precious, and we, the audience, with all our aches and pains, mobility trundlers and complaints can celebrate that we have attained a stage in our lives when we have no longer responsibilities, duties, cares, and if we  no longer look forward to a bright future, at least we can enjoy the present.

Refugee children, hospitality and exploitation

Amy Williams, a young British scholar, talked about her research of the comparative narratives of the Kindertransport. The emphasis of these narratives were, by and large, on the hospitality of the kind British people in welcoming and receiving these poor German and Czech Jewish children fleeing for their lives. The narratives left out accounts of children trying to be brave, but spending their time in the toilet so that people wouldn't see them crying, they left out the stories of the parents these children left behind, most of whom were never privileged to see their children again, they didn't touch on the many children who had lost their Jewish and German identity, and they certainly didn't talk about the exploitation of some of these children. These certainly don't talk about the hundreds of Jewish refugee children who were interned as enemy aliens and were shipped off to Canada, and notably to Australia on the troop ship Dunera on which they were ill treated, and were subsequently exploited by their Australian hosts. Nor do the narratives tell you that these children gained only temporary admission, and were only granted residency after the outbreak of the war. Their stories were used as one of the many justifications for Britain fighting Nazi Germany. 

Every feel good story as an underlying dark side. We celebrate on our Timeline in the Holocaust Centre, that in 1943 'Prime Minister Peter Fraser publicly expresses sympathy over the plight of the Jews in Nazi Europe and his interest in the development of Palestine as a Jewish state', yet we make no mention of the same Peter Fraser bending the rules in 1944 and admitting 734 Polish orphans with teachers and priests who washed up in Persia after tracking through vast stretches of Russia and Siberia,  yet the many Jewish children who travelled with them were excluded from New Zealand and rerouted to Palestine. We do not mention that although Jews lived in New Zealand since the 1830s, and were completely and very successfully assimilated, in 1930 Jews were thought of as hard to assimilate. We do not talk about the deeply ingrained latent antisemitism of the 1930s in New Zealand. We talk about Annie and Max Deckston, who saved twenty Polish Jewish orphans from Bialystok, but do not mention that they were only granted permits for these because they failed to find children in British Jewish orphanages who were prepared to come to New Zealand. The permit was initially issued for British children only.
When you see a feel good story take a critical look and see what is left out, why the story is there, what is it trying to say and what is hidden behind it.

Immigrant bashing - it must be election year.

New Zealand has a population of 4596 million (2015, a few thousand more now), less than one suburb of Shanghai, Karachi, Beijing, Dhaka, about the population of Sydney, slightly more than that of Melbourne. Yet our senior geriatric politician who is way past retirement age trots out his xenophobic concern about the large number of immigrants, particularly those coming from Asia. They push up house prices, overcrowd hospitals and schools, clutter up roads. The other main political parties, instead of ridiculing his concerns, which should be the right response, try to finesse their immigration policies to make them look like they are doing something about keeping immigrants out. The reality is that much of the increase in the number of arrivals in New Zealand are New Zealanders returning home because the grass is greener here than in Australia, England or wherever they went in search of greener pastures. Others come here because New Zealand is a good and peaceful place to live in. That is not a bad thing and politicians should be proud of it. What's more, industries that underpin New Zealand's prosperity are dependent on immigrant labour. The vast farming conglomerates would come to a standstill without Philippine labourers, orchards, kiwifruit farmers depend on Pacific Islanders for seasonal workers, our hospital would not be able to cope without Philippine nurses and Indian doctors. All this is out there for everybody to see, yet politicians think that there is something to be gained from immigrant bashing. True, immigrants need housing and there are not enough houses built. There is tax free money to be made from the housing shortage. The housing shortage could easily be alleviated, as the Labour government did in the late 1940s and early 50s, by building more houses, but this goes against entrenched interests of property speculation on which New Zealand fortunes were built right from the beginning of Europeans settlement in the 1840s. Investors in the New Zealand Company in 1840 expected huge profits from the enhanced value of their land due to controlled settlement. Auckland was built on land expropriation, exploitation of native greed, and monopoly of land. The last thing speculators want is a mass housing project on land ripe for development. This is not new, but the housing shortage has little to do with immigration. Talking about immigration is a distraction from real issues that face New Zealand. What happens if the Chinese cut back on their consumption of milk powder or get these from other sources? This would bankrupt the New Zealand economy. What would happen if poverty and inequality reaches a point where there is large scale of dissatisfaction tat leads to social unrest? How long can the country subsidise the wages workers whose values has been undermined by cheap labour in other parts of the world. Our education is undermined by emphasis on trade or technical skills for the present while downplaying the liberal arts, which are at the heart of future creative thinking. Instead of debating such issues that really matter for the future of the country, politicians on all side jump on the immigration bandwagon, whihc is a distraction.

Universal Basic Income, what to do with your spare time.

An opinion piece in today's Dominion Post by Gwynne Dyer about Universal Basic Income raised some challenging questions. Paying a wage to people who are not in paid employment goes against the deeply ingrained Protestant culture and values. There is no problem with people making money from land speculation without working for it, see the opinion piece about High Country land tenure, there is no problem with people making a mint out of speculating in shares or property, but to pay everybody a living wage so that they could live in dignity, whether in employment or unemployed goes against the grain. Yet unemployment is a feature of the global capitalist economy. It is also a product of technology, automation. No matter what Trump says, the jobs he wants to bring back to America no longer exist, and both he and the people who voted for him know this. There is a permanent divide between those who are fortunate to have a job and those who are thrown on the job scrap heap. However paying everyone enough to live on raises the question of what would people do who have no paid job. How would they use their leisure. The wealthy, who have spare disposable income, learned how to enjoy their leisure, but the working man, not used to leisure, whose whole life centred around his work, would have to learn what to do with spare time. The elderly, the retired, who live on their pension, have a lot to teach them. Those over 60 or may be 65, have the remaining possibly as much as the third of their lives to fill in. They take up hobbies, interests, and feel no guilt for not working, or at least not working for money. Society would also have to address the role of money and such institutions as continuing education, fitness programmes, broadcasting, television, the internet and libraries. In our present state of libertarian capitalist thinking we lose sight of these, that the air waves are not there to be exploited for advertising and money, but for public education and enjoyment, that Facebook and other similar programmes are there to bring people together, to communicate with others, not to generate profit for those who gained a monopoly over these facilities. These are big challenges for the future, yet curiously, none of the political parties are interesting in confronting them.

Holocaust denial - do I care

With the film Denial on, a discussion of Holocaust denial next Sunday, and incidents of Holocaust denial, and a very interesting, well attended talk by the MP, Chris Bishop on his Honours paper on the legal aspect of Holocaust denial last night, Holocaust denial is the topic of the day. I found my letter to the Editor of the New Zealand Herald about David Irving's proposed visit to New Zealand in 2004, and David Irving's comments on it. I still stand by my letter, and I am proud to be associated by Irving with my much more famous namesake, Stephen Sedley. But now I wonder whether we should care about Holocaust denial. In the age of Trump, fake news is all around us, and spreading it through Facebook and Twitter is so easy and unstoppable. So what does it matter if some people believe that Elvis is still alive, the moon landing was faked, the destruction of the two towers on 9/11 was an inside job. David Irving said in his comments on my letter that he gave a talk to a small audience in Lower Hutt on his previous visit and no one was hurt, no one was killed. He didn't say what the purpose of his visit was, or who financed it, but clearly not many people noticed it and no harm was done. But then David Irving is just a shoddy historian with an oversized ego. Only his followers take him seriously. He doesn't matter, because he has no power. Joseph Goebbels on the other hand, an even greater liar, had great power, and his lies caused unspeakable harm. I am happy to completely ignore the Holocaust deniers of the lunatic fringe as long as they exercise no power. I would not argue or debate with them, I would treat them as complete meshugas and would lose no sleep over their utterances. It is so easy to ring up the radio station and say that the world's ills are caused by the Jews, put it on the Internet and swamp your lies with lots of 'likes' to advanced them on the search engine. As long as they do no harm, don't hurt people, I treat them as they deserve, put them on the box marked 'crazies'.

Is Jewish an adjective like Spanish?

If you describe someone as 'Spanish',' Danish' 'Polish' you imply a historical link to a land, a piece of real estate. This does not apply to Jews. Describing Jews always presented a problem. I am described on my birth certificate as Israelite, though there was no Israel in existence till many years later. The term 'Zsido' Jew, just as the term 'Yid' had many negative connotations, exclusiveness, poverty, lack of genteel good manners. As an acculturated, assimilated Hungarian, 'Israelite' was a description akin to Catholic (in fact, Roman Catholic to distinguish it from other forms of Catholicism) Protestant (with its different variants, Reformatus, i.e. Presbyterian, Lutheran, Sabbatarian). It implied that I was part of a happy family of different ethnicities. The price my grandparents, or more like great grandparents had to pay for it this was that they had to give up their language, in the case of my grandparents, German, their Jewish culture, and their religion was viewed through Christian eyes and norms. The notion that we were all part of a happy, civilized, liberal family whatever our religion and ethnicity was blown out of the water by the deeply ingrained anti-Semitism of European Christian society and ultimately the Holocaust. We have to face that we are Jews, with all that the term implied. 

The Zionists also faced these issues. They were not happy to transfer their European Jewish culture and traditions to a new land. They deliberately abandoned Yiddish, the language of Eastern European Jews, they abandoned the religious practices, they abandoned, or tried to abandon the high culture of Western European Jews, Herzl wanted the language of Israel to be German, Weizmann had difficulty persuading the Zionist leadership to set up a world class university in Jerusalem, they wanted peasants with socialist leanings,  Hubermann faced great obstacles getting visas for Jewish musicians to set up a symphony orchestra. The last thing the Zionist vision needed is more Jewish fiddlers. The term Israeli doesn't conjure up an image of a Talmudic scholar, a shop keeper, a cobbler, a wine merchant (as were members of my family) a violinist, a professor, or for that matter a ganev, a thief, a crooked operator, yet the term 'Jew' has all these associations. A Jew is, to a greater or lesser extent, and outsider, with no attachment to the land, and the less he is an outsider the less he is a Jew. His value to society at large is exactly this outsider's perspective.