The failing nation-states of Western Europe are not peacemakers. They are warmongers, the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ – the Coalition of Sanctimony and Hypocrisy. They are trying to frame the current geopolitical struggle between a unipolar versus a multipolar world order as a struggle of the ‘Democratic’ Axis of Good against a strengthening ‘Autocratic’ Coalition of Evil located through most of Eurasia.

Germany’s new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says “whatever it takes“. Twice this year the coalition of sanctimony has derailed opportunities to end the Russia-Ukraine War through the re-creation of a neutral Ukraine. (The present war is already nearly as long-lasting as World War One.) The re-creation of a neutral Ukraine is the only available off-ramp to end this war.

The anti-peace phalanx that pretends to be pro-peace – headed by Merz, Keir Starmer, Ursula von de Leyen, and Mark Rutter (and formerly including Joe Biden and Boris Johnson) – represents the expression of a clear and open geopolitical strategy of eastwards expansion, both further into the Slavic Heartland (refer to Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality, free on Google Books, published early in 1919 though mostly written late in 1918) and in Southwest Asia (aka the ‘Middle East’). (France’s Emmanuel Macron is more ambivalent than these others, and is expected to fade from the presentCoalition as his political career comes to an end, and as France becomes consumed by domestic problems.)

Considered to be the academic founder of the discipline of geopolitics, Mackinder – born in Lincolnshire, England – was then the Conservative MP for a Scottish constituency. In late 1918 – a critical pivot moment in world history – he held his seat in the House of Commons, with a comfortable majority in Britain’s immediate-post-war election. Mackinder saw the necessity of establishing a group of smallish neutral nation-states between the two potentially resurgent “Going Concerns” of defeated Germany and defeated Russia (Russia, then in a post-war civil war, and in the process of becoming the ‘Bolshevik’ Soviet Union). In line with Mackinder’s analysis, the World War reignited in the late-1930s partly as a result of those smaller states eschewing neutrality in favour of various mostly-failed attempts to form security alliances with former antagonists, and/or with Britain and France.

On the matter of Mackinder’s relevance to the 2020s’ world, note this quote re Heartland: Three Essays on Geopolitics, by Halford John Mackinder: “Heartland is a fascinating introduction to a pioneer of geopolitics. Halford Mackinder’s trailblazing ideas have influenced international politics to this day. His concept that world domination depends on the control of the global ‘pivot area’ or ‘heartland’ – the centre of the large land mass of Europe and Asia – has informed the political tactics and wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe through the decades. His theories have influenced politicians and political scientists for generations, most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to a long line of U.S. presidents. In our times, the importance of Mackinder’s heartland theory for the United States’ fight to enforce global hegemony, Russia’s struggle to stay independent and relevant on a world stage, and China’s plans to establish a trade route between East and West, make Heartland essential reading for understanding our world.”

Ukraine and Israel as Western bridgeheads into the Eastern heartlands

In geopolitical context, both Ukraine and Israel can be seen as Western bridgeheads into the ‘Near East’ and ‘Middle East’ heartlands; bridgeheads against the west-resistant poles of Russia and Iran. Ultimately these geopolitical gambits seek as an end-goal the ‘containment’ of China; China being understood as the single biggest threat to the unipolar Western – essentially Christian, labelled ‘Democratic’ – world-order fantasy which prevailed especially in Washington in the 1990s. (In the Cold War, this geopolitical contest was presented as the battle of the Free against Communism.)

Since the demise of Joe Biden (dubbed ‘Genocide Joe’ by some, and not without reason), there has been a bifurcation of the western project.

The United States is most focussed on its Middle Eastern agenda (which, as in Obama times, very much includes geopolitical designs on Syria), so has doubled-down as Israel’s main sponsor of regional terror. Nevertheless, the self-appointed European coalition of sanctimony has been fully and consistently behind “Daddy’s” geopolitical interest in promoting Israel’s asymmetric war of aggression; and still is, despite some attempts to appear to be distancing itself from the Palestinian theatre of conflict. (On ‘Daddy’, see “Daddy” diplomacy: The politics of obsequiousness, Hugh Piper, Lowy Institute, 24 July 2025.)

Israel’s barbarism could only be tolerated by any group of countries if those countries had a ‘higher’ political purpose; namely opposition to a geopolitical adversary shared with Israel – an adversary which dares to resist western power. Any coalition facilitating Israel’s anti-human agenda (of erasing “human animals”, aka Amalek) has fully given up any claim to be considered The Good. In line with geopolitical realism, there are no Good Guys.

The European Coalition of Sanctimony quickly formed when peace threatened to break-out in Ukraine following the 28 February 2025 meeting in the White House. Their aim is to locate German soldiers in Ukraine; an insensitive act which to Russians would be as provocative as 1914 and 1941. If a post-war Ukraine is to have genuine peacekeepers, they cannot be belligerents; such peacekeepers would have to be there under the auspices of the United Nations, and only from countries which are verifiably neutral with respect to Eurasian geopolitics (India would probably qualify; so would South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Ethiopia, Egypt, Nigeria – and of course Fiji with its tradition of peacekeeping.)

The Coalition is, it claims, fighting for the ‘rules-based-order’ in one conflict while pushing-back against international law in the other (genocidal) conflict. A coalition of hypocrisy, indeed.

In the end, international rules are meaningless in a battle framed as Good versus Evil. Evil, by definition, does not follow the rules. So, if Good is to wage an unyielding war against Evil, why would Good handicap itself by following rules that Evil cannot be expected to follow? Laws can be applied to a real war – of A versus B – but not to a war when one or both sides claim to be Good combating Evil? For the sanctimonious, defeating the posited Evil is more important than following the rules.

These West European interests are pulling back from their unconditional support for Israel so that they can focus on their belligerence towards Russia. While they don’t admit the contradiction in their embarrassing support for one aggressor (Israel) and their adamant opposition to another (Russia), Israel’s war in Palestine has removed any possibility that the coalition can seriously claim the moral high ground.

In Aotearoa New Zealand – the little-West located in the far southeast – we need to show more empathy towards Asia, which has been invaded and abused many times by The West, and less towards West Europe which was last invaded by Asia in the fifth century (by Atilla the Hun). New Zealand (eg under Jim Bolger) once considered itself to be an Asian country. Now, New Zealand’s political class is at risk of reinterpreting the continent Asia – sixty percent of the world’s humanity – as a monolithic antagonist. Can the lands to the south of Asia – literally, Australasia – be trusted by Asia?

In geopolitical terms, the West are the aggressors – and the peace blockers – in both of the present faultlines.

The Central Issue: Unipolar versus Multipolar ‘World Order’

Realist scholars of geopolitics – including the conservative John Mearsheimer and the progressive development economist Jeffrey Sachs – are clear about the nature of and the openness of the western geopolitical project. They see the eastwards expansion of the west, cloaked in its narrative of sanctimony, as somewhat problematic.

A unipolar world order is not necessarily an overt dictatorship over every human on the planet. Rather, it is a system in which one central polity – potentially one man or woman, but more likely a technocracy of truth-guardians – has an effective global veto over the contest of ideas, should it choose to use that veto. In a multipolar world order, such vetoes may operate regionally, though there could be no ‘one-veto-to-rule-them-all’.

The first thing that people across the world should consider, is whether the one-empire world is a better aspiration than a multi-empire world; noting that empires come in both overt and covert forms, and that empires can vary from the somewhat benign (ie fraternal) to the severely malign. (Mackinder’s principal principle was that of ‘fraternity’.) Is a single benign empire best? The issues here are twofold: how easily can a benign empire become malign; and how can we be sure that a benign hegemon is really as benign as portrays itself? (We may note the more benign optics of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World compared to the chilling repression underpinning George Orwell’s 1984.)

The West’s illusion of being non-violent in achieving its objectives is a result of it using violence only as a last resort; the West favours heavy-handed diplomacy, known in earlier imperial times as gunboat diplomacy. Importantly – as we have seen in Palestine and Iraq, and as we saw especially in World War Two, Korea and Vietnam – the West will always resort to extreme violence if it feels it has no other choice. The West will always bring out its ‘big bazookas’ if it feels sufficiently threatened or sufficiently punitive.

The coalition of sanctimony, through Mark Rutter, let slip the truth that the President of the USA is ‘Daddy’. Another ingratiating word that I’ve noted, for example in Berlin Briefing podcasts, is ‘uncle’; a word that this year cost the Prime Minister of Thailand her job (see Thailand’s PM suspended over probe into leaked ‘uncle’ phone call with Cambodian official, Euronews 1 July 2025).

Daddy! says it all. The coalition wants a military presence in Ukraine. Please Daddy! Don’t stop the war in a way that obliges Ukraine to become a neutral country (eg in the way that Austria was obliged after World War Two).

Mackinder claimed: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island [Eurasia-Africa]; who rules the World-Island commands the world.” (Not unlike the Muldoon political stratagem which contributed to New Zealand choosing to adopt MMP. “Who rules the Cabinet rules the Caucus. Who rules the Caucus rules the Parliament. Who rules the Parliament rules the Country.”)

Mackinder, in his later writing, emphasised the lands between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea as the Heartland. The World Wars of the twentieth century can be seen as grabs by Germany for Ukraine, the heart of the Heartland. Which country is it today which – using ‘whatever resources it takes’ – most wants to gain effective control of all of Eastern Europe, including former Soviet republics. Who rules the European Union rules Europe. Who rules Nato rules the West. The United States’ role in Nato is diminishing. Who, who once played a back seat in Nato, is now muscling into the front row?

Let’s play Dominoes, noting that geopolitical advance is performed using various ways and means, soft power and economic power as well as hard power. From a European viewpoint, the final important dominos would be Georgia (an especially interesting prize, given the ambiguous statuses of Abkhazia as a seaside playground for Russia’s richest and South Ossetia), and maybe Belarus.

Further south, after Syria and Iran are neutralised by Israel and the United States (noting the events of 1953), there are – as dominoes for American imperialism – Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Russia, with Belarus and Kazakhstan, would then be encircled. The geopolitical West then would be literally on China’s border; adjacent to China’s sensitive Xinjiang province (aka East Turkestan). It was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s published dream; to contain China, to effectively veto China as a ‘player’. Something like this was Brzezinski’s open conspiracy.

Conspiracy Theories

Yesterday we heard this (Donald Trump says China, North Korea and Russia ‘conspiring against’ US, BBC News, 3 Sep 2025) from the American president. Yes, he was probably baiting the media. But we have been told that only feeble-minded people believe in conspiracies. Are conspiracy theories only lulu-lala when they are espoused by anti-ruling-class people? Is it OK to laugh-off other people’s conspiracy theories while quite earnestly promoting one’s own?

I heard this just the other day on Berlin Briefing, Why military service is back on the table in Germany(14 August 2025; 28’20”); the 2029 hypothesis which is gaining all the hallmarks of a Euro-conspiracy theory. Young soldier: “For example, 2029, the date that is put there out in the room from all Nato allies…”. Nina Haase: “Hang on there, to explain what that means, the date 2029 is the date when most military experts seem to agree that Russia will be in a position theoretically to test Nato’s Article Five, so to test an attack on one of Nato’s countries to see just how Nato will react, whether the other countries will come to help, because that’s what Article Five means, an attack on one is an attack on all.”

A good reference for the 2029 story is Germany’s Army Is Rebuilding. What Could Go Wrong?, Politico, Jessica Bateman, 29 August 2025, ‘”We are now moving from a war of choice to a war of necessity,” he [Carsten Breuer, the Bundeswehr’s highest serving general] explained. From security analysis he believes Russia will be capable of attacking NATO territory by 2029, with the caveat that this depends on the outcome in Ukraine and whether the war exhausts the Kremlin’. Remember Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass-destruction’!

Nobody ever says why Russia would want to attack a Nato country in 2029 or any other year; allegations-of-evil by western soothsayers notwithstanding. Russia has never aspired to possess Western Europe, and its hegemony over Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989 was entirely in the context of the finality of World War in Europe. The coalition of hypocrisy simply asserts this conspiracy theory as a justification for the militarisation of a near-bankrupt Old Europe, to deploy Donald Rumsfeld’s2003 putdown.

Western Europe is undergoing an Economic Implosion

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are all now in economic crisis; in fiscal crisis. Their spending cuts led to revenue constriction, meaning that less government spending has led to bigger (not smaller, as the neoliberals presume) budget deficits. With France it’s especially political, given the present fiscal crisis, the looming presidential election there in 2027, and the lack of unifying candidates to replace Macron in that role. (Marine Le Pen, who has become a potential unifier of the non-Centre has been barred from running.) The United Kingdom government is imploding too, and for similar reasons (though Nigel Farage, continuing to espouse fiscal conservatism, remains a less likely unifier). Many people in Britain think that the Labour Government cannot survive even half of its five-year term, despite Labour’s huge majority in the House.

In Germany, there is some pressure on the right for the CDU to dump its SPD coalition partner in favour of finding common ground with the populist-right AFD. But ‘Putin’ has become the number one political issue in federal Germany, and the AFD are – at least in Merz’s eyes – ‘pro-Putin’.

In principle, Merz could revive Germany’s economy – and enhance his own political fortune – by practicing Hitlernomics; reindustrialisation through a government-spending initiative to invest in rearmament. Whatever it takes. Hitler’s popularity in the 1930s increased because he got Germans working again. But Merz has agreed to buy Germany’s weapons from the United States, so that the arm-twisting United States can make more money and less war.

Most European countries are facing radical demographic change. To fight wars, they will need to exploit immigrant labour. Of course that happened in World War Two, too. One thing we hardly ever heard about, re WW2, was Germany’s reliance on and exploitation of ‘immigrant’ slave labour. Many of the victims of the Royal Air Force in wartime Germany were in fact slaves from the places the RAF was supposedly trying to save.

It all leaves the polities of the countries which make up the coalition morally, intellectually and financially bankrupt.

The Rise of the Conservative Left

The nuanced political chatter in Europe now is about the rise of the ‘conservative left’. And, indeed, it appears that the ‘populist right’ is moving leftwards on economic policy. In practice, that will mean a return to something like Keynesian economics. To a degree this is what is keeping Giorgia Meloni popular in Italy, while the handwringers and conservatives to her north are tanking in the polls.

In New Zealand, there is one authentic party of the conservative left; New Zealand First.

The three policy-axes which determine elections are: economic (progressive [left; fiscal pragmatism] versus neoliberal [right; fiscal conservatism]); cultural [multiculturalism versus dominant-culturalism]; and geopolitical [conciliation versus belligerence re foreign states].

In Europe and elsewhere, the Left (Die Linke in Germany) is ‘progressive’ on fiscal policy, ‘progressive’ on identity politics (including open to immigration), and pro-peace. The Right (AFD in Germany) is becoming ‘progressive’ on fiscal policy, is conservative on identity politics (including immigration), and pro-peace in Europe. Two-out-of-three (potential points of agreement) ain’t bad; especially as left-identity politics is slowly giving way to ‘bread-and-butter’ issues.

So the left-Left and the right-Left may be able to ally to form future coalitions which will oust the “Saatchi and Saatchi” (to quote the late Jim Anderton, as in ‘the difference between National and Labour is the same as the difference between Saatchi and Saatchi‘) centrist legacy parties of the hitherto mainstream political class. (We note that ‘coalitions of opposites’ are not unknown to history; for example, the alliance between the West and the Soviet Union in World War Two.)

The legacy parties, though divided on cultural/identity issues (as are the new parties), are firmly neoliberal (ie fiscally conservative, claiming the virtue of balanced budgets), supportive of Ukraine, and facilitating Israel’s genocidal erasure of Palestine’s indigenous population. The legacy parties can only survive if their opposition remains divided. With the rise of the conservative left – the right-Left – such division can no longer be guaranteed.

Prediction

My sense is that, on or before 2030, there is a one-in-five chance (20%) that there will be a nuclear exchange between the world’s ‘great powers’. That ‘Third World War’ will have been caused by the last-gasp resistance – on the part of the West – to the new reality of a multipolar world order. If such a ‘last gasp of the West’ exchange does take place, my prediction is that there is a 50% chance of a mass extinction event on a scale at least as great as that of 65 million years ago. That’s a 10% chance of a mass extinction event.

Nevertheless ‘nine-out-of-ten’ (or ‘four-out-of-five’) ain’t’ bad, meaning it’s more likely than not that the world does eventually settle down. I am predicting a 50% chance that the politics of Europe will decisively shift towards the ‘conservative left’ in this half-decade (or in the 2030s, towards the radical centre, parties like TOP in New Zealand); and that there will be enough common ground between the old-left and the growing conservative left to make it possible for the two-lefts to form coalitions against the withering centre; against the diminishing hurrah of today’s elite political class. Something like this did indeed happen in the 1930s; then the creation of a coalition against fascism pushed the old conservative politics to one side.

Summary

The world is facing a dangerous moment. Sanctimony and hypocrisy are not the answers. Fraternity, trustfulness, dialogue, neutrality, sympathy; they are the qualities we need to embrace and project.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

World War One is really the first conflagration of a Great World War which lasted between 1914 and 1945. That great war was a ‘”game” of two halves’ with an extended and less violent mid-war phase; total war, with an interregnum which exacerbated rather than resolved the trigger issues of early twentieth century ideologies.

These mid-war events – in particular (but not only) the rise of the Stalin and Hitler regimes in Russia and Germany – could not have happened as they did without their being embedded in the Great World War. These regimes epitomised socialist and nationalist social pseudoscientific belief systems; two of the great pseudoscientific Utopias, Marxist Historicism and Social Darwinism. To them we may add the capitalist social pseudoscience (economic liberalism; liberal mercantilism; ‘Social Newtonism’ to coin a new label) which gave the Euro-dominant world the calamitous Great Depression of the early 1930s. These three potentially catastrophic ‘scientific’ Utopias dominated the intellectual ether, so to speak, before 1914. They manifested in their various deeply problematic and distorted ways within the context of the 1914-1945 world war experience. Fascism and economic liberalism had their roots in biology and physics. The socialist pseudoscience – aka Marxism – had its roots in historical materialism, a conflation of (Ricardian) classical economics and Hegelian historicism, an attempt to create a social science of history.

In this regard, we may see the denouement (WW2) of the Great World War as a battle between three problematic personalities: Stalin, Churchill, and Hitler. Each representing their own false depiction of the world as ‘scientific’ Utopia: Marxian Socialism (aka ‘Communism’, in its pejorative sense), Economic Liberalism, and National Ethno-Supremacism. (And we note that each of these pseudoscientific belief-systems carried seeds of each other. For example, Winston Churchill’s liberal mercantilist worldview was imperial, nationalist, and deeply racist. Adolf Hitler [with no interest in appeasing aristocratic or bourgeois interests] pitched his ‘Aryan’ nationalist poison to the German working precariat. And Josef Stalin terrorised and starved his own people, especially but not only in the 1930s while the world was distracted, as the mismatch between reality and Marxian ‘science’ became increasingly evident.)

(We note that, for the post-great-war generation, these issues of the three Utopias were practically resolved in ‘The West’, through for example decolonisation, Keynesian economics, and non-Marxian socialism. Though the Stalinist Utopia took on an even more demonic second phase in Mao Zedong’s China. The Social Darwinist Utopia took on a new life in South Africa and Israel; and for a while continued to inform the Dixie states of the US south. Racism never really left the United States. And Economic Liberalism – initially as neoliberalism, now as Liberal Mercantilism – returned to the world with a vengeance in the 1980s. Today, just as Stalin could not reconcile Marxism with reality; our western liberal elites cannot reconcile the diktats of the prevailing [and increasingly mercantilist] capitalist ideology with reality.)

Were there Goodies and Baddies in 1914?

However we choose to see this 1914 to 1945 period of widespread humanicide, it’s difficult to see a clear group of ‘Goodies’ and a clear group of ‘Baddies’ in June 1914. Thus, we can at least start our analysis of this war without succumbing to the ‘Goodies’ versus ‘Baddies’ (Good versus Evil) narrative. I would argue that the emergence of this as the predominant narrative of modern warfare, and its conflation with Winner versus Loser (‘we won, you lost, eat that!’) narrative, were themselves the single biggest cause of the world’s greatest conflagration to date. (For interest, see this New Zealand Journal of History review of Paul Goldsmith’s book We Won, You Lost. Eat ­That!; a book which derives its title from the late Michael Cullen, former Minister of Finance of New Zealand. Indeed it is Goldsmith who is easily the most qualified current politician in New Zealand to be Minister of Finance.)

Nevertheless, there is a compelling argument that Germany was ‘The Bad Guy’ in WW1 because it was the ‘principal aggressor’, evidenced by the fact that most of the fighting took place on other countries’ territories. True, but the story of aggressor versus aggressee – invader versus invaded – is more nuanced than that. Two comments here: the most significant battle in 1914 – in August 1914 – was the Battle of Tannenberg, fought in Germany (East Prussia); and much of the important action of the war was fought in Germany’s proxy territory, the lands of Austria-Hungary. Though almost none of these battle-sites are in modern Austria, Hungary, or Germany. On the western front, the earliest battles were fought in Alsace-Lorraine, territory then held by Germany.

In reality, the three-way war that ended inconclusively and abruptly in November 1918 (albeit with a clear but not huge ‘advantage’ to the Western Powers) was ‘settled’ as if there had been a decisive military victory to The West. (For the first half of 1918, Germany had won the war in the East and was winning the war in the West.) Victors’ justice soon followed, although the Americans prevented it from descending to show trials of war criminals only the losing side. (We note that a similar process had taken place on the Eastern Front, with Germany able to impose victors’ justice over Russia; indeed the German state had done all that it could to facilitate the second [Bolshevik] Russian Revolution of 1917. Leon Trotsky signed the humiliating Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918, which among other things granted most of Ukraine to Germany. Further, the Western Powers then [ie early in 1918] involved themselves in the subsequent Russian Civil War; see The Allied Intervention.)

In WW1, the victors – the western powers – became ‘The Good’; the ‘victors’ usurped the narrative (as victors do), and would consequently place themselves in the predominant position to determine how the subsequent ‘peace’ would play out.

In WW2, the sequence was reversed. Rather than the victors becoming The Good, ‘The Good’ became the victors (but not the only victors). Indeed from 1944 The Good puzzled over why it took so long for their adversaries to see ‘the writing on the wall’. The answer was largely obvious, the English-speaking ‘Good’ (aka The West) waged relentless terror campaigns against ‘The Bad’; most of The Bad had presumed they were The Good (and fought hard on that basis). The Good had (inadvertently?) reinforced the belief that The West was The Bad, through their malicious and relentless bombing of civilians. Who would surrender to such aerial firebombers; what other kinds of evil could they cook up? In reality The War – as are most wars – was waged between The Bad and The Bad; or – as in the Great World War, it became The Bad versus The Bad versus the Bad versus the Bad (now including Japan). In the end it was victor’s justice that prevailed, posing as the Judgement of The Bad by The Good. The West and Soviet Russia got away with their many pre-war crimes and war crimes, scot-free.

World War One was not a decisive victory on either front

In the land war, while in a stalemate on the western front in 1916 and 1917, Germany had the military upper hand in the first half of 1918. In the end though, the most vital factor was the British naval blockade, and the associated economic war. Germany was being starved. Yet the worst of the food shortages in Germany were in the winter of 1916/17. By early 1918, Germany was able to redeploy battle-hardened troops from the Eastern to the Western Front. And Germany now had access to food supplies from Ukraine.

On the adverse side for Germany, however, was the arrival of American troops into France. These were ‘green’ troops who could not compete with Germans in direct military combat. But they did bring with them, unintentionally, the lethal weapon which may have won the war for the West: influenza.

As I see it, Germany lost its advantage in World War One for three reasons: the economic blockade, the lack of strategic vision of what ‘success’ on the Western Front actually meant, and the influenza brought by the American troops. (The 1918 influenza pandemic was most likely due to a hybrid novel H1N1 virus, forged in France as a result of a combination of the lethal influenza strain traced back to military barracks in Kansas in 1917 and a severe seasonal strain of ‘Asian flu’ already present in France.)

With the lack of strategic direction and military setbacks from July 1918, the German leadership – a dynamic flux, with an overall focus on civilianisation – sought to freeze (or even make concessions in the form of withdrawals from occupied territories) the western frontline so that it could end the war with its eastern gains intact. To this end, a new liberal Chancellor – Prinz Maximillian von Baden (interestingly, in light of later Nazi developments, a known homosexual) – was appointed early in October 1918. Also interesting, Prinz Baden and half a million other German civilians, became “seriously ill” with influenza that spring.

Returning soldiers from the western front were the main transmission vectors of the 1918 influenza pandemic, the ‘Black Flu’, the misleadingly named ‘Spanish Flu’. It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that the influenza, brought in initially by the American troops, played a vital role in Germany’s military setbacks in the late-summer and spring of 1918.

There seems to be very little written about the contribution of either the influenza or the naval blockade to Germany’s truce (a truce which began through Germany’s leaders reaching out to US President Woodrow Wilson; but which morphed into a substantial political defeat) which, to the West, ended the war, but which to many Germans looked very much like a ‘stab in the back’. Hence, from the German point of view, scapegoats had to be found, and the events which led to an eventual continuation of the Great World War were set in train. This was not helped by poorly considered attempts (especially at Versailles in 1919) by France and Britain to make Germany – now firmly ensconced in the western mind as a comprehensive Loser – pay for the war. And, perhaps most significantly, Germany being stripped by the Western powers of the full suite of its military gain in the East. Ukraine and other German-acquired territories were returned to the Russian Empire; now in the form of the ‘Communist’ Soviet Union, although in 1919 very much in a state of a civil war in which the West had intervened.

These events clearly represent the foundations of the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum; more than anything, Germany wanted Ukraine back. Germany’s main weakness in World War One had been its resource base, especially its inability to feed itself. Germany, from the 1870s onwards, had become a food importer following its rapid industrialisation and imperial outreach (which included Samoa and New Guinea). And Germany also needed time to repopulate, to breed a new generation who could fill and administer what it saw as its ‘rightful’ empire in the west, and in the world.

We can clearly see Germany’s growing vision to replace its former far-flung empire by acquiring – as a proxy empire – France’s overseas territories. We saw this play out in 1940, with the creation of ‘Vichy France’ a nominally independent client state of Nazi Germany, and to whom the whole of the French Empire was designated. (In this light, had Germany’s military plans worked out in the early 1940s, France’s interests in the Northern Levant – Syria and Lebanon today – represented a possible solution for the alleged ‘Jewish problem’ of Eastern Europe. The West had a similar ‘Jewish problem’, which was resolved initially in 1924 by shutting down Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom and United States; that shutdown was still in place post-1945, meaning that The West used the Southern Levant as a repository for its erstwhile Jewish immigrants.)

We might note that, today, Germany is very well aware that it has the same resource vulnerability that it had from 1914 to 1940; and must look East for a solution. In addition, many people in Germany are well aware of a new form of demographic ‘crisis’ that Germany is facing, and that immigration from Eastern Europe (and a further degree of proxy absorption of Eastern Europe) represents its only plausible hope for an ‘ethnic European’ future.

What Happens if The Bad wins a World War (or any war for that matter)?

In 1918 the politically victorious West was able to create a Goody-Baddy narrative, facilitating a victors’ justice by presenting it as Good judging and punishing Bad. One consequence, reinforced by the western campaign of terror over Germany, half of which took place from November 1944 to April 1945. (Documents which have since come to light suggest that this bombing campaign – with the loss of 800,000 German civilian lives through horrible fiery deaths – was a failed genocide. The Morgenthau Plan, for example, advocated what amounted to bombing Germany ‘into the stone age’ – an expression which, applied to Vietnam, resurfaced in the 1960s – reducing Germany’s population from 80 million in 1939 to 30 million. 80 million people standing side-by-side along the equator-line would complete a circle of the world; now imagine randomly executing five-of-every eight people in that circle. Nuclear weapons were one means of making that genocide of civilians and refugees ‘more efficient’, as was actually done in Japan. Britain’s genocide plans included Operation Vegetarian, a dastardly scheme of biological warfare.)

In the end The Good was able to conceal most of its many very Bad contemplations, in large part because it was becoming more concerned to turn its killing attentions onto its erstwhile ally, Stalin’s Russia. Interestingly, as A C Grayling noted in Among the Dead Cities, the British leader of its terror-bombing force equated his efforts (killing 800,000 civilians in Germany) with the numbers of civilians estimated to have died of starvation or malnutrition in World War One as a result of the naval blockade.

Of course, whoever ‘wins’ a world war will use the victors’ prerogative to call themselves The Good. But, if, during a world war, ‘we’ have fully convinced ourselves that we are The Good, and we are suffering unsustainable losses, at what point do we (aka The Good) surrender to The Bad? Do we fight on, futilely, to the last man and woman, as it seemed the Germans and the Japanese were doing in 1945? Do we call a truce, as ‘we’ did eventually in Korea in 1953, and in Vietnam in 1972? Looking back, we are truly grateful that we did end those two Asian wars, one with a result that would be called a ‘draw’, the other becoming a clear defeat in 1975.

In the Good versus Evil narrative, Good never capitulates to Evil; not even if the alternative is the nuclear destruction of all life on Earth.

Truth and Reconciliation versus Accountability and Retribution

As we have seen at the end of World War One, an attempt by Germany at reconciliation to end the conflagration – including a willingness to have war crimes assessed and adjudicated in an international court – turned into a humiliation of Germany; that humiliation, in turn, ensured that the conflagration would recommence at a time of Germany’s choosing.

Fortunately, we have the South African experience of the end of Apartheid as a template for another way: Truth and Reconciliation. The former can always win out over the latter. Processes of humiliation and punishment are accompanied by large-scale processes of evasion and concealment; the incentives are to conceal rather than reveal the evidence of what really happened. It is better to know and not punish, than to punish a few scapegoats and to conceal the rest.

The best outcome is Remembrance, not Punishment and Vengeance. Sunlight is the strongest disinfectant. And to remember all; not to over-remember some things while severely under-remembering most things. For most younger people in the world today, World War One is understood as gritty soldiering in the trenches of the Somme, or under the cliffs at Gallipoli. And World War Two is reduced to Adolf Hitler’s genocidal mania, and Winston Churchill’s ‘heroic’ campaigns to defeat Goering, Rommel and Hitler (thereby, though too late, to save the Jews). Even the Pacific War is largely forgotten, except for reminders every five-years or so of Pearl Harbour and Hiroshima; the rest is unfathomable nuance.

Today

The western powers have tried hard to present themselves as ‘The Good’ in a biblical struggle through their Ukraine client regime, against Vlad ‘The Bad’. Yet the paucity of western Goodness has been so deeply exposed by the western alliance’s complicity in the genocide by Israelis of their co-semitic Palestinians, with whom they share the land known from 1918 to 1948 by some as ‘Mandatory Palestine’ and by others as ‘Eretz Israel’. Whatever we think of the virtue of the various western alliances (starting with the French-British Entente of 1904), clearly they are not ‘The Good’. Like all the other dirty wars in the twentieth and twenty-first century, the contests are between The Grubby and The Grubby, each looking for an opportunity to impose victor’s justice over the other.

Israel is trying to create a nationalist ethno-Utopia in accordance with the principles of Lebensraum. Israel has been doing so since the newly formed United Nations inflicted WW2 victor’s justice upon an indigenous third party in 1948.

Truth and Reconciliation is the answer; researching what happened and how and why, noting the root of the word ‘publication’ is ‘public’. Not one-sided Accountability and Retribution.

Conflicts will always exist. If we can get past the Good versus Bad narratives, we can make deals  which are never perfect for either party; but better for all three parties (noting that world wars have major impacts on third parties, such as the indigenous people of the Levant; and such as the birds, bees, people and trees, all of whom will lose big-time in the case of a self-inflicted extinction event).

Two Interesting Historical Deals

In the Napoleonic Wars – World War Zero – we had the British on one side defending the ancien regime European orders of feudalism and merchant capitalism; versus the French side which (under Napoleon Bonaparte) both advocated for and subsequently destroyed the new revolutionary liberalism.

As in World War One, the British Navy played a major role. Important territories for France were the Indian Ocean islands of Isle de France (now Mauritius) and La Réunion. In 1810, Réunion Island was captured by the British. In 1814 a deal was done. Réunion was swapped for the more economically valuable Isle de France. Great Britain had the military advantage of having captured the less populated part of this ‘France in the Indian Ocean’. Hence, Britain in 1814, leveraging off its relative military success, instigated a swap deal; Britain gained Mauritius (reverting to its former Dutch name), and Réunion was restored to France. (As usual in those times, indigenous people didn’t get a look in!) For France, the only alternative was to continue the fight; in that event, France would eventually have lost both islands. Pragmatism prevailed; the 1814 swap took place.

A second event – also an allegory for our present times – involved a genocide; an event in the Banda Islands (in present Indonesia) described by Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh, in his 2021 book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. This particularly problematic genocide was perpetrated by the Dutch East India Company (Dutch abbreviation ‘VOC’; Abel Tasman’s employer) in the 1620s. (Mauritius was then also part of the VOC territory; indeed that’s who ruled Mauritius when the dodo became extinct, in 1662.) At that time, England and the Netherlands were the great mercantile rivals in the North Sea, Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean spheres. England had possessed one of the more remote Banda Islands, Rhun. To settle the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, the Dutch formalised a land-swap deal which at the time seemed very advantageous to them (Manhattan or Pulau Rhun? In 1667, Nutmeg Made the Choice a No-Brainer, New York Times, 2024). England got the last laugh, however. It had acquired Manhattan Island; and, as they say, the rest was history – world history – the island in which fortunes were made from real estate deals.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The following two tables show New Zealand and the 24 other economies in the world most easily and fruitfully compared to New Zealand. The countries are sorted with the worst-performing economies (in terms of economic growth per capita) listed at the top. Thus, taking four-year compounded growth for 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, Germany was the worst performer (ranked 25 out of 25); its economy, adjusted for population growth, shrank over four years by 1.2 percent.

The ‘top’ three countries in the table all had such negative growth.

Table 1: Rankings for 25 Advanced Economies 2019-23

source: IMF World Economic Outlook Database, April 2025

On growth, New Zealand was in the middle of the pack, with 3.9 percent compounded growth per capita; that averages out to just below one percent per annum.

On inflation and interest rates, a high ranking is generally regarded as a poor performance; although a low inflation rate may be outside the policy target zone, just as a high inflation rate may be. New Zealand had the fourth-highest CPI inflation over that four-year period, comparing consumer prices in December 2023 with December 2019. In December 2023, consumer prices were 20.6% higher than in December 2019. The country with highest compounded inflation was Austria with 22.4%, and the lowest Switzerland with 5.5%.

New Zealand had the highest compounded interest rates for that period; it had top-ranking for high-interest. If $1,000 was ‘invested’ at the Official Cash Rate each December from December 2020, and reinvested each December for four years in total, the accumulated amount would have been $1,111. Next highest were the United States and Canada. This ranking gives a sense of the monetary policy in the four years after the 2020 covid wave; New Zealand had the tightest monetary policy for the period as a whole, meaning the strongest ‘anti-inflationary policy’. If you see Table 2 below, you will see that New Zealand had the lowest economic growth in 2024, a direct consequence of that tighter monetary policy stance.

On interest rates, we note that the countries in the Euro currency zone all experience the same monetary policy setting. It means that those Euro countries which are more aggressively anti-inflation tend to resort most to fiscal consolidation, a euphemism for government retrenchment and austerity. There is no simple measure for tight fiscal policy; the Budget deficit/surplus is often used incorrectly because government retrenchment significantly undermines government revenue.

On inflation, we note that some of those northern European countries which we normally expect to have low inflation actually had the highest inflation: Austria, Netherlands, Germany. One country similar to New Zealand on inflation and interest, and with zero growth per capita, was the United Kingdom. Australia was better than New Zealand on all three measures: growth, inflation, and interest. And much the same as New Zealand on population growth.

Table 2: Rankings for 25 Advanced Economies 2023-24

source: IMF World Economic Outlook Database, April 2025

Table 2 shows the same data items for 2024. Of particular interest is the 2024 growth and inflation rates in 2024, compared to the interest rates for the preceding four years. New Zealand, with the toughest monetary policy over a longer period certainly got the recession it asked for; and was the median country for CPI inflation in 2024, virtually bang-on the policy target. (Was the pain worth it?)

It’s important to note that many countries with significantly lower inflation than New Zealand did not have anything like the very high policy interest rates that New Zealand was subjected to; eg Sweden, Italy, France, Denmark, Slovenia. Any beneficial link from high interest rates to low inflation remains moot; and it is clear that high-interest-rate policies do much damage to the wider economy. While Japan had higher inflation in 2024 than New Zealand, we note that Japan’s overall increase in consumer prices in the half-decade was much lower than New Zealand’s. Japan’s inflationary pressures are almost entirely imported, with New Zealand’s domestically generated CPI inflation being significantly greater than Japan’s.

We should note that southern Europe was doing particularly well in 2024. Although Greece’s per capita growth is fuelled in part by substantial population losses. Spain, on the other hand, is getting its population back. Further north, the Austrian economy is looking particularly problematic; it’s no wonder the ‘far-right’ political party did so well there in elections at the end of 2024 (ten percentage points higher than the Hitler-led NSDAP party got in Germany in 1930). And Finland is not looking happy either, despite low inflation.

United States, United Kingdom and Australia continued to have above-median inflation in 2024, despite – or, more likely, because of – their continued perseverance with high-interest monetary policies.

On population growth we see that Canada has been the overall ‘winner’, presumably in the sense that it both attracts and accepts immigrants. Surprisingly, in 2024 Australia slumped in its population growth, whereas New Zealand did not. I suspect that 2025 will show more immigration in Australia than New Zealand.

Finally

All is not well in the New Zealand economy. And it’s also quite unwell in some other countries, especially the North European Euro-zone countries, and the United Kingdom. And the United States, with its tight monetary policies, seems to have only averted the fate of the United Kingdom and New Zealand (and Germany and Austria) by virtue of stimulus to its military-industrial complex. Or, strictly speaking, to its military complex. Civilian industry remains weak in the USA.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Have you noticed how, in New Zealand news items and weather reports, Nelson and Marlborough are called the “top” of the South Island rather than the ‘north’ of that island. We also get phrases such as the “lower North Island” and the “upper North Island”. And New Zealand’s narrators regularly refer to New Zealand as being at the “bottom of the world”.

These phrases reference the (conventionally portrayed) map of the world, not the world itself. Rotate the map 180°. Nelson-Marlborough will still be the north of the South Island. But they will now be at the bottom of the top island! (And noting that the Roof of the World is the Tibetan Himalayas, not the North Pole. The South Island is at a higher latitude than the North Island; eg 44°S rather than 38°S. And Upper Egypt is south of – lower than? – Lower Egypt.)

Another really annoying aspect of a similar problem – in this case, the problem of colloquial jargon – is the propensity of financial journalists to refer to ‘up’ as ‘north’, as in “the stockmarket is heading north”. An even more egregious example I heard on RNZ on 29 May (Reserve Bank cuts OCR 25 basis points) was the Acting Reserve Bank Governor (Christian Hawkesby) referring to the ‘North Star’ as the ‘target’ of arcane monetary policy. Especially problematic was when he said “if you knew your North Star was much further south”. A bit ‘woo woo’ new age, if you get my meaning. Is the Reserve Bank trying to navigate the stormy seas where myth and reality meet, as in the search for Moby Dick? (Irish navigators 4,000 years ago could always return from a trip to Spain by following the North Star. Being in the ‘lower world’, Maui and Kupe faced more complex problems.)

Does the Reserve Bank make policy decisions based on Tarot Cards? Indeed, astrology did guide policy formation for most of human history.

The lesser problem is that ‘bottom’ has a pejorative meaning; a meaning that has been transferred to the word ‘south’ (which means ‘poor’ in the label ‘Global South’). The more substantive problem is the diminishing ability of ‘modern man’ (or at least homo sapiens in the Global North) to think abstractly. A diminishing abstract capacity allows us to conflate the reality of the planet Earth with its representation in the form of a map. And once too many of us see the representation as the same thing as the reality, the ongoing repetition of that framed construct self-reinforces; we give in to the narrative for the sake of mental peace and quiet. The imputed ‘reality’ of the conventional map becomes hard-wired; the map becomes reality, hardware rather than software.

Other examples of incongruent representation follow.

Knowledge Rich

‘Knowledge rich’ is a label that doesn’t match the package; refer Govt’s curriculum changes come under fire RNZ 22 July 2025. The phrase ‘knowledge rich’ appears to be an example of vacuous bureaucratic weasel words, to use a bit of idiomatic anti-jargon; a label useless except for obfuscation purposes. We would expect that the term ‘knowledge rich’ would mean something like ’emphasising the acquisition of knowledge’; ie the more understanding of reality the better.

When asked to define ‘knowledge rich’, the senior bureaucrat interviewee said in that RNZ interview: “really well-structured, clear content, the things that we want young people to know [my emphasis] and the things [skills?] that we want them to know how to do; we want them to learn … in nice sequential and … coherent learning pathway… structured ways … and that teachers need clarity on what needs to be taught and what students should be learning at any particular point on the pathway”. That’s actually reasonably clear for a bureaucrat put on the spot, but it’s not in any way the meaning of ‘knowledge rich’. This definition is about structure and constrained knowledge acquisition; it’s about young people learning what the state wants them to learn, only what the state wants them to learn, and in the ways the state wants them to learn. The label contradicts the reality, possibly with political intent.

A Humanitarian City

The Israeli government has rightly been described as ‘Machiavellian’ (refer Machiavelli) when it represents its planned concentration zone in Rafah (Southern Gaza) as a ‘Humanitarian City’. (Refer ‘Humanitarian city’ would be concentration camp for Palestinians, says former Israeli PM, The Guardian, 13 July 2025; and Israel turning Gaza into ‘graveyard of children and starving’: UNRWA chief, Al Jazeera News, 11 July 2025. And the new Israeli-American terror unit operating in Gaza is masquerading as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; refer What is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and why has it been criticised? Al Jazeera explainer, 20 May 2025.

It is clear that the Israeli government is exploiting the increased naivete of the western news audience; a state of entrenched naivety that – as noted above – has become hard-wired in too many of our brains, thanks to the ongoing use of language which presents representation as reality.

We should also note that, in Germany in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler was able to gain a groundswell of popular support through his representation of Jews as cunning and Machiavellian disrupters; it does not serve Israel well for their present-day leaders to give any semblance of support to Hitler’s portrayal.

Holocaust

Through a relentless multi-decade campaign, it has become hard-wired into too many western brains that there was little more to World War Two than The Holocaust; ie that WW2 was essentially a battle between ‘Hitler’ and ‘The Jews’, and that it was resolved by white knights in the form of Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman coming to the rescue – albeit too late – by dealing to Hitler and giving (as compensation) Palestine to The Jews. In the process, most other narratives in that war are by now largely forgotten.

World War Two was of course far more complex. Further, the label Holocaust is an inaccurate portrayal of those catastrophic events. One strength of the English language is its capacity to borrow from other languages. The correct label for this greatest of catastrophes should be that from the victims’ own language; their label, the Shoah. The word holocaust, correctly used, has connotations of fire and brimstone (especially raining from the sky); the best-known biblical example being the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah ‘documented’ in Genesis. We may note that part of the divine and the diabolical intents of both the biblical holocaust and of the Shoah was to eradicate homosexuals. World War Two has a number of ready-made examples of true holocausts; many perpetrated by the Allies, starting with Operation Gomorrah which incinerated Hamburg in 1943, and ending with the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.

The Holocaust obscures the holocausts, and much else. Inadequate representation indeed misrepresents the Shoah as a biblical spectacle, whereas it was really a coldly cynical mix of operations conducted in the then shadows. Was the Shoah a bigger catastrophe than Gomorrah? Probably yes.

Genocide and Terrorism

Earlier in the 2020s, people such as Paula Penfold and Liz Truss tried to represent the Chinese government’s persecution of the East Turkestan (aka Xinjiang) Uyghurs as “genocide”. They were ‘weaponising’ the g-word, part of a wider cross-partisan opportunity to demonise China during the Covid19 pandemic.

In the light of recent events in the Levant, an obvious and unmistakeable genocide which too many people refrain from calling a ‘genocide’, those anti-China representations look rather silly.

It is perfectly possible that people using the same identity label can be both victims of genocide and perpetrators of genocide; most likely at different places in different times. Most petty of all, this ‘is it a genocide?’ has become an elitist word-game. Anyone who thinks that if what is happening in Palestine does not meet some English-language definition of ‘genocide’ is morally bound to come up with an alternative word or phrase – presumably a somethingelse-icide – that more accurately conveys their assessment. Myself, I think that these events may be even more than a genocide; such as philosopher historian AC Grayling’s term culturicide (from Among the Dead Cities) which expresses what – for example, the Morgenthau Plan – looked to impose on post-war Germany (seeking to reduce Germany, with a pre-war population of 80 million to an impoverished ‘pastoral’ nation of 30 million). Cultural erasure is more than genocide.

Genocide is an unfortunate reality, a human propensity which has occurred in the past, is occurring in the present, and will occur periodically (unless finished by the ‘final genocide’, or biocide) in the future. Trying to weasel our way around it through an absence of language is a trait which has hard-wired itself, through denial and distractive fig-leaves, into elite cultures of complicity and impunity.

Another such word is ‘terrorism’. Winston Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris had no doubt about the meaning of that word. So did the victims of their fiery terror, in Hamburg and many other cities. Now the representation of ‘terror’ through this word is restricted to a selected subset of resistance organisations. Winston Churchill understood that meaning of ‘terrorism’, too. His friend – Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne – was assassinated in Cairo by fascist Lehi terrorists. (Re Lehi, see Stern: The Man, the Gang and the State, Al Jazeera 13 Aug 2024.)

Appeasement

This word may be used improperly, as a damaging misrepresentation of a political opponent, or avoided when it is most needed. (Grayling, in Among the Dead Cities, concludes that the Churchill/Harris holocausts on German cities, were in large part an ineffective appeasement of Josef Stalin.)

Here’s a correct recent use of the a-word: “With such uncontrolled power and aggressive posture, it seems Israel is seeking submission [in Syria and the rest of the ‘Middle East’ region]. The Trump administration’s approach of solving crises by appeasing Israel will entrench this doctrine and push the region into further instability.” (Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in lieu of Al Jazeera ban by Israel, Al Jazeera News, about 8:05am NZ time, 20 July 2025. She ‘hit the nail on the head’.)

Could someone who has been represented as an ‘appeaser’ ever be a justifiable winner of a Nobel Peace Prize? I think the answer is a ‘qualified yes’; just as good fishers sometimes have to appease their quarry before reeling them in. But, I think, neither an appeaser of Netanyahu nor Stalin could qualify for that prize.

In reality, appeasement has to be done sometimes. New Zealand dairy owners have been routinely asked to appease violent robbers. And, in the movies, when someone points a gun at someone and says “hands up”, the victim almost always appeases the gunner, regardless of their moral position.

‘Appeasement’ is a representation that’s both underused and overused; a representation designed to construct a deception. If we cannot distinguish between representation and reality, label and labelled, then we stand to become victims to all kinds of mischievous narratives.

Cost of Living

The Government and the Opposition both frame the alleged “cost of living crisis” as a problem of inflation rather than deflation. Indeed, the linguistic minefield around economic policy is so problematic that a whole separate article is required to examine it.

The key issue for us here is that the ‘cost-of-living’ framing – ie representation – in government circles is that the economy must be in an inflationary phase and therefore a deflationary policy is required. However, when the New Zealand public complain about the ‘cost-of-living’ they are saying that prices are too high compared to their incomes; it’s an ‘affordability crisis’, not an inflationary crisis. And clearly the deflationary retrenchment policies – meaning policies to slow the economy down, to instigate a recession – pursued by the government are a critical part of the problem. The government’s solution is to represent its actual class-war anti-growth policies as ‘pro-growth’ policies. And the Labour Opposition completely falls for the way the government frames New Zealand’s structural recession as a ‘cost-of-living’ crisis.

At present, New Zealand has near-record-high (north!?) ‘terms of trade’, only slightly below the record highs of 2022. New Zealand’s terms of trade are now 50% higher than they were in 2000, and nearly 100% higher than the dramatic lows of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. As when Brian Easton wrote In Stormy Seas: The Post-War New Zealand Economy in 1997, the terms of trade represented the stormy waves, some bigger than others; and the favourable crests of those waves were when New Zealand expected (and generally got) economic good times. The troughs during the Muldoon years – not Robert Muldoon’s fault; he never had the power to shift the tides of a stormy world – were very difficult times for Aotearoa New Zealand. In these terms the twenty-first century has been the ‘best of times’ for New Zealand, and the 2020s the ‘very best of times’. Yet they are also the ‘worst of times’, to reference Charles Dickens. (Many of our most potent truths come from literature.)

New Zealand, like other countries, has experienced economic cycles and economic shocks. Through my lifetime one consistent cycle has been the short ‘trade-cycle’, on average about 32 months. We are near the crest of that cycle now. The last quarterly growth peak, September 2022, led to an annual growth peak of 4% in the year-to June 2023. Based on the usual timing of the trade cycle, June 2025 will be the next quarterly peak. It will not be pretty, if that will be the best GDP data that we get on this government’s watch. Any positivity when the next GDP figures are released in September, in colloquial jargon, may be characterised as a ‘dead-cat bounce’.

The government is undertaking structural retrenchment under the cover of a ‘cost-of-living crisis’ that means very different things to different people. Insinuating that New Zealand has a crisis of inflation – taken as a synonym for ‘overspending’ – when it has a very real crisis of structural recession and growing unemployment, is a particularly cynical misrepresentation of reality.

Conclusion

We too easily fall for these misrepresentations of reality; for representations that, in our minds, become a reality like treacle; sets of overlayed representations which play tricks on our minds. That makes us, and our political Opposition parties, quite unable to form coherent critiques of the too many misrepresented and problematic things that are happening to us.

In New Zealand, although we are allegedly at the ‘bottom of the world’, in the Far Southeast (fortunately not in the incorrectly named ‘Middle East’!). We also pride ourselves as being in the West and in the Global North. What is genuinely true is that Aotearoa New Zealand is geographically very far from most of the rest of humanity. We could use that birds-eye bottom-of-the-world detached perspective to see past the labels, the frames, the self-serving narratives. We don’t have to play ‘silly buggers’ when the rest of the world is so-doing; we can cut through the ‘bullshit’, to use some more colloquial jargon. We can be the North Star of the South.

1. With escalating geopolitical wars, and plenty of undertested nuclear weapons in the hands of numerous political sociopaths, being at ‘the bottom of the world’ may not be such a great place to be. All of us of a certain age remember British, American, and French nuclear testing in Oceania. Some, a bit older, remember nuclear testing in Japan.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

On Saturday I came into possession of this letter, transcript below.

I will note that the recipient of the letter is someone I know a bit about; I would like to know more about his time in London, circa 1930-1932. I understand that he attended the London School of Economics. I never met him; but, me being a student of the Great Depression, I wish I had known him while writing my MA thesis.

Eric Salmon lived from 1903 to 1990. Certainly a patrician, he was an Auckland City Councillor and associate of Auckland’s ‘Mayor Robbie’. While he would never have had any sympathy with the Nazi cause, I would like to think that, like me, he would have had some empathy for the German people in 1933; and the many other people then caught up in events – indeed zeitgeists – moving too fast, and on too great a scale.

Sadly, I will never be able to see Mr Salmon’s letter to his German contact (probably written late in 1932). I do not know if he replied to the letter below.

Home Address:

Schwelm (in Westfalen)
Kirkplatz 7

Schwelm, 6th VI. [June] 1933

Dear Mr. Salmon,

                                    Your letter with the interesting account of your native [town?] and the economic position of New Zealand was a great joy to me, and I thank you very much for it. I hope, you won’t take it amiss that my answer comes so late. During the last months I spent all my time in finishing the dissertation for my doctor examination. Some days ago I finally handed it to my professor, and I am now preparing for the oral examination which will take place in the end of July. – How are you getting on with your work?

                        In the course of rather a short time the political situation in this country has thoroughly changed, and the questions you put to me in your letter have found a sudden solution. I may add : also a good one. You are perhaps astonished to read that, for – as far as I know – most of the great newspapers of the world tell you just the contrary. The reason for it is that the European nations, above all France and Polonia [Poland], but England too, fear a new war, and this fear is in an inexcusable way nourished by all those German people who don’t agree with the new spirit and the new methods. The Jewish question is also of great importance. The measures we took against the Jews were not at all cruel or unjustified, as you read in English papers. All we try is only to reduce the enormous influence and power of the Jews in Germany to an extent which compounds to their small number. More and more their influence has become a destructive force in our national life. What you see nowadays in Germany is not a warlike or an extremely militaristic spirit or a mass barbarism (as many foreigners suppose), but the will to build a new nation, in which no longer the unchecked liberalism of the postwar years reigns. We were standing just before a complete breakdown and the chaos of Communism, which would have been fatal for the whole world. In this dangerous moment came the revolution of our nationalist party under the great leader Hitler. It marks the beginning of something quite new in Germany. We know that a great many tasks are waiting for us, but seeing them we are no longer desperate as it was the case in the last years. The new Germany has a new hope, a new will, and a new energy, and with them we shall overcome all problems and difficulties.

      What do you think about the change in Germany, and what do you read in the papers? I should be very glad to hear something about it from you. Hoping you are quite well I am with kindest regards, yours Theodor Hort.

Herr Hort – presumably Dr Hort, soon after – is writing from Schwelm, eleven kilometres east of the Westphalian city of Wuppertal. To the west of Wuppertal is Düsseldorf, on the Rhine; Cologne is to the south, near where the river Wupper flows into the Rhine. To the north of Wuppertal is the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s western industrial heartland. Between Düsseldorf and Wuppertal is Neandertal/Neanderthal. Most of the journey between Wuppertal and Schwelm can be taken on the ‘world-famous in Westphalia’ Wuppertal Schwebebahn, the suspension railway, built between 1897 and 1903, which runs above the Wupper River. I am privileged to have ridden on that railway in 1984.

I had hoped that, because the railway is still there, that Wuppertal had not been bombed by the RAF during WW2. No such luck. I found this article in the Burnie Advocate (Tasmania), 1 June 1943: Wuppertal raid one of heaviest of war. This was eight weeks before Operation Gomorrah decimated Hamburg. (On Wuppertal, refer also: Planning a Bombing Operation: Wuppertal 1943, My grandfather, the bomber pilot, When the singing stops on Christmas Eve, German tragedy of destiny, Wikipedia.)

I have no idea what Theodor Hort’s fate was. Maybe he was recruited for the notorious Einsatzgruppen, which was top-heavy with academic doctors? More likely he turned away, at least in his mind, from the excesses of the New Germany; nevertheless serving his country in some capacity, albeit out of the kind of obligation that would have been hard to refuse. There is a high chance he died during the war. I’m guessing he would have been about 35 years old in 1943.

Throughout the twentieth century, many young Australians and New Zealanders studied at the London School of Economics. (William Pember Reeves was its Director from 1908 to 1919.) So did many upper-middle-class Germans; Herr Hort clearly fell into that class-category. Other Germans to study economics at the LSE included Heinrich Brüning and Ursula von der Leyen.

Brüning was Chancellor of Germany from mid-1930 to mid-1932. Brüning was the centrist politician most associated with the economic collapse of Weimar Germany during the Great Depression, thanks to his ‘liberal’ policies of stubborn fiscal conservatism. He sought to balance the Budget at any cost. Germany and the world paid a very high cost indeed. I understand that the “unchecked liberalism” Hort refers to is the economic liberalism of Brüning and others (think today’s neoliberalism), and not so much the social liberalism of Berlin that was an icon of 1920s’ Germany. (As a part of that social liberalism, Germany in 1918 – Germany’s first annus horribilis last century – became a proper democracy, with proportional representation, and votes for women.)

I would imagine that Hort’s parents would have voted for Bruning’s Zentrum (Centre) party. While it started as a Catholic party, it was actually the foundation party of German ‘Christian Democracy’, having already broadened its base by 1930. Westphalia, Düsseldorf and Cologne represented the West German heartland of centrist Christian Democratic politics. And consistently these places cast the fewest votes for Adolf Hitler’s party. (The city of Cologne, the least-Nazi-supporting city in Germany, was the first large German urban centre to be carpet-bombed by the British, in 1942.)

Nevertheless, at least in March 1933, young Theodor probably voted for the National Socialists. (Although his “great leader” epithet was probably a direct translation of ‘führer’ rather than an expression of devotion.) The Enabling Act of 1933, which ended democracy in Germany, had been in force for three months before Herr Hort wrote this letter. He, like many others in a desperate country, was willing to forego democracy if other goals might better be achieved without it. Further, by 1938, Hitlernomics – borrowing ‘as much as it takes’ to re-arm and reorganise along Spartan lines – was looking like a great success. (Something suspiciously similar took place in the Bundestag in 2025, exactly 92 years after the Enabling Act, using the outvoted ‘lame-duck’ parliament to get the necessary two-thirds majority. This time it was the ‘fascists’ – AFD – who were against borrowing to re-arm; and the outvoted fastidiously-anti-borrowing neoliberal FDP, who should not have been there.)

Finally, here, we should note that Germany as a whole – and certainly western Germany – while Judeophobic, was probably not much more Judeophobic than other European countries (including the USA); and that most German Jews, to 1918 at least, had seen themselves as more Germans than Semites, and played a significant role in the German armed forces in World War One. The circumstances of 1918, however, made it a relatively easy task for would-be-politicians with nationalist agendas to scapegoat Jews. There were vastly more Jews living in the countries east of Germany, and they from 1940 to 1944 ended up being very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Germany in 1933, ‘Jewish’ identity was used very much as proxies for the twin-devils who many Germans believed had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ in 1918 (at a time when Germany appeared to be winning on the western front) and again in (and around) 1931; ‘Bolshevik’ Communists and big-finance capitalists. The 1918 claim of a ‘stolen war’ was an evidentially-false conspiracy theory which had the appearance of credibility to many desperate people looking for simple answers, and scapegoats.

On the Bolshevik matter, while Theodor Hort and others will not have known about it until much later – the winter of 1932/33 was the peak of the Holodomor where four million mainly-Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death by Josef Stalin’s Moscow-based regime. Too many elements of the western press were looking the other way. Soviet Communism was being romanticised in certain middle-class and working-class circles in ‘the West’ (though demonised in others: refer Three Women who Launched a Movement); the mega-atrocities were downplayed by mainstream journalists such as Walter Duranty.

It was the full discovery in 1939 of the Holodomor and the later Great Purge(s) that enabled the Nazis to contemplate an even worse genocide, a substantial part of which became the Shoah. The Shoah, while the worst genocide ever, was neither the first nor the last real-world example of ‘hunger games’ in the last 100 years.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.