Civil disobedience 'an expression of humanity'
In Context talks to some of those involved in direct action, as New Zealand experiences increasing discontent in the face of militarism, rising inequality, propaganda and the Gaza genocide.
Like other Western nations, New Zealand is witnessing acts of civil disobedience by those who see their government as increasingly democratically unaccountable in the face of militarism, increasing inequality and genocide.
Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has been one the main drivers of such protests. Successive New Zealand governments have supported Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ against armed resistance to its occupation and has refused to intervene with sanctions - a diplomatic position that has given Zionists huge lateral movement to carry out their colonial expansionist project.
Massive military spending at the expense of social programs has been another. New Zealand has agreed to be a regional node for a US military industrial complex that finds itself unable to produce weaponry needed to sustain wars with its competitors, including China.
Forms of civil disobedience include the unauthorised leaking of documents in the public interest, unauthorised demonstrations, sit-ins, occupations and the destruction of property.
The standard definition of civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies.
Mick Hall in Context spoke to individuals recently engaged in protests.
Joseph Bray
Joseph Bray (22) and Jackson Duguid (18) were charged with trespass and wilful damage after a protest at a commercial facility used by Australian arms manufacturer NIOA International in Rolleston, Christchurch on March 3. They are awaiting sentencing.
The pair were part of a group of protesters who arrived in two vehicles, cut barbed wire fencing and entered the compound and sprayed red paint over the facility’s windows. Bray and Duguid climbed on to the roof and draped protest banners off it, with one that read: ‘NIOA supplies Genocide’.
The pair padlocked themselves to a downpipe with chains and surrendered to police after 9 hours of negotiations. NIOA International said the action cost it a full day’s loss of business.
Bray was also arrested on October 7 when activists protested outside the New Zealand Aerospace Conference in Christchurch.
The University of Canterbury student believes the actions were important, as a means of making the public aware of New Zealand’s increasing involvement in the military tech industry and its role as a US node of empire.
“There’s a need to shift public perception and really enlighten people as to the technology we are now producing, the launches we do with Rocket Lab for example, and where that’s going,” Bray says.
New Zealand’s Rocket Lab has contracts to launch satellites for geospatial intelligence firms BlackSky Technology, Capella Space, and HawkEye 360, all of which have links to the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
The company has launched Blacksky satellites from New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula on the East Cape since 2019 with approval from the Government and despite opposition scrutiny in Parliament. The satellites likely give Israel geospatial intelligence used by its AI systems to select targets in Gaza, Lebanon and other countries in West Asia.
For Bray, civil disobedience is a way to campaign for change outside of a Parliamentary system that has proven incapable of ensuring the Government abides by international law or implements policies reflecting the popular will of ordinary people.
“The ways we’ve understood democracy to work, and the ways we’ve understood populism and the ‘views of the majority’ being legislated for, has been proven false,” Bray says.
“In reality, the only language that power speaks is profit and if you’re profiting from genocide, then we’ll stop you profiting, full stop.”
Bray believes his actions are morally legitimate, given the issues at hand, even if the illegality of his actions has seen him spending nights in police cells and going before the courts.
“Laws that are designed to protect the interests of capital above people, with economic benefits for the few,” Bray says.
“Of course, some laws are moral, upholding human value and justice. But once we disentangle those two ideas of morality and legality, it just becomes so clear, that not only is this type of protest justified, but it’s warranted because there is nothing that can change through what our ruling class would consider nonviolent means. I would never consider violence against property violence. I don’t believe that framing, that it is an inherently violent act.
“If I went through my whole life without doing what I thought was moral and just, then I haven’t lived a life or a life that I’m okay with having lived. But you know the consequences. I’m very privileged to be in a position in life where I can choose what my consequences will be”.
Fr Gerry Burns
Ordained in 1985, Wellington-based priest Fr Gerard Burns (67) serves in both Ohariu and in Te Ngākau Tapu parishes. He is Vicar-General of the Catholic Arch Diocese of Wellington.
He was one of six clergy who chained themselves to the door of Cabinet Minister Nicola Wllis’ Wellington electorate office for 32 hours in mid-September.
They were demanding the Government impose sanctions on Israel and recognise the state of Palestine. Other clergy simultaneously staged a sit-in at Health Minister Simeon Brown’s electorate office in Pakuranga, Auckland.
“I got invited to be part of that through Christians for Peace in Palestine, an ecumenical group, also linked with the Anglican group Common Grace,” Fr Burns says.
“They believe a key way of pressuring Israel is through boycott, divestment and sanctions, a campaign we bring a particularly Christian tinge to, I think, in terms of language and symbolism employed, something distinctive.”
Fr Burns says the group had been prepared to be arrested during their action. “That was one of the things that was canvassed in terms of the preparation of the group,” he says.
“Like a lot of these things, there’s grades of what people are prepared to do and be involved in. The idea was to gain access to the office, set up a little prayer circle, with the expectation we’d be asked to leave… If the police said, ‘oh, well, we’ll arrest you now because of all this’, then we would accept that, but not necessarily fight being taken out of the place.”
Burns comes from a Catholic tradition with a rich history of civil disobedience, from Fr Daniel Berrigan who raided US draft board offices during the Vietnam war in the US, to philosopher and celebrated saint Thomas Aquinas, a key figure in the natural law tradition, who argued that unjust laws have no binding moral force, which we are in fact obliged to actively oppose.
“I suppose, I became interested in things like liberation theology, which we studied a little bit when I was in the seminary,” Fr Burns says.
“And then, of course, in the mid-80s, the ‘structural sin’ idea got taken up in one of the papal encyclicals. So, it kind of became officialised in a way, even if it wasn’t made particularly prominent, but at least it was recognised.
“Those different levels of opposing evil, whether it’s in the individual situation or the communal situation, became very much part of my thinking and way of looking at the world.”
He was also influenced by Fr John Curnow, a liberation theologian based in Christchurch during the 1970s and 80s.
One concept taken up by the reforming Second Vatican Council in the 1960s was the idea that the type of society people lived in either made it harder or easier to live good lives and win personal salvation. Many argued capitalism and other systems of domination made it harder and that systemic injustice was a grave affront to God.
Fr Burns says there is a need to employ more structural analysis within the Church to complement its spiritual mission of salvation, to help it accompany people in their daily struggles and better identify and call out injustice.
He says there are signs people desire the Church to take this approach in the turbulent political times we live in.
“One chap came along to the protest and he sort of said, ‘well, this is great, but I did feel a bit of anger that you hadn’t done this earlier’,” Fr Burns says.
“You know, that there hadn’t been more speaking up from the Church earlier, because now it just looks like you’re getting on the wave of public opinion and so now it’s okay to do this.
“I could understand it. We are late on this. There is a groundswell of opinion around this issue, so it can look like that. But that also spoke to me about a sort of yearning, with people asking ‘why hasn’t there been a stronger moral voice’, say, from the churches, or my particular Church, and I understand that. I think in among our own bishops, there must be some strong division about speaking about this thing…”
New Zealand has a largely forgotten history of Christian protest against war and conquest, including Christian conscientious objectors like Archibald Baxter, forcibly sent to Europe during World War I and tortured for two years on the frontlines, documented in his book We Will Not Cease.
Fr Burns says there is space to protest non-violently as part of Christian faith and to speak up within the Church, although some are hesitant about doing so.
“I work for the bishop, representing him personally and he hasn’t told me he can’t have me in that role,” he says.
“Within my own community, I’ve had tonnes of people express support, sometimes they just come up and say, ‘I really appreciate what you did’. I said to one, ‘you don’t have to whisper’.”
Inaction ‘kills our humanity’
In Context spoke to a student who partook in direct action involving damage to property, which would be deemed illegal. The name of the individual and details of the action are being withheld from publication.
Tactics used overseas, particularly those of Palestine Action in the UK, inspired the person’s actions. A protest in April 2008 by the Ploughshares at New Zealand’s Waihopai spy base, where Catholic peace campaigners slashed an inflatable dome covering a spy satellite, also left an impression.
“I just felt that what we are currently doing isn’t enough and isn’t working,” the individual says.
“We have this genocide being live streamed 24/7 and our institutions and governments are complicit.
“Because we live in such interconnected times, every time we see a child die because of systematic hunger or by a laser-guided bomb and we choose to do nothing or choose to not do what we know is necessary, it kills off a little bit of our humanity.
“Every time we choose to look away, it does that, and you can only do that so much before there’s no humanity left to lose. I think we live in a time where we as communities, and society as a whole are slowly losing our conscience and humanity. And I feel that if things continue to go the way it has been, it won’t be long before all that’s left is a world where we’re only concerned about stepping on somebody’s neck to get ahead right before somebody else steps over our necks.”
The student points to a failure of government in respecting the UN’s Genocide Convention, which compels signature states to intervene to stop a genocide taking place and punishing its perpetrators with concrete measures like sanctions.
Gaza has, for the individual, exposed democratic deficits in New Zealand and moral bankruptcy of its government, as well as the collective West.
“They couldn’t even do the symbolic act of officially recognising Palestine, which materially meaningless, but they wouldn’t even give that much of a concession,” the individual says.
“We protest, we write our MPs, we call people, we raise awareness and those in power are supposed to give concessions to us. But that social contract we were brought up to believe existed is broken, or perhaps it was never real. That social contract is falling apart.”
The barbarity of the Gaza genocide may have been the emotional catalyst for the person’s action, but a deeper existential angst and societal estrangement is also evident.
“I get the sense that our generation don’t see a future for ourselves. We feel that the people in power have pulled out the ladder, and we don’t feel like there’s a place for us in society any longer,” the individual says.
“And that’s why I think that a lot of young people either fall to fascist, reactionary movements, like the Manosphere, that kind of stuff, or they choose to isolate themselves and dissociate and drown themselves in narcotics and alcohol. It’s perfectly understandable.
“The global economic system is leading us to a point where things are going to change either way. We live in a time of dying empires desperately clinging to power, where society gets more restrictive and authoritarian and the more the power slips, the more they will want to grab on to it by more and more extreme means…
“I just think that I would sleep better at night knowing that I did something that makes things a little better than worse.
“We need to do something different to change how things are, because the status quo no longer has a place for us to live anymore.”
- Part 2 will be published tomorrow
Three courageous individuals who show the best side of New Zealanders, the best side of Christianity, and the best side of humanity. We are truly indebted to them, and to the journalist who had the courage to tell their story when others choose to remain silent.