The Longer History of the Christchurch Attacks

On Friday, an Australian white supremacist committed a monstrous act of violence against
Muslim worshippers in New Zealand. The attack, which he livestreamed, was
steeped in the kind of global iconography and discourse that characterizes
modern white supremacy. The assailant played a song about convicted Serbian war
criminal Radovan Karadzic as he approached the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch,
and his weapons bore further testament to the global resonances of contemporary
white supremacy: One rifle apparently eulogized a Swedish girl who was murdered
by an Uzbek immigrant in Stockholm, while another celebrated a Frankish
nobleman who fought Muslim armies in Western France over a millennium ago. His
manifesto cited U.S. white supremacist mass murderer Dylann Roof as
inspiration, and featured a
diagram promoted by U.S. white supremacist David Duke on its cover.

In any
attack like this, it is important to look at the particulars: the online hate
speech the perpetrator absorbed, for example, which has proliferated in recent
years. But it is equally important to remember that this latest outrage, and similar
barbarities elsewhere, are not anomalies: White supremacy has a long, global
history, and New Zealand and Australia have played central and interrelated
roles in that history. This most recent horror is not just testament to a more
recent uptick in far-right violence. It is also the latest episode in the
ongoing story of antipodean white supremacism at the heart of both New
Zealand’s and Australia’s national histories. And then, as now, American white
supremacy has been intimately linked to that story.

The first
victims of white supremacy in New Zealand and Australia, where the latest
killer was born, were indigenous inhabitants. But by the late nineteenth
century, white colonials had also turned that sentiment against the imagined
influx of “undesirable” immigrants from Asia. The gold rushes of the 1850s
brought the first Chinese migrants to both Australia and New Zealand. Curiosity
turned to hostility as the mines were exhausted and Chinese miners moved off in
search of other opportunities. By the 1880s, both New Zealand and the
Australian self-governing colonies had enacted immigration regulations that made
Chinese immigration prohibitively expensive and therefore nearly impossible.

Remoteness
from Britain and proximity to Asia, white New Zealanders and Australians proclaimed
toward the end of the nineteenth century, would bring racial degeneration and
ruinous economic competition unless they maintained a total commitment to white
territorial, political, and economic control. As one representative explained
to the Victorian Parliament in 1899, “we have a territory with a suitable
climate, but with a sparse population, while on the other hand, we have quite
adjacent to our shores hundreds of millions of a very undesirable class of
people.” The same sentiments were echoed in legislative bodies, newspapers, and
trade union halls all over Australia and New Zealand, and the same solution was
repeatedly volunteered. In the words of that same Victorian legislator: “It
should be one of our ideals to maintain, if possible, a pure Australian blood,
or a pure British blood, or a pure British and European blood, within the
shores of Australia.”

What
followed was the White Australia Policy and its lesser-known analog, the White
New Zealand Policy. The former was enacted almost immediately upon the
federation of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901. In the words of Australia’s
first Attorney General (and future prime minister), Alfred Deakin, the new
Immigration Restriction Act demonstrated that “at the very first instant of our
national career we are as one for a white Australia.” The law empowered
immigration officers to exclude non-white immigrants on the grounds of literacy
rather than color. New Zealand had instituted a similar policy in 1899. These
laws—encouraged by the British government, which opposed explicit racial
exclusion for diplomatic reasons—derived from a similar policy adopted by the
British colony of Natal, which in turn took its cue from so-called educational
tests designed to prohibit African American voting in the American South.

In 1908, some
white New Zealanders and Australians sensed an opportunity to connect with
white supremacist allies in the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt had
recently dispatched the newly constructed American battle fleet on a
circumnavigation of the globe, and from August to September 1908, that
so-called “Great White Fleet” visited Auckland in New Zealand and Sydney,
Melbourne, and Albany in Australia. Some legislators embraced the racial
implications of the American visit, especially in the context of deteriorating
U.S. relations with Japan over the issue of immigration restriction: Liberal MP
William Steward spoke for many when he declared that “the brown and yellow
races will challenge the white race for the possession and occupancy of [the
earth]” unless white colonists rallied around American naval strength in the
Pacific. The New Zealand Times agreed,
pronouncing the fleet’s visit a “bold, emphatic assertion of the dominance of
the White Race.”  Some white Australians expressed
similar hopes, with Prime Minister Andrew Fisher later enunciating a plan to
“to join with [the Americans] as far as we may in keeping the Pacific for the
Anglo-Saxons.” While these initiatives came to naught, their intent was
unmistakable.

That effort
reached a dangerous zenith following the end of the First World War a century
ago. In Paris, the Japanese delegation hoped to write a statement of racial
equality into the constitution of the new League of Nations. Determined to
protect the White Australia Policy from Japanese claims to racial equality, Australian
Prime Minister William Morris Hughes repeatedly and ostentatiously scuttled those
attempts. “White Australia is yours. You may do with it what you please,” he
declared to the assembled crowd upon his triumphant return to Melbourne in
August 1919. While it would be an overstatement to draw a straight line between
Hughes’s actions and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor some twenty years
later, there is no doubt that this episode contributed to Japanese alienation
and facilitated the rise of militarists and expansionists in that country.

White
Australians and New Zealanders have long wrestled with the implications of
white supremacy. Moreover, that history has always been inextricably
intertwined, and it has often been connected to broader currents of white
supremacist politics across the Pacific in North America. In that context, it
is not so strange that a white Australian terrorist might choose to make his
stand in New Zealand, citing American extremists as inspiration. How all three
societies—as well as other majority-white societies across Europe—respond to
this outrage will determine whether this history of trans-Tasman white
supremacism can finally be brought to an end.