Mike Williams. Photo / NZME
I think I’ll be glad to see the back of 2022.
Just about every story in the media seems to be bad news, though there are some very important developments that anyone would welcome as positive.
Some months ago, I wrote about the apparent success of fascists - defined by the late Madeliene Albright as “someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence or whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have”.
Three fascist figures, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump, have suffered severe reversals in 2022.
All three have had to deal with challenges to their dominance (and egos) in 2022.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which he predicted would be over in weeks, is badly bogged down. Before the arrival of winter, Putin’s army was clearly on the run, having been ejected from Kherson, the only provincial capital taken by Russia in its first attack.
The invasion has been an unalloyed disaster for Putin.
Finland shares a very long border with Russia and was previously firmly neutral but has applied to join NATO.
Visiting Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, like our PM, the leader of a social democratic party, has said that every effort must be made to assist Ukraine with weapons, money, and its refugees.
As sanctions against Russia begin to bite and its key fossil fuel exports stagnate, domestic disillusionment with Putin is growing and becoming public.
Xi Jinping, having got himself appointed by a cowed Communist Party for a custom-breaking third five-year term, has faced unprecedented public opposition to himself and his one-party rule.
Without the ability to vote Xi and his party out of office, ordinary Chinese folk have mounted large demonstrations against Xi and his zero-Covid policy and, though a violent crackdown has been threatened, opposition to the fossilised Communist establishment seems to be growing.
In a fascist state, attempts at mind manipulation can, and often do, become truly ridiculous.
Xi’s government is now censoring pictures of the attendees at Football World Cup matches so the Chinese people don’t see crowds of unmasked people.
Donald Trump, whose grip on the Republican Party seemed not to have weakened despite his defeat as US President in 2021, took what might be a fatal blow to his ambitions with the results of the mid-term elections.
With all of the seats in the House of Representatives and a third of those in the Senate up for election, Trump’s Republican Party was expected to win large majorities in both houses.
Instead, the party scraped to a tiny majority in the House of Representatives and lost a seat in the Senate where the Democrats now have a more secure majority.
The very worst results for the Republicans were delivered by candidates Trump had personally endorsed, many of whom supported his “stolen election’ fabrication.
Let’s see if any Republican will now have the guts to stand up to what is now a proven loser - somehow, I doubt it.
And let me add some good news for the Christchurch taxi driver who, last week, told me that youth offending was “through the roof” after a “teenager murdered a dairy worker”.
Thankfully, none of this is true, though the youth offending myth is regularly repeated by the National Party.
The assailant and his accomplices were in their 30s and 40s - not “youth” by any stretch - and, courtesy of Justice Department statistics, I can report that the overall offending rate for children has declined almost constantly between 2010 and 2021, from 197 to 69 per 10,000 children — a reduction of 65 per cent with 2900 fewer children offending in 2021 compared with 2010.
A dairy worker, Arun Kumar, was indeed murdered by a 14-year-old accompanied by his 12-year-old friend eight years ago, in my West Auckland neck of the woods.
This was during the life of the John Key National Party Government and no public outcry of the sort we saw last week eventuated.
The taxi driver’s opinion about youth offending is widely shared. It is utterly untrue, and I speculated on what could be responsible for this falsehood.
My guess is that the proliferation of closed-circuit TV cameras is partly to blame.
There was no record of the incident that resulted in Arun Kumar’s death because eight years ago there were very few CCTV cameras.
Auckland Council and Auckland Transport alone now have 4500 cameras and are planning to increase this to 8000.
Almost every shop and many private residences have CCTV so that crime is often recorded.
This makes for gripping television and the TV producers know that.
Because we are seeing more young people offending on TV, we think that it’s happening more often.
It’s not.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke’s Bay and is a director of The NZ Howard League.