For almost a month now, New Zealand politics has been preoccupied by the dangerous actions of the #TurnArdern movement. A small but determined group, these people have been undermining the prime minister’s dignity by turning around books and magazines bearing her image. Reports have also indicated that the core of the movement is made up of the lowest form of human life: older men.
The big issue with the book turning is that it violates once sacred norms of our democracy. For example, it was entirely unheard of for any leftwing person to hide John Key’s biography or move it to another section of a bookstore prior to his retirement in 2017. His critics also just accepted that as prime minister, he had some purchase with soft-media that would be available for him to exploit and that whining about it was pointless. Lastly, however much they may have objected to his policies, Key’s family and personal life were always considered totally off limits by political activists.
So #TurnArdern just could not be ignored.
And at first, the Turners seemed to be getting away with it, quietly gathering power with the public none the wiser. Their big mistake, however, was using the social media site Twitter.com to coordinate and report progress. That allowed dedicated media commentators to bravely alert the world to the goings on and massively amplify their antics – precisely what the Turners didn’t want.
Thanks to their vigilant tweeting, the anti-Turners were eventually able to bring the big guns of the national media to bear. This strategy was, initially, a stunning success, with the leader of the movement unmasked and personally harassed into taking his account private.
But nature abhors a vacuum. Suppressing the Turners did not, it turns out, bring about a reversion to the entirely civil oppositional situation that prevailed prior to Labour gaining power. Now the same progressive watchdogs have blown the whistle on a cadre of even more radical activists: the Ardern book burners.
Not content with merely making magazines and books bearing the visage of Ardern a bit harder to find, these extremists seek instead to scratch them from the earth.
So things have gone from bad to worse. These Burners make the Turners look like life members of the we heart Jacinda fan club. Before we we had a problem on our hands and now it’s a full blown crisis.
Let me be frank. This is no time for dangerous idealism. We are not going to get out of this situation unless we are willing to engage in some realpolitik.
We know that the Turners are sworn enemies of the Burners. Their leader recently denounced them in a tweet from his now hidden account. Whatever contempt we have for book turning, we must acknowledge the burners are a common foe and a worse threat.
That leaves us with just one realistic option: it’s time to train arm the #TurnArdern movement.