Radio Live’s Token Natives Stockholm Syndrome Backfires!

Update: As some of you noticed I mistakenly named Radio NZ in this post as the host sender for the show I discuss here. This of course is not true as it is Radio Live talk back radio hosting the program and I apologize for this silly mistake. I have lived here only 8 years and have not listened much to either radio as I don’t listen much to radio period. It was an honest mistake and I hope one you’ll forgive me for.

I don’t listen to Radio Live much. It happens sometimes when I drive into town around lunch time and I have listened to Willi And JT on occasion.

The reason I don’t listen to Radio Live much is because, to me, it is the quintessential representation of the part of NZ I don’t like with a vengeance.

It is the hateful, spiteful, venal, sexist, racist and above all willful ignorant part of New Zealand.

Willie and JT did not strike me as the exception to that rule on he best of days and while I haven’t heard the hurtful remarks that caused such a storm, the fact that they felt they where appropriate doesn’t surprise me in the least.

When listening to Willy and JT, you see, I always felt I was listening to two people suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological state which is developed when a human being is held captive and it is a terrific example of a psychological survival technique. Here is what happens:

Human being get’s taken captive by other human beings  hostile to him/her. In order to survive and get a grip on the fear, and the isolation and hostility the captive human adopts the ideas and behaviors of his/her captors.

I have seen this transition very closeup and personal when the partner of my grandfather was held captive in a train hijacking in Holland when a group of young people from the Moluccan Islands became politically  active and started to hijack trains to push their political agenda. These people didn’t make jokes and actually killed three of the hostages with gunshots while being filmed doing so and the fear inside the train must have been horrific.

Yet after the hijack ended she came out identifying completely with the people who had threatened her life and kept her in captivity for what to me seemed weeks but actually lasted just 12 days.

When listening to the show of Willy and JT I always felt as if I was listening to Pakeha with a Maori accent and a touch of Maori like humor but I always felt a strange disconnect. The subject matter stayed well withing the limited scope of what is allowed on Radio Live and had to be such that it didn’t rattle any Pakeha sentiments and it struck me as strange that Willy and JT as reasonably smart guys whom I could hear had undercurrents of much more politically savvyness than they let on  stayed so close to the obvious Pakeha scenario.

In fact I sometimes felt that they had adopted the middle class white male Pakeha mindset with a vengeance and with it the racism and sexism that marks that group of NZ society so badly.

In fact when I listened to them I felt like I was listening to my Grandfathers partner speaking about the political agenda of her Moluccan captors.

Let me emphasize that I am sure Maori in their own right are just as capable of sexist and racist behavior  as anybody but theirs was directed not at Pakeha but at Maori, at their own!

Their judgment of the young females, many of whom were probably young Maori or Pacific Island girls ( I simply don’t know the details so I am putting the two together knowing full well that I am talking about different cultures and backgrounds so no throwing all of them together in ignorance intended here) as the guys whose photo’s I have seen and who partook in the Road buster gang activities were obviously from a Maori /Pacifica Island origin, is a case in point.

First of all, let’s face it, if these girls where of a nice middle class Pakeha background being raped by a couple of Maori boys confessing, ney bragging about it on facebook the police would have been pressed into action much sooner and the case would have been blown wide open when the first girl came forward two years ago.

So not only are we talking about rape (sexist), we are talking about rape in a certain ethnic group (racist), the police’s response to it (that of the middle class, male, dominant Pakeha culture ) and the fact that it was allowed to continue for several years as not deserving of swift intervention to avoid damaging more girls for life condemning them to a life of self harm, addiction and more destruction of Maori/Pacific Island culture.

And yet…. Willy and JT did not respond in righteous anger judging a culture which allows the police to be so callous in their disregard for the young female victims and their lack of action over such a long period. No…. in what I can only describe as a Stockholm syndrome sufferers identification with his captors both Willy and JT espoused the ruling male Pakeha sexist and racist second victimization of these young girls now condemned not just by the Pakeha dominant culture but by their own as well.

I think Willy and JT’s remarks were deplorable. I don’t care how you twist it but for two grown man to sit in judgement of these young girls on a National radio show is cowardly and shows that these two have lost the plot and in a way as Stockholm sufferers they really have.

But the huge outcry which ensued after Willy and JT attacked strikes me as hypocritical to say the least because as Stockholm sufferers they are only repeating what their captors i.e. Radio Live’s prevailing culture are saying in the canteens, the factory smoko rooms and rugby clubs of this nations and if they want to keep on earning their nice salaries there is no way in hell they will speak what is on the mind of many Maori/ Pasific Islanders. And while I don’t want to profess to knowing what that is I’m sure it differentiates from what Willy and JT are saying on the radio.

I think the show should end and Willy and JT should get therapy to get back to their own identities and after  some serious therapy they should be offered a job on a Maori radio station where maybe that political savvynes I  glimpsed on occasion is allowed to bloom and maybe we will see what these two are really made off.