When doing my fieldwork with Christian Lebanese fighters in the middle of the Lebanese civil war, I witnessed a conversation concerning what to do with prisoners captured following a successful overrunning of a Palestinian camp.

The conversation was casually happening while the fighters were having dinner at a well-known precinct underneath a Maronite monastery in the hills to the north of Beirut.

There, a woman, Salma, who had a reputation as someone exceptionally loving and totally devoted to caring for the militiamen, opened a rest house where she cooked for them, served them and washed after them.

During that conversation, one militiamen suggested it was perhaps best if they put the prisoners in trucks and offload them across the warzone’s frontline as they had done before.

At that moment Salma, who was putting a jug of water on the table, turned around and casually said: “Why? So that they’ll come back and kill us? These are children of the devil, finish them, finish (howdeh wlehd el sheetahn khlaso mennun khlaso)”.

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The moment remained with me ever since; it was impossible to forget how someone who oozed so much love and affection was also able to express such venomous exterminatory desires.

It gave me a permanently disenchanted view, perhaps a too disenchanted and devalorising view, of the facile virtues of those who “love their own people”.

To me the love that is worthy of our attention and admiration is the more difficult love, the love that is able to cross cultural boundaries and encompass multiplicity and difference rather than remain entrenched within the boundaries of oneself.

I am reminded of this as I think of the many political actions and proposals by Jacinda Ardern in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. Like many I am watching her politics unfold full of admiration for its multidimensional restorative potential.

But most of all I am full of admiration because the kind of love she has exhibited and that runs through everything she has done is precisely the kind of love I have come to valorise.

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Most of us who work on white nationalist racism know that like all ethno-nationalist racism it works as a shattering force. Even when it is not physically violent, it can shatter the psyche of the people it is directed to and it can shatter communities. It is a centripetal force that works to fragment and disperse.

There is no doubt that ethno-nationalist racists consciously use it as a weapon aimed at producing such fragmentation and dispersal. Racists aim to shatter the psyche and the social makeup of the people and the communities at which their racism is directed.

We Australians only have to look at colonial racism’s effect on Indigenous Australians as individuals and as communities to recognise in this racism, not only a weapon of economic dispossession but also a weapon of mass psychosocial destruction and communal disintegration.

This is why dealing with the effect of structural racism – a racism that has unleashed, and is continuing to unleash, its disintegrative effects on people and society – is such a difficult endeavour. It requires more than cosmetic notions of “closing gaps”.

It requires a fundamental and sustained politics of restoration that unleashes all the possible economic, practical and affective centrifugal forces to counter the corrosive effects of the disintegrative politics that has prevailed for so long. But, as importantly, it also requires a special kind of love.

While love on its own leads us nowhere, a restorative politics is not complete without it being permeated by a deeply felt love, a love that can cross rather than erect cultural boundaries and that can heal rather than entrench divisions.

It is in this regard that Jacinda Ardern’s restorative politics is so crucial. At a time when politicians are moved by a soulless pragmatism that transforms even their demonstrations of affect into flat affectless pronouncements, it does provide a glimmer of hope that a politics that heals the shattering effects of white ethno-nationalist racism is possible.

The problem is that such a politics is not easy to emulate if the love that moves it is not genuinely and deeply felt. Anthropology students across the world learn about “gift economies”: societies predominantly structured by the exchange of gifts as opposed to the circulation of commodities.

They learn that in those gifts and offerings resides a hau (pronounced ho). A concept that anthropologists have taken, appropriately enough for us here, from Māori culture. The hau is the spirit of the giver present in the gift. It is here that we get to the reason why the politics of Ardern cannot be easily emulated.

It cannot because at its heart it is a gift and an offering. As such it carries in it Ardern’s spirit as a giver. If another politician tries to copy her but is not genuinely moved by a healing, cross-cultural love of the multiplicity, no matter what they give, the spirit with which they have given, their hau, will reveal itself in the undertone of what they offer.

As such, their gift will lack the healing, integrative effect that it should otherwise have. You only need to hear Scott Morrison speak about Indigenous Australians or about Muslims to understand what I am talking about.

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The hau that is present in what Ardern offers is not hers alone. It is also the spirit of the various social forces she has come to embody. If there is in her a desire and a capacity for healing, it is because she conjures what is best and healing in New Zealand society.

There is no doubt that there is in Australia a similar articulation of social forces, white and non-white, who together can offer a healing non-racist transformative force. Unfortunately, very few Australian politicians in positions of leadership have chosen to connect with such a space.

For that reason very few have been able over the years to offer a politics that is remotely similar to that of Jacinda Ardern.

Even when they say all the right things, the spirit of what they say is present in their offering. And regrettably for all of us, this spirit remains the spirit of narcissistic love, the spirit of white Australian culture loving itself.