A Snob Who Couldn’t Hide His Disdain for the Locals
Kenneth Folkes’ career in military intelligence had begun spectacularly well. He had enlisted as a private, and in less than a year, had risen to major and was in charge of an entire country’s counterintelligence. To be sure, New Zealand was a small and out of the way country, but still – it was a rapid rise. Once he got to New Zealand, however, things began to turn sour. Folkes saw the New Zealanders as backwards colonial bumpkins, ignorant of basic security practices, and resistant to change. In reality, his contempt for New Zealand’s practices was a reflection of his own intellectual laziness and unjustified arrogance.
Folkes had been trained in British military intelligence practices for only a few months, had limited experience, and held an imperialistic worldview that saw New Zealanders as inferior to the English. That mix was toxic. It left Folkes unable to grasp that there might be ways to do things other than what he had learned in his brief training back in Britain. That was bad, but in a blunder that made things worse, Major Folkes let his disdain for the locals show. Unsurprisingly, the locals resented that, and repaid his contempt for them antagonism of their own.