Incensed by the Popata brothers’ chillingly thuggish display on Monday night, I rang Close Up first thing Tuesday and offered to provide some push-back.
Next thing you know, I’m being flown to Auckland for a debate with Hone Harawira and the supposedly ‘moderate’ young Maori blogger Morgan Godfery.
Why is it that the state broadcaster always feels the need to outnumber me two-to-one with lefties — who inevitably and rather tiresomely then label me an extreme right-winger, racist or liar.
Last time it was Willie Jackson and Paul Spoonley, this time Hone and Morgan.
Morgan seemed a pleasant chap, who has done extraordinarily well to become a spokesman for the Maori moderati at the tender age of 20.
After the show, we chatted amicably for two hours, sharing a taxi, dinner and plane ride back to Wellington.
(Note my various replies in the comments section.)
There was a time when being flayed alive by blog commenters used to upset me.
Now I just smile and think of all the intelligent readers they’re alienating by responding to facts with abuse.
Morgan will learn this lesson in due course.
But back to Close Up.
Sadly, Hone couldn’t be with us in person, as he was hikoiing in Kaitaia.
I found his performance rather subdued compared with my experience last year with the foaming fool Jackson.
(Maybe Hone was knackered after a hard day’s hikoiing. Or maybe it was a deliberate strategy to differentiate himself from his bully boy proteges.)
My strategy was twofold:
- To seed the phrase Colourblind State into the national conversation.
- To alert the public to the upcoming Constitutional Review, and the Maori Party’s agenda to impose a Bolivian-style animist/communist/racist constitution.
The more the Lefties mock me for suggesting this wacky-sounding plan (the actual declared agenda of Marxists like Margaret Mutu and Nin Thomas), the less comfortable they’re going to feel promoting it.
I also wanted to confront Maori with their extraordinarily violent past, not for the sheer joy of causing offence (despite undoubtedly doing so), but to wake them up to the real source of their present violence.
Namely: their forefathers, not mine.
The sad truth is that Maori in 1840 were 42 warring, cannibal, communist, slave-owning dictatorships.
The British did not destroy them, as we’ve been led to believe.
In fact, they saved them from blasting and hacking themselves to extinction.
(Somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 Maori — up to half the race — were killed in the Musket Wars of the 1820s and 30s, compared with about 2,000 in the Sovereignty Wars of the 1860s.)
Today, thanks to inter-breeding, Christianity and British law, they’ve shed most of those violent tendencies, but (understandably) not all.
All peoples, perhaps bar the Moriori, have had to confront a brutal past, very much including Europeans.
Thanks to Christianity (once they’d got through their witch-burning phase), Europeans gave up the bloodlust, and Maori followed suit when they became equal members of the British Empire.
[A commenter has pointed out that my claim that Europeans have renounced violence is not entirely plausible, given the many wars that have been waged on that continent since 1840.
But I'm talking about daily life, which, I hope even he will agree, is less violent than it used to be.]
When Hone and Morgan claim that until Maori achieve the same health, wealth and homicide rates as Pakeha they’ll need more and more Pakeha money, they’re arguing from a position of greed, not logic.
After all, as all Maori radicals seem strangely happy to highlight, Maori are still at the bottom of every social statistic.
Still at rock bottom — after being showered with billions of dollars of benefits, and up to five full and final Treaty settlements.
Clearly, more money is not the answer.
Could that be, I wonder, because too much of it is going to feather the nests of their millionaire leaders?
Whatever, it’s time we turned off the tap and asked Maori to look inward for the answers, not outwards.
It’s time they followed their Achievers, not these Grievers.
I couldn’t get all of these messages across in the debate, but I hope I showed that not all New Zealanders are prepared to be cowed by the standover tactics of wide boys and thugs.
As I said on Close Up, our fathers and grandfathers (including those in the Maori Battalion) went to war for this country.
They paid for their patriotism with their blood.
Thousands more, Maori and Pakeha, paid with their lives.
Have we become so feeble that we’re prepared to surrender this vibrant nation that our forebears clawed from raw bush, with blood, brains, sweat, tears and guts, to a violent minority of a decent minority, for fear of being called a name?
