Scott Hamilton RTM
@SikotiHamiltonR
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Books include The Crisis of Theory, The Stolen Island, & Ghost South Road. 'Atenisian. Islands open the door to strangeness.
Puhinui/Warkworth
Joined June 2014
1/7 MAGA is melting down as the movement's lumpenproletarian base rages against tech bros' talk about American mediocrity & the superiority of migrant workers. I'm reminded of a story Tongan-based American sociologist Maikolo Horowitz told me about Trumpism.
Vivek and Elon briefly talking about white Americans the way white Americans talk about everyone else has the entire Republican coalition fractured and in disarray.
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10/10 MAGA is built on the 'culture of mediocrity' Ramaswamy condemns. It offers ageing jocks & prom queens a bogus explanation for their ills - an explanation rooted in the conformist, exclusivist, anti-intellectual values the hard hats who heckled Michael Horowitz embraced.
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1/7 When conservative Pakeha are made anxious by Maori protest they reach for the Moriori myth like a comfort blanket or brandy. Posts to twitter about Moriori have predictably surged as the hikoi has descended on parliament. These posts reek of unintended irony.
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1/7 In 1969 a Frenchman struggling with mental illness suddenly began producing astonishingly beautiful sculptures that seemed like they had sprung from Melanesia, a region he had never visited or studied. How did Michel Nedjar do it? For my friend Sio, the answer is obvious.
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1/30 Te Pati Maori's haka in parliament has been greeted with disgust, anger, & fear by many conservative Pakeha. Like Act's Treaty Principles Bill, this response to the haka is the expression of a massive, long-brewing identity crisis.
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7/10 'The world has been turned upside down for these people' Horowitz said. 'The ideology they grew up, its world of prom queens & jocks, its valourisation of manual labour & contempt for the intellect, is still hegemonic, but it's a route to poverty & frustration.'.
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The anti-vax heckler at Ardern's press conference was Shane Chafin, who according to his own testimony was visited by police in the aftermath of the Christchurch terror attacks because of concerns he shared the terrorist's ideology. How did Chafin get so close to the PM?.
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NZ Loyal supporter Ken Duncan has announced that he is preparing an affidavit that will show the party was robbed of votes due to software used by voting machines. He's not deterred by the fact NZ doesn't use voting machines.
Could schadenfreude over Liz Gunn and Brian Tamaki discovering they are not in fact at all popular be the moment that heals a divided nation?
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5/10 'Fast forward a few decades, & the jobs have gone. The steel belt has rusted. & it's the losers, the nerds and weirdos, who are giving out jobs. People like Bill Gates & Steve Jobs, who were smoking pot & coding in garages in the '70s, they're running things.'
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1/15 Jill Bender teaches history at the Uni of North Carolina. She's dived into NZ archives, & returned with a story about alliances between Maori & Irish anti-imperialists in the 19th C Waikato & King Country. Bender has also found an old, long-forgotten, potent name: Piniana.
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1/7 I've noticed a lot of Pakeha on twitter saying, with the best intentions, that they are here in Aotearoa because of the Treaty of Waitangi. I understand what they are trying to say, but I'm pretty sure that, like me, they're here because the Treaty was broken.
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9/10 In Marxist terms, what Ramaswamy & other Trumpist tech bros want is a shift in the cultural superstructure of the US that reflects the changes in the country's economic base. But there's a problem with a Trumpist making such a demand.
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8/10 Vivek Ramaswamy, an unctious techie & convert to Trumpism, provoked the current uproar by condemning the culture of 'mediocrity' in America, & championing the values of successful, highly educated migrant Indians. Ramaswamy wants a cultural revolution.
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6/6 When we put together Burr's racist politics, the racial explanation he gave on the night of the amputation, & the gratuitous nature of the amputation, then it's hard not think our courts have just endorsed a hate crime, rather than a legitimate act of self-defence.
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1/6 Here are hundreds of protesters preventing 30 players from expressing themselves at Rugby Park in 1981. Hundreds of thousands of rugby fans are also having their right to watch sport trampled on. It's important to resist the hard right's attempted redefinition of protests.
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2/7 Horowitz grew up in NYC's Trotskyist community; Allen Ginsberg was a playmate. Later he hung out with Warhol & Lou Reed & turned down a job managing the Velvets. He was too busy helping run legendary protest group Students for a Democratic Society.
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1/18 Richard Dawkins & his allies have been attacking the idea that Polynesians gained scientific knowledge during their thousands of years exploring the Pacific & settling lands like Aotearoa. Dawkins et al regard such an idea as a 21st C, 'woke' phenomenon. They're badly wrong
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Marx died in 1883. When Engels ventured into his departed friend’s study, he was bemused by the mess, & by the fact that the papers & books piled there had little to do with Europe & capitalism. One of the volumes Marx had been reading was Grey’s account of Maori mythology.
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6/10 Richard Sennett's essential book The Culture of the New Capitalism deals with the shift Horowitz described. The globalisation of capital in the late '70s & '80s saw industry fleeing the US & the tech & service sectors of the economy predominating.
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1/7 The debate about the meaning of the Treaty shouldn't be settled by partisan politics or polls. It should be settled by historical evidence. Here are 5 reasons why I believe David Seymour's wrong when he claims the Maori who signed the Treaty 1840 gave away all sovereignty.
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1 In his new column my friend Chris Trotter argues NZ was never a white supremacist society, like South Africa or America. I think Chris' case rests on a false dichotomy & on a denial of the historical record. I want to argue against him & post a few old documents. (thread).
Journalists should stop using the term "White Supremacist" unless they are referring to the specific race-driven ideology which animated the "Jim Crow" South and Apartheid-era South Africa.
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A few folks have been complaining about the Waitangi powhiri. Apparently the symbolic aggression involved in powhiri is barbaric & quite unsuitable for public events. I notice, tho, that the critics of the powhiri are not bothered by today's 21 gun salute.
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4/7 'We'd be hanging round in NYC and some guys in hard hats would shout across the street at us', Horowitz remembered. 'They'd say Get a haircut & a job, you hippies. That was their revenge, economics. The counterculture, the freaks and needs, they'd never get jobs.'
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3/7 He's spent most of the last 30 years in Tonga, & collaborated for many years with its great educationalist & philosopher Futa Helu. Horowitz used a memory of his SDS youth to illuminate the frustration & resentment that fuel MAGA.
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In '94 Auckland got its first gay pride parade. One observer didn't have a good time. Afterwards, he complained about obscenity & immorality & started a letter writing campaign to try to prevent future gay pride events. You might recognise his name. It was Julian Batchelor
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1/4 Act could help settle the debate about the Treaty of Waitangi by republishing & circulating this little book by William Colenso, which contains his detailed notes on the speeches Maori chiefs made at Waitangi in 1840. But the debate wouldn't be settled the way Act wants.
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22/30 No one familiar with the history of Aotearoa in the 1840s could take the bill's claims seriously. One only has to read William Colenso's notes of the discussions in Waitangi to see the absurdity of the idea that Maori surrendered all claims to sovereignty in 1840.
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1/6 Pio Pio's Bill Burr has become a hero for some conservatives since he & his son were acquitted for cutting off the finger of a home invader. But Burr is no ordinary Kiwi farmer. He's a right-wing political activist, & he justified the amputation with racial language.
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1/9 Everyone knows about Japan's war 'stragglers' - those soldiers who hid out for years or even decades on jungle islands in the Pacific, unwilling to believe that the war was lost. But after both World Wars, NZ had its own strange stragglers.
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1/2 Invercargill mayor Nobby Clark thinks English has been 'bastardised' by absorbing Maori words. Nobby doesn't seem to realise that English was bastardised a long, long time ago - it has taken words from 350 different tongues. This pie chart gives a sense of English's diversity
"I don't believe that we should mix Te Reo and English together," - Invercargill Mayor Nobby Clark doubles-down on his anti-Māori opinions at the 'Stop Co-Governance' rally on Saturday night.
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1/14 There's been a lot of discussion on social media about the new history curriculum for Aotearoa/NZ schools. If there's one thing that many commenters, liberal & conservative, agree on, it is that kids should be taught 'objective history'. But there's no such thing.
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1/2 Here's another 'segregated space' at Auckland Uni - the beautiful Maclaurin Chapel, which memorialises a former student who died fighting fascism in Spain. Only Christians tend to attend the chapel, but that doesn't mean non-Christian students are harmed by its existence.
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1/7 Sam Linden has a letter in the Dominion Post condemning the Maori Party's co-leader for claiming that Maori suffered a Holocaust at the hands of colonising Pakeha in the 19th century. Linden thinks that such language is insulting to Jewish victims of Hitler. I disagree.
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1/4 Tuheitia has taken his place on Taupiri, the maunga that seems to float on the Waikato like a great ship of the dead. Taupiri is a sacred place for Tainui, & also for some Pakeha. In October 1933 a leader died here & an alliance was born.
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1/3 After I posted about Kiribati last night, a fool tried to denigrate that country by calling it tiny. Kiribati is not only the largest nation in the world, it is larger than any empire that existed in the past. Its 33 motu are spread over 35 million square km of ocean.
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1/2 There's been a furious response to the doco No Maori Allowed, with many conservative Pakeha insisting that stories of segregation in NZ are a 'woke' invention. Unfortunately for history-deniers, hundreds of stories of segregation are available in our old newspapers.
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The best way to prevent Pakeha critics of Israel succumbing to anti-semitism is to remind them that they, too, are residents of a settler colony. The tragedy of Palestine, like the tragedy of Aotearoa, is part of the wider pattern of imperialism. These maps complement each other.
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1/7 Imagine that settler govts had not denied Maori the vote, that there had been no wars & confiscations, that Maori & Pakeha had come together in a hybrid culture. This might sound like a plot for an alt history novel, but in a remote part of NZ it was reality.
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1/11 Some say Winston Peters can't be racist against non-whites because he is Maori. Ben Couch made the same argument in his defence in the 1970s & '80s. Couch's strange & sad life as an All Black & later a minister in Muldoon's government give us a clue to understanding Peters.
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1/2 Luxon says councils think too much about the environment & not enough about development. If he'd like to see the results of pressing ahead with development & ignoring nature he should come up here & taste our Mahurangi oysters. He'll need an ambulance ride afterwards.
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The Chinese Student Society is Auckland Uni's largest club. Like other clubs, it gets funding from the university & space - & it deserves both. We'll never hear Act criticising the CSS for 'segregationism.' The party's 'anti-racism' is, as ever, carefully aimed at Polynesians.
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Whilst thousands of Aucklanders sleep in garages or on couches or in shelters, an entire town is empty on the Rodney coast. We drove to Omaha beach today, thru lifeless streets of holiday McMansions. The homeless should march north, occupy Omaha, & take a holiday.
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Owners of Puhoi's pub claim the outcry over their use of the word n****r is a product of 21st century cancel culture. But the word has long been used in NZ, & its use has long been opposed. In a Lyttleton restaurant in '28 a group of seamen found out how unpopular the word was.
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1/5 Twitter can, I suspect, be very misleading. This site may be periodically haunted by conservative Pakeha upset by karakia or mosques, but the real, offline NZ teems with cultural exchanges & adventures. Tonight I witnessed a small cultural revolution in Warkworth.
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1/4 I walked into Hastings to look at the art deco clocktower, & instead discovered a Marxist bookshop. I was secretly chuffed to see one of my books displayed by the counter. Adrian & Siobhan's Little Red Bookshop is misnamed: it has 80,000 titles.
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I've seen NZ leftists like Morgan Godfrey called terrorists & anti-semites for saying that Israeli policies are responsible for the tragedies in southern Israel & Gaza. But Haaretz, Israel's 3rd largest paper, is saying the same thing, as this quote from an editorial & tweet show
Horrifyingly, but not surprisingly, Netanyahu has partners who prefer revenge to concern for captives. At a cabinet meeting, Smotrich said, “We have to be cruel now and not consider the captives overmuch.” This is unacceptable | Haaretz Editorial.
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1/2 Winston Peters says spaces for Maori & Pasifika students at Auckland uni are reminiscent of the KKK. I think this photo of students at a capping parade is more reminiscent of the KKK. These spaces were set up as a response to the racism their users faced everyday in NZ.
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1/3 I've just read an article that quotes the Maori & English versions of the Treaty, says they mean different things, & claims Maori didn't cede sovereignty in 1840. The article was not published by Te Pati Maori or The Spinoff. It appeared in a pro-settler newspaper in 1843.
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I'd wager that more than a few of the redneck Pakeha cheering Richard Dawkins on twitter today were also cheering when Te Rehutai was racing for the America's Cup in 2021. That vaka was based directly on Polynesian craft, & thus benefitted from ancient Polynesian aquatic science.
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1/3 Wayne Jones will change the name of the Bully Hayes Bar. He'll consult Akaroa over a new name. It takes courage to admit a mistake. All Pakeha, myself certainly included, are on a learning journey in this colonial country. I'll be keen to have a drink at the renamed pub.
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1/5 As he wanders from town to town, spreading a fantastic version of NZ history & making apocalyptic predictions of the future, Julian Batchelor is recycling a myth about 19th C NZ that is shared by far too many sensible & educated NZers. This myth needs quashing.
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1/15 Maori, Indian, & Chinese NZers were often victims of racial segregation in the 19th & 20thCs. I've written about their exclusion from rest rooms, pools, pubs, & cinemas in some NZ towns. But this map reminds us of a European group that also suffered segregation.
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1/14 Michael King has been dead 18 years, but his name is all over twitter. The people deploying it would be alienated by his great biography of Princess Te Puea & his passionate exploration of Moriori history. They've seized on one of King's errors to bash Maori.
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1/5 National MP Harete Hipango has justified attending an anti-vax protest by saying her Whanganui River tupuna fought for freedom. But during the smallpox epidemic of 1913 Maori of the river gathered to receive a vaccine, not protest it.
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2/7 Moriori leader Maui Solomon has told Pakeha to stop using his history 'as a stick to beat Maori with'. But some people need the Moriori myth more than they care about Moriori. In 2024, the mythologisers are even able to recount the myth coherently, or to name its source.
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1/4 You may not recognise her face, but this person is your supreme leader. At least, she says she is. Kerre Reddy is a horse whisperer & anti-vaxxer from Eketahuna who calls herself the Chief Sheriff of NZ. She's one of the group of sheriffs who recently 'tried' the PM.
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Not all deaths are equal in NZ. The 2 men shot dead in Auckland have been mourned by the media; their murderer has been excoriated. Yet an average of 2 construction workers die every month in NZ in workplace accidents, without attracting the attention of editors & newsreaders.
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1/5 In 1973 NZ suffered two shocks. Britain chose Europe over our farmers, & the Arab oil embargo sent petrol prices soaring. A long crisis & the savage restructuring of society by neo-liberalism followed. 2025 could well be another 1973, but you wouldn't guess it from our media.
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1/7 Brian Tamaki's demanded a ban on gay people using the rainbow as a symbol. He says it should be reserved for Christians, because of its role in the story of Noah. But a carving in Te Awamutu museum reminds us of a rainbow god who was already old when the Bible reached NZ.
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1/6 Look at these four old codgers in a southern pub. They might be talking about the rugby or the racetrack. But they are demigods disguised as scruffy pensioners. Each one has recreated NZ in their art, turning what was dull & familiar into something rich & strange.
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1/15 In the '90s I was a student politico. I remember student debates on early internet fora. The young David Farrar popped up. He liked to gloat over the collapse of the USSR, & call his socialist interlocutors dinosaurs. Now Farrar has become a dinosaur, but I can't gloat.
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1/2 A Putin apologist told me Ukraine deserved invasion because it has a) biolabs & b) Nazis. I sent the chap these images. One shows some of our local Nazis; another shows our national biolab in Upper Hutt. If NZ gets invaded, you can blame me.
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1/7 Auckland Transport paid for an article in the NZ Herald about the history of Meola Road, which has just been reconstructed. But AT's piece doesn't mention that the road runs over land where war & ethnic cleansing were rehearsed in the 1860s.
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1/5 @dpfdpf is asking for examples of cancel culture in NZ. Here are a couple. In 1907 the Seddon government cancelled Maori religion with the Tohunga Suppression Act. For 55 years it was illegal to attend a whare wananga or lead prayers to the old gods. Tohunga were jailed. .
Am speaking tonight and want to highlight the culture war around cancel culture. To save me looking up all the worst examples, can people share them here? Stuff like Faulty Towers being banned, JK Rowling books being literally burned etc.
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A Winston devotee asked me if I wasn't afraid that Te Pati Maori would seize power & impose Nazism on NZ. I said I wasn't, because I was still too busy worrying about the Moscow & Cuban-armed Marxist Maori guerrillas Winston told us were coming back in 1985.
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1/7 National Party pollster David Farrar is trying to distance himself from John Ansell after Ansell's talk of a vaccine genocide & his death threat to a Labour MP. But Ansell's delusions were encouraged for years by Farrar & others on the mainstream right.
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1/7 Apirana Ngata is the Maori authority that conservative Pakeha like to cite when they talk about the Treaty. Ngata several times wrote that the Treaty dissolved Maori sovereignty. But his career was a losing battle against the Maori majority that disagreed with him.
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A friend's fed up with lockdown. He says he'll break the rules if it goes on. I tried a cricket analogy: when Mark Greatbach was facing the last few overs of the fifth day at Perth in '89, he didn't decide to have a slog. That'd mean throwing away 11 hours work. He kept blocking.
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1/2 Posie Parker probably needs a holiday. I hope she'll visit one of our tropical neighbours, where the Western notion of 2 genders is rejected & transgender people have ancient roles in society. It'd be hard to blame billionaires or Western decadence for fa'afine or leitis.
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1/9 Taitusi Taufa is one of the scholars keeping Richard Dawkins up at night. In work for his PhD from Victoria University, Taufa used both traditional Polynesian & European science traditions. Taufa discovered unique & possibly medically useful molecules in Tongan sea sponges.
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1/8 A psychologist would have fun trying to understand what drives David Farrar to churn out blog posts about subjects he knows nothing about. I remember how he morphed into a literary critic during a controversy involving Eleanor Catton. Now he's an expert on Tonga.
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1/4 Convicted neo-Nazi terrorist & Brenton Tarrant supporter Phil Arps says he's joining the protest outside parliament, so he can lend his hand as a 'ZOG removal specialist'. Arps' language might seem bizarre, but it opens a window on many protesters' anti-semitic ideology.
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1/11 The Act Party has called for the repeal of parts of the Human Rights Act, which bans discrimination on racial grounds in NZ. Like its allies in the US - the senator Rand Paul, for example - Act argues that market forces can act as a safeguard against racist businesses.
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1/18 There's been a lot of public discussion about the Treaty of Waitangi lately, but when I look at statements about the Treaty by conservative Pakeha I'm struck by an absence. The most popular traditional conservative argument against Maori sovereignty has almost disappeared.
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1/6 Julian Batchelor claims iwi who had lands seized by the state during the NZ Wars were justly punished for rebelling against the colonial government. But Batchelor, like all apologists for the confiscations, can't explain why pro-Crown iwi had their land confiscated.
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In 2014 a band released a song about killing John Key & raping his kids. No one suggested that Key meet the band & hear their grievances. Yet today journos like Hosking & Edwards urge Ardern to 'dialogue' with people who wave signs calling for her death. It's a surreal attitude.
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1/32 Brenton Tarrant's murder of Christchurch Muslims is infamous, but the massacre at Surafend is little-known. 103 years ago today, Anzacs killed between 40 and 120 Muslims in that Palestinian village.
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1/2 Savage Clubs were one of the strangest expressions of NZ European culture. This is Reg Seamark, 'rangatira' of the New Plymouth Savage Club. Clubs met in halls filled with faux-Maori carvings, called their visits to each other 'raids', & elected 'rangatira' & 'chief savages'
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1/9 This property was the stronghold of two Pakeha capitalists. One thrived in the 19th C, the other in the 21st. Both saw the property as the model for a new & sinister society. Both hoarded art here. Both uprooted communities of less fortunate NZers. & both suffered vengeance.
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6/6 Those who protested against anti-trans, anti-Muslim, & anti-abortion rhetoric today felt the morality of their cause & the effects of their protest were more important than one person's freedom to speak in Albert Park. They made the same calculation as the protesters in '81.
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1/4 Ngaruawahia has been the focus of national attention, as thousands have gathered at its marae to farewell King Tuheitia. But in the second half of the 1860s Pakeha settlers tried to make the town disappear. They renamed it Queenstown. Can you spot the pattern on this map?
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How can Act criticise NZ education, when we've produced so many new experts so quickly? Social media shows hundreds of newly minted climatologists & epidemiologists, as well as new historians discovering a secret Treaty & pre-Maori civilisations. A few are Act candidates. .
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I talked to a friend who monitors conspiracy theories today, & she told me that anti-vaxxers are morphing into Putinists. Many were once Q Anoners. What is constant, thru all these changes, is the fear of, or perhaps the desire for, some cataclysmic, world-altering event.
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1/2 For me the strangest part of NZ responses to the crisis in Gaza - public, media, & political responses - has been the lack of discussion of our army's presence on the Gazan border. We've been there for 41 years as part of the MFO, & yet our presence & role remains undiscussed
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1/3 I still see people arguing on twitter that it's no good learning te reo Maori, as the language is not understood outside NZ. They seem to think Maori is a linguistic isolate, a Pacific version of Basque. This is Kerry Howe's map of the Austronesian languages.
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The Traffic Light system's a blessing for Glen Eden Bookshop. The owners are outspokenly pro-vax; their shop windows reflect this. For weeks conspiracy theorists have been entering the shop without masks to harass them. Now the anti-vaxxers are on the outside, where they belong.
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1/2 I went to Pakiri, where Maori landowners have placed a rahui on an eroding section of the beach. For years an Auckland company has been dredging nearby sandbanks & exporting the sand to Australia. The Environment Court is hearing arguments from the company & locals.
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4/4 For me, Reddy's occupation of Mt Lees, which seems to have petered out, symbolises the politics of the anti-vax & sovereign citizens' movements. She's desecrated a piece of our heritage in an attempt to satisfy some messianic & apocalyptic fantasy.
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An anti-trans meeting has been cancelled by Christchurch library; the Free Speech Union is upset. But last August FSU leader Elliot Ikilei promoted a petition to ban drag queens from reading to kids in Timaru library. Elliott isn't for free speech. He's for Christian bigotry.
MEDIA RELEASE: Christchurch City Library ban of feminist group illegal -
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Imagine if Julian Batchelor said a Jewish elite, guided by Satanist ideology, was conspiring to destroy NZ. In 1977 Colin King-Ansell was convicted for saying those things in a leaflet. Batchelor has simply substituted Maori for Jews. Those who disrupt his meetings are justified.
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If you're taking the kids to Coromandel in the school holidays, don't stay at Pauanui's Flame Lily B & B. The owners have ties to the Rhodesian museum in Mt Maunganui, & regularly host Rhodesian fascists. The Flame Lily was Rhodesia's national flower, a symbol of racial 'purity'.
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1/2 I've just had my twitter account restored after being banned for 12 hours for posing a photo, one I copied and pasted from a 2018 NZ Herald news article, showing a sign outside William Burr's farm. I was initially told I could be banned for a week or even 'indefinitely'.
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1/2 Simeon Brown's contrasting drunken Labourites with Nat MPs, who've always believed in 'personal responsibility'. Wasn't this bloke a Nat? He went on TV boozed & announced an election. Later that night his frightened aides had to let his tyes down to stop him driving.
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I'm very pro-vax, but I can appreciate why mistrust of the Ministry of Health might persist in some Maori communities. I wrote for The Spinoff about the epidemic of 1913, which saw the ministry imprison kainga & create Maori-only vaccine passports:
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Kissinger is dead; his crimes are being recounted. One was the invasion of Cambodia. In '71-'72, as a favour to the US, NZ troops trained hundreds of Cambodian child soldiers at Dong Ba Thin camp in Vietnam. Journo David Barber took these photos & exposed the programme.
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1/2 Here is another sticker-poster being distributed before Anzac Day. When I wrote in 2021 about the RSA's white NZ policy & campaigns against 'Asiatics' I was called a traitor by Sean Plunket & others. But it was the RSA that betrayed its comrades.
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1 The cops who screamed past our place a couple of hours back are now guarding the local mosque. I'm happy about this, because I remember the Auckland aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. I was living in Sandringham at the time, & local mosques & halal butchers were vandalised.
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5/10 Today a garbled version of the Best-Smith theory is used on twitter by those keen to assert that Maori weren't the first people to live in Aotearoa. They don't realise that, according to Best & Smith's axioms, Tame Iti & thousands of other Maori are indigenous.
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History is mercilessly ironic. In 1863 Otahuhu was the base for a white supremacist army that expelled Polynesians from Auckland & conquered the Waikato. Today I found the suburb over run by a red army of Tongan rugby fans.
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4/7 Skinner was the first archaeologist to work on Rekohu/Chatham Island, the Moriori homeland. It didn't take him long to work out that Moriori artefacts, words, & bodies were recognisably Eastern Polynesian, not Melanesian.
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