We Are The Goodies! Trotter’s Fantasy and Fanaticism.

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1879

“Are we the baddies?” asks Chris Trotter in his latest From the Left column for The Democracy Project (17/10/2024). He asks it of the New Zealand Left (as a self-described “libertarian socialist”) in connection with what he sees as their misguided perversion from liberalism towards a doctrinaire identarian and indigenised agenda broadly described as decolonisation. His columns on this subject are now so numerous they trail far off into the darkness, like so many tiki torches, it is difficult to say whether he’s marching to, or returning from, a burning cross. Indeed, in years gone by when his name came up in conversation around the Left wing traps the “level of intervention” meant his thoughts on the extent Government needed to reign in capitalists, but now when that phrase is mentioned we are referring to the extent he may need psychological assistance. Leave any three Lefties in a room for more than ten minutes and this subject will emerge – always with a mix of bewilderment and alarm, but with increasingly less sympathy.

Having recently re-read his (excellent and recommended) 2007 book on New Zealand’s political and social history, No Left Turn, the glimmer of those lights, and the darkness from which they emerge, were always there. The existential struggle of the European settler colonist in a Polynesian milieu was the framing just as much as the struggle between labour and capital was. The essential masculinity of the enterprise was throughout. The fetishisation of violence are not just present in graphic semi-fictionalised passages (such as a rather turgid piece on ANZAC cove) but daubed on almost every second page as a blood splatter motif to break sections. Not that the style is objectionable – Peckinpah meets Tarantino can make for a gripping tale – but the idea that political and social questions are best answered by Israeli amounts of overkill confirms his reactionary credentials. As such he is a literary gateway drug into the amphetamine psyche of the Right.

If the threat to the white settler colonisation project – that is to say the colonisation of Aotearoa primarily if not exclusively on their own terms – is real and substantive (if not irreversible) then their fears are not merely paranoia and phobia they are concerns. How legitimate or justified those concerns are and how they are reconciled with what he calls the decolonisation project is the issue.  The Act Party’s “Treaty Principles” Bill is the catalyst for this latest discussion, however it is fairly representative of the perennial concerns of the white settlers and serves as an adequate vehicle for their discontent in the current term of parliament. As such it is a situational, opportunistic, political gambit not wholly encompassing the spectrum of white settler angst; but the visceral responses and polarisation tells us it is close enough of a proxy to be used both as a lens to focus and a prism to diffuse.

I will reply below to Trotter’s latest column with similarly unencumbered emotion, but hopefully also with more pointed facts with which to answer him. In particular his entire notion of comparing New Zealand with North versus South in the American Civil War is fantastically warped.  To do him and the reader a favour this reply will be done methodically, paragraph by paragraph, in tandem with his column.

 

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Are We The Baddies?

Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does.

 

This is so not what it seems when you see where he takes this!

 

‘THE DEMON OF UNREST’ documents the descent of the United States into civil war. The primary focus of its author, Erik Larson, is the period of roughly five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860, and his inauguration in March 1861. These were the months in which, one after the other, the slaveholding states of the South voted to secede from the Union.


Coincidentally New Zealand at this time faced a crisis of partition. These are also the months where the Second Anglo-Maori “Land” War began. The Waitara block was in dispute in 1860 with pressure from the Taranaki settlers to take it. The Governor at the time, Gore Browne, convened a hui of Queenite and neutral tribes at Mission Bay known as the Kohimarama Conference to isolate the Kingitanga and solidify Government support (which was only partially successful).

Seldom has the evolution of an implacable political logic proceeded in circumstances where so few effective means of altering its direction lay to hand. Americans had become the prisoners of convictions that could not be set aside without incurring, to employ a key concept of the era, an irreparable loss of honour.

So too the British honour was at stake in New Zealand and so too the implacable settlers and their Government were on a collision course with the autonomous tribes of the central North Island.

Only a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have won the American Civil War, but not even a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have prevented it.

Gore Browne was victim to the settler’s rapacity and in 1861 the former Governor, Grey, was brought back for Kill Bill Volume 2.

The most disconcerting feature of Larson’s historical narrative are the many parallels between the America of then, and the New Zealand of now. There are Kiwis, today, as committed to the decolonisation and indigenisation of their country as Yankees once were to the abolition of slavery. Likewise, there is an answering fraction of the New Zealand population every bit as determined to preserve the colour-blind conception of what it means to be a New Zealander as the slaveholders of the American South were determined to preserve their own “peculiar institution”.

Here Trotter draws back the bow to modern New Zealand – but an assessment of the same time period is more productive to gather insight into how things have developed in this country. The transposing he attempts is assaultive: “colour-blind” is held up as an ideal – but he equates it with… the slaveholding South! That is intellectually peculiar and certainly intellectually courageous.

The key historical question arising from this comparison is: which of the opposing sides in the present conflict between “New Zealand” and “Aotearoa” represents the North, and which the South? The answer is far from straightforward.

I would prefer to just look at what war New Zealand was undergoing while the Americans were having their war to figure out the two divergent strands of ideology of today that descend directly from that cleavage. His naming of the conflict as between “New Zealand” and “Aotearoa” I do agree with. “Aotearoa” (being the name of the North Island) was sewn onto a Kingitanga flag captured in the Waikato, and the memorials set up following the Land Wars by the Government states the soldiers “Died for New Zealand”. This is a good way of understanding the tension.

Superficially, it is the promoters of decolonisation and indigenisation who most resemble the Northern abolitionists. Certainly, in their moral certainty, dogmatism, and unwillingness to compromise, the Decolonisers and the Abolitionists would appear to be cut from identical cloth. Brought together by a time machine, one can easily imagine their respective leaders, so alike in their political style, getting along famously.

Superficially? No, substantially. The Maori who visited the Auckland settlement in that period of the early 1860s report that with the influx of British immigrants came a hostility towards them they had not experienced before – these white settlers viewed Maori as an enemy and were conspiring to attack and subdue them.

By the same token, the defenders of Colour-Blind New Zealand, in their reverence for tradition and their deep nostalgia for the political certainties of the past, would appear to be a more than passable match for the political forces that gave birth to the Confederate States of America in 1861.

“Colour-Blind” – again that terminology is used without any provenance. It is an irksome and perverse inversion of reality. The same racists in the 1860s that were hating on Maori and coveting their lands are no different in essence to the racists of today hating on Maori and coveting their lands. The political certainties of the past and traditions he refers to is their racism.

These correspondences are, however, more apparent than real. From a strictly ideological standpoint, it is the Decolonisers who match most closely the racially-obsessed identarian radicals who rampaged through the streets of the South in 1860-61, demanding secession and violently admonishing all those suspected of harbouring Northern sympathies. Likewise, it is the Indigenisers who preach a racially-bifurcated state in which the ethnic origin of the citizen is the most crucial determinant of his or her political rights and duties.

It is the European, the white settler, that makes the distinction between the Tangata Whenua and themselves a matter of “race” – not Maori. Maori are the same race as their Rarotongan and Tahitian cousins, but each set of cousins respects the mana of each other in their own respective territory. Race and colour is a peculiarly European obsession. The bifurcated state was exactly what the Treaty envisaged: tribes were autonomous and the Crown controlled the lands alienated to the settlers. The whole country is under one Governor, but there are two systems operating. It was operating that way from day zero. It was the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 (UK) that provided for “Maori Provinces” to be gazetted to formalise the territorial bifurcation. As an historian Trotter cannot project the prejudices he holds today back to this time period against the weight of the historical record, the evidence does not permit him to do this.

Certainly, in this country, the loudest clamour and the direst threats are directed at those who argue that New Zealand must remain a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equal rights, irrespective of wealth, gender, or ethnic origin, and in which the property rights of all citizens are safeguarded by the Rule of Law.

No. No they aren’t. Everyone wants what he describes including Maori nationalists and white liberal “identarians” so far as I can tell. Trotter’s deliberate confusion is to pretend that the Treaty and its guarantees to Maori of their autonomy and property rights is somehow not a law.  It isn’t even the first law of the land, it’s more than that: it’s law zero from year zero. Whether the Treaty can be ambulated into matters of Government policy and rules beyond the autonomy and listed guarantees is going to be a live issue, but he makes no distinction so as to roll everything into his racial rubric.

 

These threats escalated alarmingly following the election of what soon became the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government. Like the election of Lincoln in 1860, the success of New Zealand’s conservative parties in the 2023 general election was construed by the Decolonisers and Indigenisers as a potentially fatal blow to any hope of sustaining and extending the gains made under the sympathetic, radical, and identity-driven Labour Government of 2020-23.

Again with the threat rhetoric. Threat of what? We wait a couple of years and maybe a less bigoted coalition assumes office. Such an anodyne state of affairs lacks the drama he seeks so he again draws an acute angle to something he says is a parallel. Everyone does not know that in 1960 the United Nations General Assembly passed a landmark resolution on Decolonisation proclaiming the process was inevitable and irreversable; but everyone in New Zealand does know that this conservative cocktail of a coalition is nowhere near being a “fatal blow” to this nation’s process of doing exactly what that resolution of 64 years ago foretells: decolonisation.

Just as occurred throughout the South in November and December of 1860, the fire-eating partisans of “Aotearoa” lost little time in coming together to warn the incoming government that its political programme was unreasonable, unacceptable, and “racist”; and that any attempt to realise it in legislation would be met with massive resistance – up to and including civil war.

No source given for “civil war”. The only figure of any significance that speaks with any regularity of civil war is Trotter himself. His prophesising has been so inaccurate he can’t even be rightfully called a Cassandra. Why have civil war when there’s a potential change of government in less than three years (and currently less than two)?

The profoundly undemocratic nature of the fire-eaters’ opposition was illustrated by their vehement objections to the Act Party’s policy of holding a binding referendum to entrench, or not, the “principles” of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like the citizens of South Carolina, the first state to secede, the only votes they are willing to recognise are their own.

It’s funny how one’s own interests are rights that must be protected by law against the scourge of democratic mob rule… and the rights and interests of those with a Treaty that might affect one’s presumption of rights suddenly just don’t mean anything. It is funny how that happens.

Another historical parallel is discernible in the degree to which the judicial arm of the New Zealand state, like its American counterpart in the 1850s, has actively supported the cause of ethnic difference in the 2020s.

The so-called parallels are now running at right angles across each other. The Treaty of Waitangi up until the racist 1877 “simple nullity” ruling from Chief Justice Prendergast was being abided by the judiciary. Once again discard the “ethnic” fixation and consider the parallels between the US (and former British) Treaties with the native American Indian tribes – “sovereign” tribal nations – and how those relationships manifest themselves today. Those tribes have their own government administration, taxation, police, courts, drivers licences etc. Those tribal members, for example, can pass through the Canadian border using nothing more than their tribal ID. All of these bifurcated abominations occur, more or less, without any federal, state or judicial anxiety – their Treaties are held inviolate.

In 1857, the infamous Dred-Scott decision of the US Supreme Court advanced the cause of slavery throughout the United States. Written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the judgement found that persons of African descent: “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States”. The Taney Court’s decision made civil war inevitable.

This was more akin as their 1877 “simple nullity” decision.

In 2022, the New Zealand Supreme Court’s adjudication of the Peter Ellis Case would add a novel legal consideration – tikanga Māori – to the application of New Zealand Law. The Court’s constitutionally dubious decision was intended to, and did, materially advance the establishment of a bi-cultural legal system in Aotearoa. It represented an historic victory for the Decolonisers.

Yes it was a victory of sorts to the cause, even though many of us raised an eyebrow at how tikanga can apply to a situation where the parties are all Pakeha.

It may occur to some readers, that the argument put forward here resembles the celebrated Mitchell & Webb television sketch in which a worried SS officer asks his Nazi comrade-in-arms, Hans: “Are we the baddies?” It’s a great line. But, over and above the humour, the writers are making an important point. Those who devote themselves entirely to a cause are generally incapable of questioning its moral status – even when its uniforms are adorned with skulls.

It applies to you, Mr Trotter! You stand there in the garb of Prendergast without a shred of self-awareness it seems for your sartorial choice.

 

Those New Zealanders who believe unquestioningly in the desirability of decolonisation and indigenisation argue passionately that they are part of the same great progressive tradition that inspired the American Abolitionists of 160 years ago. But are they?


Yes. Yes they are. Trotter the contrarian has four remaining paragraphs to at least start to make his case because there has been no detectable argument thus far.

Did the Black Abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, embrace the racial essentialism of Moana Jackson? Or did he, rather, wage an unceasing struggle against those who insisted, to the point of unleashing a devastating civil war, that all human-beings are not created equal?

Hate the double negative – it usually belies a contorted logic, as it does here. The “racial essentialism” is spurious, it is being used to argue against a Treaty position not founded essentially on race.

What is there that in any way advances the progressive cause about the casual repudiation of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that: “one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”?

Trotter seems to take great alacrity to his mission of poking the kittens at the petting zoo in their eyes with a sharp stick. At this stage the comments are barely worthy of a serious response.

When will the partisans of decolonisation and indigenisation finally notice the death’s head on their caps? That, driven by their political passion to atone for the sins of the colonial fathers, they are willing to subvert the Rule of Law, deny human equality, misrepresent their country’s history, and abandon its democratic system of government. Can they not see that the people they castigate as the direct ideological descendants of the slaveholding white supremacists of the antebellum South, are actually fighting for the same principles that animated and inspired the Northern Abolitionists?

If it’s sarcasm it’s comedy gold, but if he’s being serious? “Can they not see…” – it does sound like he’s written this for April 1st.

Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does. The demon of unrest has claimed you for his own.

 

Paranoid, accusatory, hysterical – and they were the best parts. The demon of gin and across-the-counter pseudoephedrine appears to have claimed another Trotter column.

40 COMMENTS

  1. i can’t help thinking you have given Trotter more attention than he deserves. However, the subject he writes on does deserve attention. To me it is simple. I believe in the Treaty and Article 2 promised that maori could retain their land, estates etc. for so long as they wished. Until all of the land which was confiscated in Taranaki is returned to the hapu of Te Atiawa and Taranaki and so forth then the Treaty is still breached. The land is still stolen. In the coming week or so a random person will win over $30 million in Lotto. This is more than many iwi received as a so called settlement for the theft of all their land. This is the contempt with which Government still holds toward Maori.

    • “i can’t help thinking you have given Trotter more attention than he deserves.”
      But, but, but don’t you know who He is?

      Sad, but the guy really has lost His way and He’s not doing Himself any favours. I recall 5 or so years ago a friend, and acquaintance of the Trotter saying “He’s all over the place” He is, and it seems to coincide with the passing of His mate Gerry who probably held the logic gates in that relationship.

        • Toby Hill’s son Gerard.
          I’ve watched Trotter gradually go down the rabbit hole, and various pundits analyse and theoreticise the reasons why. From the single issue theory to the “i’ve paid my leftie dues and I didn’t get where I am today” shit. He must be a real pain in the RRR’s to live with
          Not much different from their socially conservative – pretend liberal, and Ray Schist parents of the day.
          You don’t know how lucky you are. In my day we used to walk 5 miles to school, and 5 miles home again.
          The Trotter isn’t doing himself any favours, but that’s His problem It’s the same sort of shit the greatest media aggregator, egotist and bullshit artist Bryce Edwards has signed up to. Running on empty, but with a comfy little pozzie demanding His self-entitled position in the pecking order.
          When did wankery become so fashionable?
          Trajic specimens the lot of them. Safer not to indulge any of them OR spend any emotional capital on them (in that space in the ecosystem, going forward, rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb)

      • For context on Andrews comment,,, and his past history of commenting ,,,,,

        Andrew is a immigrant Pom & uber Zionist ,,, but ignoring his support for extreme racism maintained with extreme violence over there ,,, ignoring his hypocrisy ,,, he has a extensive history of repeating Israel propaganda as fact ,,, and NATO propaganda too for that matter….

        He’s not a lawyer ,,,, he’s a Pom immigrant ,,, he’s a Zionist and a border racist than just that ….

        …. His opinions on our various treaty matters should be weighted accordingly.

        N8V Child — https://youtu.be/vZHoz0IRAyU

    • Peter, your $30 million comment is priceless. Here in Aotearoa we of an Anglo lineage, like those in Canada, USA, Australia sit upon the stolen real estate of the indigenous. Then when we finally address this we give pennies in the pound. And bigots like Seymour who fetishize “property rights” don’t recognize indigenous peoples property rights.

  2. european exceptionalism is ova andrew you just can’t see it because you’ve caught up in your own exceptionalism and this applies globally not just in Nu Tireni

    Free Aotearoa

  3. It’s all technocracy and temu these days. Decolonisation seems to be a handy road for a detour around the practical issues (eg. fuel contamination and engine failure). There is a hidden tunnel which goes to the washroom in the beehive called local council and there’s no wifi signal so no updates.

  4. The problem is simple to explain. The solution to the problem is impossible to impliment.
    It’s all about the money. Nothing else. 50,000 farmers earn AO/NZ’s money and 5,150000 spend it and everything else might have been art, except it isn’t. It wouldn’t be so bad if the money sequestered from farmers wasn’t trapped up the 14 multi-billionaires and the 3118 multi-millionaires. The farmer earned finances quandry has made banking here the second most profitable banking in the world and our few urban scum bags here are some of the richest. graeme hart, for example, is one of the 200 richest in the world. How? Look it up yourselves. It’s about time you pulled your fingers out and started making your own inquiries.
    But what do farmers do? My advice would be to sell up and retire early and let fuckers go broke then starve.
    AO/NZ is in an extraordinary position. Intellectuals can intellectualise and philosophers can philosophise but financiers will run out of money and you will soon starve to death.
    Our farmlands are now grassy paddocks with little or no stock and freezing works are closing so there goes our primary industry so who cares what Chris Trotter or anyone else says or does. We’re fucked. I mean we’re really, really, really fucked.
    Solution… Given our greedy, pathetic goverance both past and present I don’t think there is one. You’re fucked.
    What do you think adern?

      • When we run out of houses and land that’s easy to sell perhaps we will then become a racket market in every way except tennis with ‘tits’ tackled on as the South Pacific’s Thailand. The country’s been ‘demoralised’ by USA and UK bargain-hunting financials and harpies.

        The ability to exist on a shaky job that is underpaid will demean perfectly good people. and government shows no interest in considering the hoi polloi, just adding to this group with their own beltway fatuous and mendacious projects and posturings. The memes of sexual unease in society will lead to uncomfortable people looking for a home and their own clique. The song is from Chess. https://genius.com/Murray-head-one-night-in-bangkok-lyrics
        Or ‘One night in Auckland and the world’s your oyster
        The bars are temples but the girls ain’t free
        You’ll find a god in every golden cloister
        And if you’re lucky then the god’s a she
        I can feel an angel slidin’ up to me…’

        Mr and Mrs ordinary will tighten into taut moralistic prosy puritans with no idea about others’ human emotional needs, and protean proclivities. And they will not have a true spiritual religion to steer them away from material worship. Already we are hearing and experiencing attitudes, ominous to baleful, towards struggling people’s welfare and needs that echo statements deriding the poor in a book I’ve got about London’s poor in 1861.
        Gloomy Sunday by Billie Holiday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYR1j-DVpUs

        We need bright, intelligent, musical and thoughtful people like Greg Taylor RIP. He had such a varied career and someone like him who could lift youth out of the bog and into music from which they could find a place, a job with that experience behind them, that would be great.

        Could we have Blerta type musicians who were grounded enough to carry a youth party, who would tour the country and play concerts, and talk practical ways and beliefs for a new NZ/AO? I believe that money would come to support them and the concerts would also do so, a great drawcard. It sounds soppy but perhaps ‘Perhaps Love’ by John Denver along with Placido Domingo would be appropriate for the talisman song for now to catch the ear of the sensitive strugglers who are adept and could focus the good NZ spirited people onwards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6EEcfP0QiI (John and Placido)

        Sixties scene helped shape a life of music and journalism (Greg Taylor’s obituary)
        PressReader.com
        https://www.pressreader.com › … Whakamāoritia tēnei whārangi
        10 Āku 2024 — … Greg Taylor, who died earlier this year, at the age of 72. If you were around Wellington’s colourful music scene in the early 1970s you will …

  5. Forgot to mention three obscure points that are historically relevant to Trotter’s American Civil War examination:

    1. The British, and NZ, were generally pro-Confederacy. (Being anti-slavery I take it their support was to do with splitting their rival to reduce US power, not any love for slaveholding, but?).

    2. In Hansard (I think it was 1865) it is recorded in a debate in the House that a letter had been received from the US Government stating they see the NZ colonial government cannot win the war with Maori and offering to send their military to subdue them in return for becoming a US state. The letter was met with laughter in the chamber according to Hansard and the MPs responded that they had the war under control (they didn’t – the British forces had to remain well after their withdrawal date because it was not under control with Te Kooti especially).

    3. Not a convenient fact to recite, but for historical accuracy I must note it: the “Indian Territory” (now Oklahoma) where the displaced tribes from the East were herded had slavery and joined the Confederacy and was I think the last place to surrender to the North. There are no parallels with the Kingitanga or the situation in NZ however – there were no slaves anywhere except for maybe the Chatham Islands in the 1860s. Instances of prisoners being kept in slave-like conditions are to be found on both sides however. There was at least one incident in the Land Wars when Kupapa soldiers tried to take the women of defeated tribes as a war prize but the European officers put a stop to it from what I recall.

    • The British were Pro-Confederate? Even after the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, followed by the Royal Navy stamping it out on the high seas at least. The Confederates were convinced that the British, desperate for cotton, would break the Union blockade but it never came close to happening.

      • After it had abolished slavery in its own territories the British government took very selective steps to interrupt the Atlantic slave trade, with the intention of making things difficult for its imperial rivals, primarily the United States. However once the Confederacy and the Union came into conflict, Britain terminated its naval action against slavery, and tacitly supported the south in the civil war.

  6. Great piece.
    And it rebutts the big lie they’re trying to trot out (no pun intended). THat decolonisation is racist. It ain’t about race.

    Colonisation is a foreign system of cultural power instituted on unwilling people, subjugating their persons and cultures. When the influx on 10s of thousands of British settlers flooded in and used their power to breach the treaty, they put Aotearoa under colonial rule. “But we’re all free & colour blind under the law in this super peaceful and equal society” simply does not even begin to engage with the reality.
    We should be proud of the fact that decolonisation began with the Waitangi Tribunal, and all interested and engged in where it could take us as a society. A Maori worldview has a lot to offer the binary control and dominate disease that inflicts Western society, and the runt fruit of the anglo world that is NZ. Let Maori institutions flourish and develop organically, as they were, as they will continue to.
    I know most people are feeling insecure about jobs, money the world, but that is BECAUSE of the Western quest to control and dominate and how that has shaped our corporatist capitalist society, and didn’t the “pandemic” show how they can whip us so (but not the united iwi who quietly dissented). It ain’t because the iwi are getting some of their bikkies back out of our back pocket. t is the structure of our society as is, and the nature of the few people who benefit from it that are the problem. THey’re just pointing “look, racist separatists” to distract us all from the ones that have been raking it in for decades, and continue to rake it in.

  7. “Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does. The demon of unrest has claimed you for his own.”

    I’m finding it increasingly difficult to follow Trotter’s line of reasoning. His columns are getting more and more convoluted. I gave up on him for a while for various reasons, but went back – a little like a dog to its own vomit as they used to say. Mind you are not at all sure I follow your line of reasoning here either and I have at least a couple of degrees in subjects requiring a facility with the English language.
    However if indeed he is saying that we should have a “colourblind” society, he is doing no more than repeat the nuttiness you find on the MSN comments section whenever Maori are mentioned, particularly if they look like getting something they “don’t deserve”.
    I have suggested several times that he and the Conservatives who comment on his blog site read “Racism without racists” by (not sure of the spelling and can’t be bothered looking it up anymore life’s too short) Bon illa -Silva. He points out how so-called colourblind societies have for years now, embedded institutional racism.
    I’ve also repeatedly pointed out that – until the various minorities that engage in identity politics get the same outputs from the political system is the majority, then there will continue to be identity politics, it’s inevitable, and I don’t see a great deal wrong with it.
    After all, it was identity politics that fuelled the black civil rights movement in the US, and the women’s suffrage movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But Trotter has taken against it with a vengeance, because he thinks presumably that class-based politics can solve all the problems faced by minorities. Not so. It is reasonable at ironing out economic differences, but that’s about it. And even then it has its limitations. Class-based politics can and will do nothing to restore Maori language and culture among other things. Partly because the very restoration of these things causes an adverse reaction amongst those who think we should have a ‘colourblind’ society.
    I must confess I find his comparisons with slaveowners and the American Civil War as bizarre. But I may go into that a little war when his column appears on his blog.

    • Sorry for the confusion about “colour-blind” when I said everyone agrees, I meant non-racial policies are what people agree with (as opposed to the spurious “colour-blind” notion which seeks to deny disadvantage etc.).

  8. Watch out Tim S that you don’t sink into mere sneer and smear. Martyn aims to have quick witted and wise comment and declamations here and succeeds most of the time. Having a go at roping the legs of Trotter and any free-ranging stags and bringing them down is the sport and work of a cowboy. Whether it is good or bad, the rodeo has received bad press with thumbs down lately in NZAO. You could try the lassoo and corral the largest antlers until having say twelve points are reached and then debate whether they are ‘royal’.

  9. As a dim, lazy averager, and no longer a dense reader, my guiding star is to believe things at my own pace. So, at the end of your exposition, I don’t know.

    Of course, I left Trotter after his pro-Israel tripe. He seems to have gotten fixed on Maori as privileged, which is laughable. I think in the end he is a beautifully lyrical essayist above all.

  10. The minority ruling the majority because of their race is apartheid
    What happened to all the heroes of the left who marched against it in the 80’s
    Stalin was right though. God is on the side of the big battalions

    • So the poverty stricken and underprivileged and those treated unfairly Matthew are wrong in requesting the wealthy and privileged to live up to their implicit or avowed principles? But when there are enough of the disaffected to be big battalions, God will be with them? And Stalin? What are you on about? Can’t you consider the rights and wrongs of others’ sincere beliefs without going OTT?

      • What on earth has that got to do with setting up a 2 tier justice system?
        Stalins comment was in response to the churches telling him what to do
        Sound familiar?

      • MK you dodge past the subject when you bring up J Epstein. I think that is solely US and UK – or has NZAO been involved? Could you not foment trouble for no good reason? Saying applies, ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’.

  11. what trotter fails to see is that Maori are not an homogenous mob as he imagines it to be except for one thing, cultural hegemony. maori accept it. but when the shoe is on the other foot – it’s carnage – so immature

    • Immature you are right. The philosophers, which most of us have little truck with any of, know that we have trouble down the generations reaching any or passing on mature considerations.

  12. sorry tl:dr maori have accepted for so long and yet, here we are. most rational thinking people have too. it’s always Management that needs the shake up.

  13. Hilarious. The world would be a better place if the American Civil War had not ended with the successful formation by Lincoln of an American empire under the control of the money power. Just ask the people of the Philippines, Cuba, hundreds more REAL nations.

  14. Trotter was a fake from the get go, a fantasist, an egoist who carved out a comfortable niche as the mainstream media’s acceptable voice of the good old kiwi left, in the heady 1980s days of the neo liberal revolution. Acceptable so as to salve the dissolving souls and class memory of the liberal middle class who, sated from the 1981 orgy of virtue signalling could smell the money so close they could almost touch it.

    And in the destruction of the actual Left, in the void,
    Trotter, the running dog, tearing at and dragging those shreds of working class organisation, thinking and iconography to puff up his fake romance as The Voice of the Left.

    Only in the wake of 40 years of dumbing down could he ever have been taken for an intellectual, or thought leader. A not-even-careful analysis of his current tangled prose garners nothing but regret of the effort. He was and remains a parasite, trying to repeat his career-making scavenging off the still warm corpse of class politics, now by gnawing on the cold, dry bones of the settler colonial project.

    • This bitterness expressed is an example of how factions develop and spend their energies despising those who divert from the their one true way. That dispute and dissension is a major reason why we are where we are today, which is crushed by technology and lack of love for humanity, each other. Instead we have ranting hard liners who will continue the unpleasant attitudes that we seem better at carrying through generations than the practices of civilised thoughtful respectful and positive-action behaviour.

      Let’s aim for a new-type secular State of Grace which is not one of perfection according to MY opinion.

    • A reasonable thesis.

      I think we’re all pretty mixed in our motives. Difficult to skewer a human — y’know, just by the ‘human’ bit. But, informative.

  15. I used to comment at Bowalley, however during the pandemic Chris and some of his cohort became totally authoritarian. Chris is actually far from liberal, his understanding of individual rights versus compulsion is zero.

  16. On one level when Trotter suggests that we should be “colour blind” he is saying that we should have no racial bias. This is how most of us would interpret his metaphor. But on another level he is implying that we take on the disability of colour blindness, an obstinate refusal to see the aroha, beauty, vibrancy and colour of Maori living as Maori.
    There are those in the political establishment who feel threatened by Maoritanga, and not without reason. As well as serving as a cultural taonga independently of all other political systems or cultures, Maoritanga was the line of defence against colonialism, and remains the only real alternative to the complete triumph of neo-liberalism.
    Then there are those who have no such fears of Maoritanga, but who harbour a feeling that Maori have something that non-Maori are missing out on. The colour, the warmth, and the security of a collective whanau and hapu based culture of which non-Maori have been deprived. So the first group are working actively to arouse the second against Maori. In other words the ACT party is employing the politics of envy against directly against Maori and indirectly against Pakeha, because if their Treaty Principles project were to succeed Pakeha would lose even more than Maori.
    The Treaty Principles Bill in concert with the “colour blind” principle would have the effect of making Maori into mere nondescript citizens rather than Maori. A hundred years ago the idea of being a New Zealand citizen had appeal. So much so that some were prepared to give their lives to the defence of the empire. That is no longer the case. Citizenship in New Zealand has been devalued and degraded over the past forty years. It is no longer about a nation having a common goal and a commitment to a common good. Citizenship in neo-liberal colonialist New Zealand means “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost”, the devil in this case being the forces of global capitalism.
    Is anyone going to trade rangatiratanga for this mess of pottage? I doubt it. Chris Trotter and ACT are on a hiding to nothing.

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