Reuben Chapple: "Rednecks" and their discontents

“Redneck” is an imported American term that has no place in New Zealand’s public discourse. 

It refers to “poor Southern white trash”, who before the American Civil War, were the overseer class on the estates owned by rich planters. They’d sat on horses toting whips and guns, overseeing black slaves as they went about their work in the cotton fields.

After the slaves were freed, this white overseer class was reduced to manual labour, typically eking out a subsistence-level existence as sharecroppers in much the same manner as the freed slaves who’d elected to remain in the South.

Long hours bending over in the hot sun meant white necks soon turned red, and the term “redneck” was coined to describe the blind, reflexive racial bigotry of those who resented the loss of their former status.

If we’re going to import pejorative terms from other countries, it seems entirely fair to deploy another common American slur,  “Wigger”, as a counterpoint to “Redneck.”

A Wigger is someone who rats out their own race for the warm glow that comes from lining up with a supposedly “oppressed” people.

Like all Western countries, New Zealand has a raft of these self-despising race-traitors -- both in our universities and amongst the tertiary-educated -- who have been helped by their Marxist lecturers to see that whites are to blame for all the evils of the world.

These are people who told us three decades ago that apartheid was a social and moral evil in South Africa. Now, they’re telling us it’s a social and moral good in New Zealand. Whether apartheid is to be decried or endorsed seems to be based entirely on the skin colour of its beneficiaries. Whites always deserve a good kicking.

Leftists despise their own culture. They’ve been schooled to hate Western civilisation and regard Western countries as racist, sexist, colonialist oppressors. They desperately want to see other cultures as somehow morally superior to our own.

They’re not. The Judeo-Christian culture that originated in Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, then took root in Europe, is vastly superior to other cultures. Many non-whites have also benefited massively in adopting Western cultural norms and values. This fact is undeniable to anyone except a moron.

Judeo-Christian culture hasn’t always lived up to its own standards (Communism, Fascism, Crusaders, Conquistadores, the Inquisition, slavery, periodic discrimination against non-white or non-Christian minorities), but has always self-corrected due to the principled actions of people of goodwill who have identified and remedied these shortfalls. This culture has raised more people from poverty, ignorance, and barbarism than any other in world history. As such, it is to be celebrated, not denigrated.

Two Leftist-spawned currents operate in our country: multiculturalism and biculturalism.

These terms refer to a specific political ideology.

Multiculturalism is peddled by International Socialists who want to replace our Judeo-Christian culture with a global multiculture on which they intend to erect the One World Government that’s their end game. Along the way, they propose to rub everyone’s noses in “diversity” as some kind of twisted atonement for the West’s alleged white racist past. Everyone must be made to wear the hair shirt.

There’s an old saying with which all Westerners are familiar. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”  This is an obvious truth: If you move somewhere, you must adapt to the laws and customs of the land. No  society can have more than one culture. Of course minorities should be free to practise their religion; to eat Kosher, Halal or other foods; and to celebrate Diwali, Chinese New Year, or Ramadan. But in matters affecting their relationship with the society in which they live, they must accept the rules and practices of their host culture.

Multiculturalism has undermined this rule of common sense and decency. The multicultural society tells newcomers who settle here: You are free to behave contrary to our norms and values. This is because your norms and values are just as good, perhaps even better, than ours. The evidence from European countries that are 30 years ahead of New Zealand in encouraging immigrant groups to self-segregate shows just how wrong-headed this approach actually is.

Then there’s biculturalism. Its promoters recognise and support the multicultural model referred to above, but claim that the cultural values of New Zealanders of mixed European-Maori descent identifying monoculturally as Maori should trump all others on the basis of ancestral longevity of some ancestors in the land.

Yet traditional Maori culture says that one should honour all ancestors equally, not raise some up, and trample down others.

I see no reason why Maori culture should be afforded an undeserved pre-eminence. By any objective standard, the sum total of its contribution to human felicity is an ugly, gesticulating, tongue-poking, eye-rolling, thigh-slapping war dance of limited curiosity value when deployed before a rugby match.

If anyone can show otherwise, let them step up to the plate.

Racism is often conflated by Leftists with simple prejudice, which it is not. Principled opposition to unearned racial privilege and the belief that newcomers should be welcomed but required to conform to Judeo-Christian cultural norms is not racism. Nor is it typically evidence of prejudice.

Racism occurs where a group of prejudiced individuals get together to create a system affording them separate, different, or superior rights to everyone else solely on the basis of group membership.

I will leave it to readers to decide if NZ is a racist country, and if so, which group benefits from this racism.