David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 2

New Zealand is not the social laboratory of the world. We have, and have always had, the same ideas, the same fashions, the same follies, as everyone else in the West. They may just take a little while to reach us here.

The Treaty of Waitangi madness infecting the mental capacities of so many of our countrypersons is not evidence of some special sensitivities which New Zealanders possess, or even evidence of some special peculiarities of our history. The Treaty madness is just our own localised variant of a much more widespread insanity, which we might call ‘white guilt’.

The American novelist and social observer Tom Wolfe saw this in his own country half a century ago. It was an aspect of what he called ‘radical chic’; the fashion for affluent white people to feel just a little guilty, and, in an early example of virtue signalling, to support cool liberation movements which, if successful, would of course have left them all strung up from lampposts. Stokely Carmichael was the sexy charismatic leader of the Black Panthers, and Tom Wolfe thought that fashionable liberals suffered from what he called the ‘Please Stokely rape my sister’ syndrome. I have been so bad ~ by way of compensation, don’t hurt me, but you can hurt some one else near me. My sister ~ or the ordinary people of my country....

The forms which white guilt takes overseas are very similar to our own. Both here and there, white guilt manifests itself in quotas and affirmative action, in the defacement and destruction of monuments, and in apologies and reparations for things that happened to other people a very long time ago. It is everywhere backed by a ‘postmodern’ philosophy of multiculturalism, where there is no such thing as society, no absolute standards of behaviour and of right and wrong, and where everyone has his or her own ‘truth’, which is just as good as ours ~ but where, somehow, mysteriously, amid all this non-judgmental toleration of everything and everyone, we seem to be the ones who are increasingly drawing the short straw.

The University of Auckland has just stated in a job advertisement that ‘[a]pplicants must be of Maori descent’. The New Plymouth District Council is considering a race-based procurement policy; and white people need not apply.

Is this not apartheid? Which is bad, as we all know. But what do you think the officials in the office of the Race Relations Commissioner think of this sort of thing?

In Europe, unfortunately, the indigenous population happens to be white, and therefore not a suitable candidate for being oppressed. (Indeed, its beastly old-fashioned attitudes make it the obvious villain.) Fortunately however, numerous oppressed groups for which Europeans can be alleged to be responsible are readily available. There are the ‘subject peoples’ of the old European empires. There are also millions of ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ with absolutely no moral claim at all to Europe’s hospitality ~ other than some international agreement signed half a century or more ago in a very different world ~ but which are nevertheless welcomed with open arms by a guilt-ridden ruling caste and their human rights lawyers.

Why do governments let these people in? It is indisputably clear that it is not because most voters demand it. Even for those who support the policy it is hardly an issue to die in a ditch over. And it is also pretty obvious that at any level, socially or economically, it is going to be disastrous. Once-peaceful law abiding countries such as Sweden now have the highest crime rates in Europe. Hotels are burnt down, crime soars, locals riot......We may not approve of all or any of these things, but like it or not, they are happening, and are obviously going to get worse; and at exactly the same time that we have numerous other problems, economic and environmental, to deal with. So why are allegedly democratically-elected governments doing this?

There does come a point, certainly, where policies take on a momentum of their own. Perhaps parts of Europe have reached that point. Before then, though, such policies are only possible when those in charge have no connection with or pride in their own people and culture. They must have overwhelming confidence in their own judgment. And they must have not only a contempt for everyone else’s judgment, but also a mind-numbing ignorance, not only of history, but also of human nature.

The United States of America has recently seen riots, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, where rioters have demanded that anyone in the country, no matter how illegally they have arrived, should be entitled to stay there. The rioters have been strongly supported by many ‘liberals’ within the Democrat party.

To accept that demand is in effect to accept that all national borders should be open ~ ours, anyway ~ and so anyone who wants to should be free to come in and of course to enjoy at our expense all the benefits of citizenship. It is to maintain that really, there should be no borders at all. So unkind. So oppressive....

There is the end of the state. And long before then, we have become what even the hapless Sir Keir Starmer has sometimes professed to oppose ~ a ‘nation of strangers’, of people who have absolutely nothing in common except that they happen to live in the same place.

More and more, I am driven to the conclusion that many of our rulers are absolutely genuinely insane.

Whatever insanity is, it has to be a failure to grasp reality. There has to be a disconnection between the world and the brain of the afflicted one. These people have it. The whole transgender thing, for example. Jesus and Attila the Hun would have readily agreed on what men and women were, but now we don’t know, and we believe we can be anything we want to be. The current leader of the New Zealand opposition cannot say what a woman is. Professional societies here in this country attempt to discipline their members for holding opinions about male and female which were shared by Jesus and Attila.

We refuse to be bound by nature ~ by reality.

The problem is, it is impossible to argue with crazy people. They are simply impervious to reason.

How many times have we pointed out that defining people by race, and privileging brown people over white people, is just as much racism as the reverse? Have our rational arguments had any effect? No. Rational argument was water off a duck’s back to them. It is simply impossible to get through. ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.’
These people are mad. Their beliefs are crazy and dangerous. People who believe things like this should not be allowed to drive a car, let alone run a country.

What we are dealing with here is a deep irrationality; in fact, a mental illness. These people are not susceptible to rational argument.

Therefore, surely, other means of dealing with them may be necessary.

To be continued…

David Round, a sixth generation South Islander and committed conservationist, is an author, a constitutional and Treaty expert, and a former law lecturer at the University of Canterbury.