from theBFD
The execrable “Our Truth” section of self-flagellating Stuff exposing their past ‘racism’ is part-farce, part-comedy. Belting out the beaut idea just a couple of weeks ago the racism-hunters cited “One front-page article from the 1800s” which reported, ‘”For an inferior race, coming in contact with one greatly superior, there are generally but two possible and conceivable destinies – absorption or destruction.” That racist tone was not uncommon back then.” ‘
In fact, that’s just one sentence taken from a 2500+ word essay titled ‘A Native Policy for the Future‘ calling for better law and administration for Maori and for settlers to consider more carefully the causes and solutions for grievances. It’s simple dishonesty to call said article ‘racist’.
In fact, if fibs were money Stuff would be worth much more than a dollar: this one’s golden.
“Underlying much of our coverage, as headlined in a 1926 piece headlined ‘Maori Morals’ was the idea that Maori were intellectually inferior, and the settlers way was right”.
This one’s a complete lie; the story considers the plight of a Maori gentleman fined in a community council of morals, very similar to the ‘Kirk Sessions’ of Scotland, then tried again in a criminal court for the same offense “one of the gravest” in which the judge said, in passing sentence, “if the prisoner had been a white man I would probably have handed down the maximum sentence” (7 years) before sending him to jail for twelve months. If racism is so easy to find in their past why are Stuff going out of their way to lie about it?
Topping that, in disingenuousness, comes race-baiting Joel Maxwell with his two-cents worth.
“This is, after all, one of the problems we have in news media in Aotearoa: Maori have been the butt of the communal joke, cast as villains, the criminals, in their own story.”
For which Stuff are obviously very, very sorry.
Also from Stuff, also from Maxwell’s keyboard, but for which Stuff are not sorry, at all and couldn’t give a hoot about, is the casting of others as villians, as criminals, the butt of jokes:
“Pakehas, man. They are a dizzying mess…a neurosis in a tuxedo. Nowadays, it’s not even the tux.” “like the worst deadbeat dad”, “the pinky-white constant in the background of the Great Show that is our nation’s recent history”, “thieving pakeha”, “fizzing with paranoia”, “in the middle of everything, bridging the Left and Right, operating from fear and its associates, spite and stupidity.”, “racists, bigots, and rednecks”, they “abase themselves by their strange, angry preoccupation with their own resentment”, “their kin picked our pockets” they are “living in the gutter of racism”.
Noting in the article image above, from 1861, ‘The Press’ motto is ‘Nilhil utile quod non honestum’, ‘Nothing is useful that is not honest’, I rest my case.
K R Bolton said:
At first Maori were regarded within the 18th Century notion of the ‘Noble savage’, living in an idyll unhampered by the intrusions of civilization, running carefree; a vision concocted in the Salons of the European Enlightenment by philosophers who had not gone beyond Europe. Because that was the intellectual fashion even explorers sought to see the natives of the newfound lands in that manner.
Later, as ethnology proceeded to study the Polynesians, Maori were regarded as the long-lost ‘Aryan’ cousins of the British, postulating that they had originated in India. This was the view not only of ethnologists such as Edward Tregear, Percy Smith, and J MacMillan Brown, but of Maori scholars also, such as Peter Buck. There are Maori who continue to trace their family origins back to Aryan-India.
That Maori men were given the right to vote 12 years before European settlers is indicative that colonial policy was not ‘racist’, nor ‘white supremacist’, but was motivated by other factors. The Afrikaners were treated in ways far below that of Maori by British oligarchs, and as Thomas Carlyle (Past & Present, 1843) , just as much as Friedrich Engels (Condition of the Working Class in England) pointed out, the system of politics, finance and industry in Britain at the time accorded the position of the White Briton a status very much below that of any colonial native, while there was no humanitarian crusade on behalf of those who endured the slums of St. Giles, Workhouse, child labour … This is what is now called ‘white privilege’.
The denigration of the European is pervasive and perpetual. Does the European New Zealander have a single representative in parliament representing their interests, culture, and an ethos that has been obliterated? A signal journalist.to write of ‘Pakeha’ grievances?
The concept of the Noble Savage has returned under a different guise and all things ‘indigenous’, (other than if you are an indigene of Briton, France, or Sweden…, in which case opposite standards suddenly apply) are accorded holy status, which must be acknowledged as sacrosanct, history rewritten accordingly, and laws passed to ensure that dissent is strictly forbidden.