Secularism’s Messiah

Salvation by Law and the Prison

It is axiomatic in a Christian Commonwealth that a sharp distinction is drawn between sins and crimes.  All crimes, of course, are sins.  But not all sins are crimes–in fact, very few of them are.

But in the world of Unbelief no-one can draw a demarcation between sins and crimes.  All iniquities, all evil is potentially criminal.  Since, in modern secularist Unbelief there is no god or saviour apart from the state, all attempts to remove evil from society will lead inevitably to more and more sins being criminalised.  The upshot is the rise of a progressive tyranny.  The state becomes more and more authoritarian, intrusive, hectoring, demanding, ruling, and bossy.  In the end, authoritarianism risks developing into full throated totalitarianism.

In the United Kingdom (once a Christian Commonwealth, now a secularist paradise) a draft bill would have husbands face fourteen years in prison if they shout at their wives.

Men who exercise “coercive control” over their partners by restricting their personal or financial freedom, or through overt criticism could face up to 14 years in jail under new laws set to be announced by Home Secretary Theresa May this week.

Campaigners, who have been arguing for a change in the law to bring emotional abuse into line legally with physical abuse, have praised the proposals as a “major step forward”. The new law will be introduced as a series of amendments to the Serious Crime Bill, and will alter the legal definition of domestic abuse to include psychological, as well as physical damage. It is expected to pass into law in the new year.[Breitbart London]

Orthodox Christian teaching declares that sin is universal in human thoughts, words and deeds. As James puts it, “whoever observes the whole law, but slips in one point, becomes guilty in every respect.” (James 2:10)  The Heidelberg Catechism asks, “But can those converted to God obey these commandments perfectly?” and answers, “No. In this life even the holiest has only a small beginning of this obedience.” (Question 114.)

When secularist Unbelief parades as its own saviour, its final desperate attempt at redemption is to make crimes out of mundane sins like “critical words” or Scrooge-like stinginess.

Seema Malhotra, Labour’s shadow anti-domestic violence minister, suggested earlier this year that husbands criticising their wives weight or appearance may be guilty of domestic abuse. “It can be part of a pattern of controlling behaviour that leaves people feeling fearful and terrorised in their own homes,” she said, and may be an “indicator of physical abuse in the future”.

Ironically, this represents in principle a variant of Islamist  theology.  Salvation by compulsion.  By the keen edge of the sword.  Submit to righteousness, or rot in gaol.  At this point the fruits of secularist redemption are the same genus and species as Islamism, which claims, even boasts, that it saves by the sword.  What these similarities suggest is that Unbelief has far more in common with Islamism than many would care to acknowledge.

For Christians there are no surprises here.  Both secularist Unbelief and Islam are alike satanic in origin and genus.  It’s not at all surprising that redemption by authoritarian oppression will end up as the driving animus of both systems. 

What will be the outcome of such idolatrous secularist folly?  Grave damage indeed.

Firstly, this new law will need to be written in gender neutral language, despite its target being men, not women.  Since women often make up for an inability to match men in physical strength by resorting to verbal abuse (sarcasm, insults, hate speech) it is to be expected that more and more women will be criminalised and end up doing serious gaol time.  This will take “taming of the shrew” to new heights.  No doubt an entirely unexpected outcome of the secularist’s “salvation by law”. 

Secondly, whilst the gaols will be bursting at the seams, cases of actual physical assault will continue unabated.  The authorities will become so busy apprehending and prosecuting verbal assaults or fiscal stinginess, real abuse will continue cloaked in secrecy and darkness.

But not everyone is happy with the legal changes. Three years ago, when similar changes were being proposed . . . Erin Pizzey, who in the 1970s set up the network of safe houses now run by Refuge, slammed the proposals as trivialising domestic violence.

She took to the Daily Mail to offer a detailed explanation of her criticisms, saying: “When I began my refuge four decades ago, I took in victims of severe domestic violence who were literally running for their lives.  They were prepared to leave everything behind to escape the horrendous situation they found themselves in for a safe house for themselves and their children.

“Unless you have seen real, shocking abuse as I have, it is difficult to imagine some of the awful violence that people can inflict on each other in the home. And that’s why I’m convinced that bringing other, lesser, wrongs under this same legal umbrella does a great disservice to the women who really suffer.  “At this rate, we’ll all end up under arrest, and that is not a situation that’s going to help the police tackle the cases of true physical violence which must be stamped out.

“People behave badly in relationships because we have human frailties. This is not an area in which the State should meddle; leave it to relationship counsellors and divorce lawyers. They already help people escape toxic relationships.”

Every day, thousands upon thousands of domestic disputes end up being called into 999.  The vast majority of them involve not physical violence, but verbal arguments and altercations.  By making such sins to be crimes, police and courts will be overloaded by the trivial, whilst predatory gangs will continue to rape unimpeded in places like Rotherham.  Police will be too busy elsewhere.  Young girls being subjected to gang rape don’t tend to call 999.  Interdiction of the perpetrators requires dedicated, long-term investigative work.

“Women want to see real crimes punished and vulnerable children protected. But if the law changes and the definition of domestic violence is watered down, the genuine victims of abuse will suffer because the authorities will have less time and energy to devote to helping them,” [Erin Pizzey] concluded.

Turning sins into crimes is a vast overreach by secularist Unbelief.  But Unbelief is both impotent and one-dimensional.  It cannot save souls.  It cannot convert hearts.  It has no objective standard to distinguish between sin and crime.  All it has is a blunt bludgeoning sword.  It is resorting to it more and more, even to control thought and speech.

Maybe that’s why Islamism is the new normal and so attractive to many Britons.  Enforced redemption by oppression and a vast expansion of state power has been Unbelief’s gospel for over two generations now, and Islam is merely a variant of the same. 

Advocates Posing as Academics

Propaganda and The Anti-Smacking Shills

The fallacy of false cause is pretty much universal amongst academics these days–which is to say they cannot think straight.  We have had presented to us one of the more hyper-ventilated examples recently.  In the NZ Herald an Australian academic breathlessly informs us that parental smacking of children to discipline them is utterly terrible.  The academic in question, Bernadette Saunders is introduced to us as follows:

Bernadette Saunders is a Senior Lecturer Social Work at Monash University. She has received two separate funding grants from the Australian Research Council and the Legal Services Board Grants Program to pursue research on the physical punishment /lawful correction of children.

Our academic expert has received money to “pursue research” into the “physical punishment/lawful correction of children”.  This is a thorough misdirection.  Mz Saunders is an ideological advocate, a shill, not an objective researcher.  She is being funded for purposes of propaganda.  She is not an honest trader.  How do we know this?

Firstly, the piece published in the NZ Herald was based upon an article by Saunders published in The Conversation  otherwise known as The Diatribe.

The recently released UNICEF report on violence against children draws on data from 190 countries to present a very grim picture of the physical and emotional harm children continue to suffer. Much of this harm is perpetrated by the adults upon whom the child depends for his or her safety and well-being, guidance and positive example.

The UNICEF report clearly states that violence in all its forms can rob children’s dignity, diminish their self-worth, and threaten their optimal development. Children not only suffer its immediate physical and emotional effects; the violence they see and experience is likely to impact on the type of adult they become and the future society of which they will be part.

The most common form of violence that children suffer is the often taken-for-granted “disciplinary” violence – physical force and verbal intimidation – used by parents and teachers as punishment and or to control or change children’s annoying or unacceptable behaviours. Worldwide, six out of ten children aged between two and 14 are regularly physically punished.

It is dubious indeed that an ostensibly credible academic would cite a United Nations report as any kind of authority.  The UN is a morally bankrupt, corrupt institution and any advocacy by it or its offshoots must be treated with a great deal of caution.  But that aside, the sentence in Saunders’s diatribe which especially caught our eye was this:

In Australia, a study of child homicide between 1991 and 2005 in New South Wales concluded that prohibiting the corporal punishment of children could save children’s lives.  Thirty-five years ago, Sweden became the first country in the world to legally prohibit the corporal punishment of children in all settings. It is now banned in 39 countries, including New Zealand, the only English-speaking country to adopt this progressive step. [Emphasis, ours]

Smacking has been banned in New Zealand now for years.  It is at this point we come to the fallacy of false cause.  Advocates and ideologues allege that parental smacking of children as part of disciplining them is a form of violence against children, which risks subjecting them to ever greater forms of violence (the old “slippery slope” argument).  It is alleged that those parents who smack their children for purposes of correction and training are more likely to beat them mercilessly and even kill them in blind fits of rage.  Really?  But worse, children subject to parental correction by use of a smack or spank are likely, themselves, to become violent adults in time.  Violence begets violence.  That’s why policemen are such violent thugs at home, repeatedly putting choke holds on their four year olds.  That’s why soldiers who have seen active duty bayonet their children and neighbours as they lie sleeping.  That’s why slaughter men at the abattoirs are likely to stab their children at will.  It’s all so obvious.  Right before our eyes.  

If all of the above were even remotely true, New Zealand’s rate of child abuse should now be declining rapidly, since smacking has been banned here long enough now to make a startling impact upon adult-child violence.  New Zealand, thus, has become an interesting test case to see whether the ideologues, such as Saunders, are right, or whether they are engaged in fallacious, crooked thinking.  Clearly, the latter is the case.  Why?  Because, according to the NZ Government, in 2014

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of physical child abuse in the development [sic] world. We also have one of the worst rates of child death by maltreatment within the family.  Children can also be abused emotionally and sexually.  All such abuse has a damaging effect on a child’s well-being and future development. [Emphasis, ours]

Therefore, we are on safe ground to reject utterly the arguments of Mz Saunders and her ilk.  New Zealand made child smacking illegal years ago.  Our rates of family violence are at the highest of the “developed world”.  So, Saunders causal argument trying to link smacking and child abuse collapses in a heap.  She has attempted to pull wool over our eyes using the fallacy of false cause.  In fact, she and her ilk are just plain wrong.  Hucksters.  Propagandists.  Ideologues.  The New Zealand evidence refutes their argument. If smacking to correct and train a child actually cause further violence against children and intra-family violence in general, our rates of physical abuse of children and family violence, now that smacking is illegal, would be declining rapidly by now.  Since the reserve is the case, Saunders’s argument implodes. 

And how about Sweden–that oft-cited paragon of social virtue?  It has also banned smacking many moons ago.  Ah, not so good.  Sweden has the third highest rate of rape in the world; people there fear crime more than in the United States.  The total crime rate is second highest in the world.  The rate of actual assaults in fourth highest in the world. 

The prima facie evidence is the exact opposite: outlaw reasonable force as part of the discipline of children and the outcome is greater crime and greater violence both inside families and outside them.  Now, we would not have the chutzpah of a modern academic to assert that such corollaries are necessarily true.  More research would need to be done.  But the prima facie evidence is much, much stronger than the contrary case asserted by Mz Saunders and her colleagues. 

But advocacy and research have always been a dangerous combination. As the old saw goes, “our advocacy is based upon facts, madam, and if you don’t like our facts, we have different ones.”

Letter From America (About Black Violence)

WSJ’s Jason Riley On Obama, Black Leadership And The Media Over Ferguson

The Daily Caller
Brendan Bordelon
18th August, 2014 

[No doubt there are plenty of issues to be addressed one way or another in the United States over the relationships between blacks and the police.  For our part, we remain sceptical of the “crowd” which would use the tragedies in Ferguson as a pretext for looting and abusing their neighbours, claiming their acts are moral because of the oppression they face.  As for the attention hungry faux-celebrities that cruise into town in the attempt to exploit the issues as part of their PR spin they are bottom barrel scrapers.  There is no doubt that the issues have to do with morality and ethics–a reality which crosses all ethnic distinctions.  In the piece below, Jason Riley brings his moral compass to bear upon the Ferguson rioting. We are intrigued because it is a perspective not often voiced. Ed.]

Normally soft-spoken Wall Street Journal editor Jason Riley became heated during a rant on the Ferguson crisis, calling President Obama’s most recent statement “a dodge” and slamming the “false narrative” that black men are targeted by white cops.  Riley appeared on Fox News’ “Special Report” on Monday to discuss the White House statement about the riots ravaging Ferguson, Missouri since the death of black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of a white police officer.

Riley was happy that Obama brought up black crime, “but then he attributed that black criminality — he suggested it stems from poverty or a racist criminal justice system, which is nonsense.”

“The black crime rate in 1960 was lower than it is today,” he said. “Was there less racism or less poverty than in 1960? This is about black behavior. It needs to be addressed head-on. It’s about attitudes toward the criminal justice system in these neighborhoods, where young black men have no sense of what it means to be a male or what it means to be black. And he needs to talk about that head-on,” Riley repeated, “not dismiss it as a product of poverty or racism, which is a dodge.”

The WSJ editor also took aim at black civil rights leaders and the media campaign they’ve created. “There’s this false narrative being pushed out there by folks like Michael Eric Dyson and [Al] Sharpton and the rest of the hustlers,” he said, “[and it’s] that black men live in fear of being shot by cops in those neighborhoods. That too is nonsense.”

“I know something about growing up black and male in the inner city,” Riley explained, “and it’s not that hard to avoid getting shot by a cop. They pull you over, you answer their questions. you’re on your way.”

“The real difficulty is not getting shot by other black people, if you are a young black man in these neighborhoods!” Riley continued. “And again, that is something we need to talk about more! Cops are not the problem.  Cops are not producing these black bodies in the morgues every weekend in Chicago, in New York and Detroit and so forth,” he concluded. “That’s not cops. Those are black people shooting black people.”

Ah, yes.  Sadly what Riley says is true.  Black on black crime is the real oppressor and killer of blacks.  Running a fast second is a false narrative–the idea that “the devil made me do it”, only the “devil” in this case is the “system”, whitey, the police, the rich, Wall Street fat cats, anybody, everybody, but definitely someone else.  “All of them are to blame for me picking up my gun or knife and killing my black neighbour.  If the collective “devil” did not exist, I would not be doing what I am doing right now.”  

Two things.  Firstly, where does that false narrative come from, and which people and entities peddle it constantly?  Secondly, the Christian Gospel will always, always press for moral responsibility and accountability to be laid firmly at the feet of the violent perpetrator (self-defence excepted) regardless of what temptations the system may throw up.  (Matthew 5: 38-42) 

Pots and Kettles

The Irresponsible Amongst Us

Every so often editorial writers get hopelessly confused.  Here is an example:  an editorial in the NZ Herald made this statement of fact:

Domestic violence . . .  is perpetrated overwhelmingly by men against women and children.

Then, a few paragraphs later, the writer states:

Professor David Fergusson, who has studied the lives of 1265 people born in Christchurch in 1977, said his research suggested the rates of domestic violence by men and women are similar and in many instances involved mutual violence between couples. “Women do suffer more in terms of fearfulness and related outcomes,” he said, “but what we do find in our study is that violence is usually mutual and there isn’t a predominant aggressor.”

The writer then adopts the tone of a scold with respect to the Professor and his research:

It is hard to imagine a more irresponsible message to give to the sort of men who resort to violence against women.

What about women that resort to violence against men?  What are our responsibilities toward them. Ah, writes the editorialist, it’s not that bad.

Men have the physical advantage. It may be unfashionable to say so but it should not need to be said.

Male violence against females is really bad.  Female violence against males . . . not so much.  Try telling that to a male whose skull has been cracked by a cast iron frying pan.  What the editorialist is implying is that the public campaign slogan, “It’s Not OK”, which is an attempt to combat the plague of family violence in New Zealand, needs a bit of refinement.  It needs to read, “Family Violence: If You are a Man, It’s Not OK.”

The research by Professor Fergusson shows that the rates of domestic violence by men and women are similar.  Mutual violence between men and women is extremely common.  The study shows that males are not the predominant aggressor.  The aggression is gender neutral.  The editorialist simply ignores these claims.  Are they true or not?  Don’t care.  They are irrelevant.  Men are bigger and stronger.  Therefore, they need to bear the blame.  The focus needs to be upon the bigger and stronger perpetrator.

Actually, it matters a whole lot.  In most households there are children.  Both male and females–if aggressive–are both substantially bigger than children.  If you care about the most defenceless amongst us think of what an angry, drunk or drug-fuelled woman can do to children close at hand when she unleashes her vitriol upon them.  Think of the most profane, filthy, verbal abuse spewing forth from the mouth of an enraged woman as she mercilessly beats a defenceless child.  Not a problem.  It’s men.  That’s where the problem lies–at least according to the confused Herald editorialist. There are few more egregious examples of the fallacy of a false dichotomy.

If Professor Fergusson’s research is accurate, the editorialist has missed the point and begged the question.  By responding in a superficial, almost hysterical manner, he or she has been gulled by the political rhetoric presently swirling around this issue.  If the editorialist had been a bit more thoughtful, the concluding paragraph which reads:

Perhaps the campaign [against family violence] could be restyled, “It’s not manly”. If boys are brought up to respect their masculinity, women should be safer.

would have been recast,

Perhaps the campaign [against family violence] could be restyled, “It’s neither feminine, nor manly”. If boys are brought up to respect their masculinity, and girls are brought up to respect their femininity, both men and women and children should be safer.

Scolding researchers and their research as giving an “irresponsible message” simply will not do.  To respond that way is the real irresponsibility.  Such confusion is not helpful in the least. 

Pseudo-Hagiography

Already Playing Tricks Upon the Dead

Over recent days the world’s Commentariat has been agog over the passing of Nelson Mandela.  We are witnessing hagiography in the making before our very eyes.  We wonder whether he will be proclaimed Messiah in the next week or so. 

There are many things to admire in Mendela’s life and career.  There are other things to reject and despise.  Fairness and balance requires that we keep both in perspective.  The adulatory ululations have covered over the bad, making him already a quasi-mythical figure.  We find ourselves reflecting on the contrast when Scripture celebrates great men.  Always, in the case of  Scripture, it is a matter of warts and all.  Their sins, failings, mistakes are up front and centre, along with how they repented of evil, turned to the Light, and became faithful to the Lord.  Think David, Moses, Saul/Paul.  This, we suggest, is the model of honest, real hagiography.  The sad thing, in Mandela’s case, is that all the evidence suggests that Mandela was repentant over his youthful wrongs, but those have been studiously ignored in the Commentariat’s ululating.  By ignoring the obvious–being too polite and politically correct to talk about it–Mandela’s actual remarkable achievements are undermined, being disembodied from humanity and history. 

Mandela’s struggle against apartheid led him to advocate violent overthrow of the government and the system.
  He formed the terrorist wing of the ANC and was not just its creator, but ardent advocate.  Under his watch and influence violence occurred, innocent people were murdered–counted mere collateral damage as the end justified depraved means.  Note well: murder and violent destruction occurred not by accident, as a collateral by-product–which would be bade enough–but by deliberate planned intent.  It was at Mandela’s specific instruction.  He was imprisoned for good reason, for just reasons.  Why, until 2008 he was on a global list of named terrorists in the United States. 

It appears that whilst in prison, over the course of many years, he recanted violence and its use.  He sought to reconcile the divided, not conquer by violence.  This is the truly remarkable thing that rightly should be celebrated.  Mandela not just talked non-violence and reconciliation, he practised it in prison and upon release.  Therefore, he truly is the father of modern South Africa.  As so often is the case, because he had been a leading ideologue and provocateur in advocating black violent overthrow of white hegemony, he therefore subsequently had the authority and mana to persuade the ANC to relinquish violence.  The non-violent message was acceptable to the ANC because it came from him. 

Mandela became a powerful reconciling figure.  He walked the talk.  He won whites over by his genuine humanity towards them.  But to our mind the most salutary exemplar of the man was his personal turning from violent hatred to forgive and pursue peaceful reconciliation.  It makes his subsequent achievements all the more remarkable.  By choosing to obscure this aspect of his past, in a pathetic attempt at Hollywood-style celebratory airbrushing, the Commentariat has robbed Mandela and his true legacy and his most salutary achievement. 

This is yet another reason to despise political correctness.  That kind of half-truth hagiography risks more harm than good. 

Eschewing Violence

Modern Suggestive Conceptions of Law

We live in a world beset by squeamishness.  How this came about, we are not sure.  Some would say that it is due to the increasing feminisation of the culture.  Others would finger a philosophy of false optimism that assumes progress and civilization mean less violence.  Maybe it is due to a general ignorance courtesy of irrelevant and impotent state education systems.  No doubt the causes and provenance of general societal squeamishness are likely complex.

But the phenomenon is real enough.  In New Zealand, hundreds of thousands of Kiwis fish.  This brings death up close and personal.  More–it links food and diet to violence.  Fish in order to be eaten and enjoyed have first to be caught and killed–unless, like Gollum you prefer them wriggling and raw.  That cultural past-time helps keep the population conscious of the need for violence if a civilisation is to survive.  But imagine how it might change if the only fish Kiwis ever ate was what could be bought at the supermarket.  The link between violence and survival would be more removed from the food chain.  It wold present a fertile ground for the miasmic fog of squeamishness to begin forming in the valleys.
 

We well remember being confronted with shock, outrage and even horror when work colleagues found out we hunted for meat.  Adjectives like “bloodthirsty” and “cruel” were appended to nouns like “killer” and “murderer”.  When we mildly inquired how these outraged moderns understood chicken got on to supermarket shelves it became apparent that our persecutors had never before considered the question.  Their squeamishness was not just emotive; it was born of ignorance and naivety.

Another manifestation of the general squeamishness which afflicts us is a lack of understanding about the law being inextricably linked to violence and force.  As Jonah Goldberg has pointed out,

Certain breeds of libertarian and anarchist are fond of observing that the state is ultimately about force, by which they mean violence.  They’ll point out that if you refuse to pay your taxes or even mow your lawn long enough, eventually after much paperwork, men with guns will come to your make and make you do–or pay-what is required of you.  The problem with this observation is not that it is wrong, but that those who espouse it think it is an indictment.  Law without the possibility of force is not law.  Or, as Hobbes noted, “covenants without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.181f.]  

Without the sanction of violence behind it, the law is not law at all: it is a mere suggestion, an encouragement.  The Ten Commandments, without the Divine sanction of God’s final and ultimate judgement and vengeance behind them, would be idealistic nostrums only.  On the other hand, the fact that behind them stands the One who will punish everlastingly every breach of the Ten makes them most certain law. 

Maybe it is at this point that we have a more comprehensive and profound explanation for our general societal squeamishness.  As our culture has progressively denied the very existence of God, it has also denied the realities of judgement for breaking His holy laws.  Implicitly, this has meant there are no bloody sanctions at all–which all self-assessed civilised and advanced peoples would find not just primitive but distasteful and unseemly. 

The Owen Glenn Inquiry

A Bit of a Yawn

The Owen Glenn inquiry into family violence has taken some strange turns down a back country road.  Glenn is a wealthy philanthropist. He has more money than most New Zealanders’ could shake a stick at–which in a country racked with covetousness and a deep sense of grievance is not well received by many.  More than a small minority believe there is only one thing Owen Glenn should do with his money: he should give it us me, myself, and I, since guys like Glenn are implicitly responsible for my hardship and my degradation.

Then there’s another thing.  Glenn wanting to “invest” private money to find out the causes of family violence does not sit well because everyone agrees that preventing family violence is the government’s responsibility.  If a private individual starts to pay for a public good, concerns surface that maybe we are seeing the first steps towards privatisation of government welfare by stealth.  Inconceivable!  Wouldn’t it be better for Glenn just to donate the money to the government and let it get on with it?   The government could even pass special legislation, entitled “The Glenn Special Surtax Bill”–or something of that ilk. 

And then there’s the “what’s the point?” argument.
  Let’s say the Glenn Inquiry is a stunning success.  Won’t it tell us what we already know?  After all it’s not rocket science.  What causes family violence?  How about alcohol, drugs, abandoned children, marital breakdowns and separations, in-bred poisonous attitudes like selfishness and covetousness and envy, and a lust for existential self-gratification,  coupled with an endless succession of transient caregivers?  These things we already know.  There is a complex cluster of causes.  There is no silver bullet.  We already know that, too.  Will the Glenn Inquiry boringly end up telling us what is common knowledge?  Probably.  Will it conclude there is no silver bullet?  Likely.  On the other hand, if it claims to have found one, it will lack credibility. 

We have watched the Inquiry tip-toeing through a succession of dysfunctional farces.  It’s been a parody of family violence itself.  Arguments, disagreements, fights, desertions, resignations, recriminations, accusations, and disloyalty.  Maybe that’s the whole point.  Maybe Glenn has a cunning plan.  He wants his inquiry to resemble, to parody, or to act out the modern dysfunctional family before the watching world, so we will draw the conclusion that family violence is normal, ordinary. 

Glenn employed a gaggle of experts–people long experienced (we were told) from working in the field of family violence.  Consultants, advisors, bureaucrats.  They wanted the Inquiry to function as a public megaphone, enabling those that suffered violence to be heard (whilst kept anonymous, of course).  But there is an abiding suspicion that many of these experts already knew the causes of family violence: they were looking not to inquire, but to showcase, to grandstand their case.  The “well-known” causes, some have suggested, are exploitation of Maori by colonialist whitey,  and poverty.  How do we fix that problem?  Well, that’s pretty obvious.  We roll back New Zealand history by two hundred years and give everyone sixpence. That’ll do it. 

When Glenn tried to steer the inquiry into a less ideological (presumably, more practical) direction that gaggle took umbrage and resigned.  Who knows.  But it’s entertaining. 

For the record, our position is this:

1. Owen Glenn can spend his money on whatever (lawful goods or services)  he chooses.  It’s a fundamental property right.  He has a right to waste it, if he chooses.  He can decide to direct good money to chase after bad, and so forth. 

2. Charity demands that we give Glenn the benefit of the doubt–that his desire to alleviate or help prevent family violence is genuine.  We thank him for that.  We need all the help we can get.  Every voice saying, “It’s not OK” is welcome.  As far as it goes, it’s good to see him trying to do something about the New Zealand scourge. 

3.  There is no silver bullet, no key that will suddenly turn us into a pacific, loving community.  The causes are complex, intergenerational, multi-layered, thick, and intertwined.  Sin is like that.  Human culture is like that.  Glenn’s Inquiry may help–but it will only be at the edge of the margins, because in the end we are talking about changing heart attitudes and confronting behavioural habits that have been inculcated over generations.  The solutions are multi-valent, diverse, complex–and almost always small in the sense of helping and redeeming one person, one family, one extended family at a time.  How long does it take to raise one child?  About twenty years, day in, day out.  Reversing violence within a broken family habituated to its curse will take much, much longer.  And money cannot do it.  Programmes run by bureaucrats cannot do it  They can only help at the edges–and often do more damage than good, with unforeseen negative consequences. 

4.  Finding “models” that are working or making a difference does not help.  As soon as those “models” are enlarged and expanded to be cookie-cutter bureaucratic/government programmes they break down and fail.  Bureaucratic programmes cannot substitute for face-to-face, people-to-people love, loyalty, devotion, and service.  Bureaucratic programmes cannot change hearts.  The other day we were out on our daily peregrination.  We walked past an older man standing side-by-side chatting with a teenager on the footpath.  The countenances were engaged.  The conversation was animated.  There was laughter.  As we walked past, the older chap caught our eye, greeted us, and wished us a good day.  Priceless.  Multiply that simple act of warm human communication between the elderly and the young by thousands upon thousands.  That’s how you raise a child, build a family, and strengthen a community.  You cannot turn that into a government programme. 

5.  All human help will be constrained.  That does not mean we should not work hard at it.  But we have to know our limitations.  Only the Lord can change hearts and mend broken lives in a truly profound way.  Therefore, we must be realistic, yet without bitterness or cynicism. 

In the face of these realities, the Glenn Inquiry is not to be decried.  But our expectations are sufficiently low that we struggle to maintain any ongoing interest.  It’s all a bit of a yawn.  The most salutary thing–which is not to be ignored–is that Glenn’s initiative provides yet another example of someone saying, “It’s not OK” and that–in as far as it goes–is welcome indeed.   

In Denial

True Islam and Its Modern Heretics 

Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair assures us that Islam does not have a problem, per se.  Rather the problem lies with particular elements within Islam.  This is the consistent line taken it the West by the United States, the UK, and Nato countries in general. When atrocities like the Woolwich murder of Drummer Rigby occur, this is the standard, PC line.  The real question is whether  the standard, official line is merely propaganda, or wishful thinking, or an inability to tell the truth (first to oneself, then to one’s coterie, then to the nation.)
Firstly, let’s review Blair’s comments as reported in The Independent: 

“There is not a problem with Islam,” he wrote. “For those of us who have studied it, there is no doubt about its true and peaceful nature. There is not a problem with Muslims in general. Most in Britain will be horrified at Lee Rigby’s murder.

Islam has a “true” and “peaceful nature” not on display in the Woolwich beheading.  To Blair’s credit, he acknowledges that heretical Islam–for that is how he is positioning it–is strong, growing, and significantly influential.

The Islamist ideology, he said, is “out there” and “isn’t diminishing. . . . [t]here is a problem within Islam – from the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam. And we have to put it on the table and be honest about it.”  He said that while there are radical activists in other religions, the Islamic strain is “not the province of a few extremists”.  It has at its heart a view about religion and about the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies,” he said.

Blair’s fantasy balloon was pricked rather neatly by  former Conservative Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind.  He . . .

told the paper that though “much of what Tony Blair says is sensible”, he “appears to be still trying to justify the Iraq War rather than acknowledging that that war provided an unprecedented opportunity for the Sunni and Shia extremists to slaughter so many of their co-religionists”.

That is the prick point that bursts the “heretical Islam” theory about Islamic terrorism and violence.  Most Islamic violence and bloodshed is intra-mural Islamic violence–the slaughter of co-religionists–fellow Muslims, often women and children and civilians.  So who are these heretics?  Are they Sunnis, or Shia?  For the violence is common to both groups.  And most of Islam is either Sunni or Shia.  So, are both Sunni and Shia doctrines heretical?  If so, which ones?  What, then, is true Muslim doctrine as represented to us by Blair?  Who or what is the true believer, and who is the heretic?  Arguably the strongest commonality between the two leading Islamic groups is a commitment to the use of violence and force to get control. 

But it’s even harder to maintain the heresy theory when we consider that the split between Shia and Sunni emerged within one generation of Muhammad in the seventh century, and violent clashes between the two have racked Islam ever since.  What we see occurring in Islamic countries today is nothing new at all.  It’s just that the Commentariat (in this case as represented by Tony Blair) steadfastly refuse to acknowledge it.  Rather they continue with the fabrication of a “not truly Islamic” theory.

Finally, was Muhammad mistaken or lying when he gave his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.'”  Usually farewell addresses contain the abiding essentials of one’s doctrine.  And given the Muslim doctrine of revocation, whereby latter revelations or teachings revoke all previous teaching, surely Islam itself would see this as not a temporary measure, but an abiding obligation and command of the religion–not a heresy, but a core component of the faith.

Now, of course, there are many wilful Islamic apologists in the West who would hasten to assure us that the “fight” (jihad) Muhammad was calling for was a moral, ethical, and ideological struggle for hearts and minds.  He was not talking about actual physical warfare.  But does that accord with the Koran and the practice of his followers immediately following his death.  How did they understand his instructions?

Well, the Koran is not silent about the kind of struggle Muhammad had in mind.

“slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush.” In this spirit [and in accordance with this teaching] Muslim armies launched a century of successful conquests. [Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 201.]

This Islamic heresy of oppression, violence, killing, and subjugation is historical Islam, both as it faces pagans and as Islamic societies face one another.  We repeat, the greatest violence done by Islamic believers today is being perpetrated on co-religionists.

So the question is begged.  What is the great Islamic heresy of our day?  We believe it is the West’s revisionist recasting of Islam.  It is Tony Blair who represents heretical Islam.  His version of Islam, whilst certainly more condign with and comforting to the West, represents a heretical Islam which is not true to the Prophet, nor to Islam’s teachings, nor to the historical practice of the religion, nor to intra-mural Islamic relations today. 

Sclerotic Incompetence

In Memory of Murray Wilkinson

The Justice system in New Zealand has some huge holes in it.  On the eighth of January, NZ police arrested an 18 year old man and charged him with the murder of an expat Kiwi, who had returned for his summer holidays to Waihi, together with his family.  It had all appearances at the time of a random, senseless murder.

For the victim, Murray Wilkinson and his family it still appears that way.  But now it emerges that the accused was, at the time, out on bail.  Once again we see the devastation that can arise when people arrested and bailed for serious criminal are allowed out on the streets, prior to their trials.  Lawyer and former politician, Stephen Franks documents some of the inanities and failings and blameshifting of our judicial system:

The 18 year old charged with murdering Murray Wilkinson outside his Waihi caravan applied for bail again yesterday. Bail was denied but I’m told that his QC indicated he would try again.  The accused has name suppression so we can’t learn the truth about him but if today’s judges had half the common sense of previous generations’ such an application would be unthinkable. . . .

Judges could at least make it clear that offenders who show their lack of remorse with stupid applications will have that insolence reflected in the eventual sentence. Lawyers, whose duty it is to make such applications whatever their personal view of them, could then explain that offensive procedures are only worth the risk for defendants who are confident of being acquitted. . . .

 The accused in Waihi can’t be blamed for expecting courts to be indulgent – he was apparently free to hurt fresh victims on New Year’s Eve because he was out on bail on charges for incidents some weeks earlier and six months ago.

Judges have allowed our system to become so constipated that a six month old charge remained unheard. Even our generation’s judges should feel they can’t justify giving bail on a third charge (of murder) but who knows?. Mr Wilkinson may have paid the price for previous indulgence, not the judges.

Judges are using the constipation of the court system to justify granting bail to those accused of violent crimes.  Sitting around six to nine months in prison waiting for a trial amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.  Fair enough.  Then judges ought to do what they can to ensure that the system does not get clogged with the repeat offences of violent criminals whilst out on bail–by making frivolous applications for bail have a cost to the one being charged. 

Moreover, bail should be far, far harder to get granted, particularly when people are before the courts charged with violent crimes.  There is now in New Zealand a long litany of victims, some now dead, who have suffered at the hands of people charged with violent crimes, yet allowed out on bail–freely to roam and devastate others at will. 

The judicial system and the parliamentarians have demonstrated repeatedly that they are incapable of changing the system for the better.  Its time for the people to apply their common sense and demand change via the ballot box and all other lawful means.

Willingly Blind

The Fruits of Atheism

The huffing, puffing, militant atheists have an argument that runs in the following form.  Evil exists in the world due to the incomplete, imperfect stages of more primitive creatures.  Evil will be progressively eradicated as mankind achieves an ever higher evolutionary state.  Religion and religious belief reflects a more primitive condition of humanity beyond which man is progressively evolving.  Therefore, religion and evil are inextricably bound together.  If you are primitive, you will likely be religious.  If you are religious you will be evil.

We are not concerned so much at this point with the asinine internal contradictions in the ruminations above.  What we wish to focus upon at this point is the implicit proposition that atheism and, therefore, atheist civilizations are at a more advanced stage of evolution than religious ones.
  Simplistically, Christendom was ignorant, superstitious and primitive.  It was, consequently, bloodily evil.  But atheist civilisations are more advanced and enlightened (by definition): consequently they are more righteous, less violent, evil, or bloody.

Except that rarely do atheists actually offer empirical evidence to establish the claims about pacific atheist societies.

The Christian position to this is pretty straightforward.  Religious civilisations (Byzantine empire, Western Christendom) continued to be plagued by the same evil and sin which plagues the heart of every man.  Consequently, such Christian nations and civilisations were responsible at times for grossly evil deeds.  Worse–evil was done at times in the name of the Christian faith.  But such evil, lamentable as it was and remains, pales in comparison to the manifest and relentless evil that has flowered in every atheist civilization.
As Peter Hitchens has argued:

Each revolutionary generation reliably repeats the savagery.  The Bolsheviks knew all about the French revolutionary terror, but that did not stop them having their own.  The Chinese Communists knew all about Stalin’s intentional famine and five-year-plans, but they repeated the barbarity with the Great Leap Forward.  The Khmer Rouge were not ignorant of their revolutionary forerunners [having learnt Marxist ideology and Communist history in Paris], yet they repeated the evil worse than before.  The supposedly enlightened revolution of Fidel Castro resorted swiftly to torture and arbitrary imprisonment and to the lawless purging and murder even of Castro’s old comrades such as Huber Matos.   [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 154.]

The current crop of foppish militant atheists remain strangely silent on this very recent historical reality.  Every atheistic, materialistic power has committed unbelievable, systemic torture and relentless merciless murder, yet our current crop of blind guides continue to argue that such atheism necessarily reflects a higher state of human evolution, progress, wisdom, enlightenment, and perspicuity.   Atheists may wish to declaim that, “God is not good” but they occlude the inevitable begged question, “Is atheism better?”.  All the evidence points to an answer that runs something like, “Actually, the fruits of atheism are much, much worse.”

Rather, the issue here should be framed more accurately: Man is a fallen, wicked creature.  When man, a society, or civilisation acknowledges the Living God, evil and sin are restrained.  When mankind rejects God, his evil nature spills forth to create a living hell upon earth.  Welcome to the wonderful world of atheism. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

An Indonesian Book Burning 

Culture and Politics – A Second Battle of Tours
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 14 June 2012

There is currently a ruckus over in Indonesia over a book I wrote, 5 Cities That Ruled the World. The publisher there (Gramedia) has formally apologized for their role in it, and has burned their copies of the book.

The first thing about this that I should note is that people on the other side of the world are in significant trouble because of something I wrote, and I don’t want to in any way make their situation any more difficult than it has to be. But this is how hostage taking works, isn’t it? Unreasonable and belligerent people are always willing to commandeer a situation, and then blame others for the devastation that follows.

Strict Islamic Orthodoxy

 By Their Fruit You Shall Know Them

A murderous Islamic shoots down Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse. He also murders French paratroopers.  He calls a radio station to boast of his crimes and expresses regret that he has not done “more”. 

The supine western media, always fearful of Islam’s long reach against them (death threats, etc.) quickly move to assure us all that killing is not part of Islam.
 

Instead, they (the media) went into full-on Islam whitewashing, citing the usual liberal bromide that poverty causes Islamists to murder Jews. The Telegraph’s Ed West wrote: “Islam is not to blame for the Toulouse killings … It is not religion that turns some young Muslim men in the West violent, but the sense of alienation and frustration that inevitably comes from being a second-generation immigrant.”

OK, so immigration is the problem and the cause.  Alienation of second generation immigrants does that, don’t you know.  Unfortunately, the pattern of this poor chap’s alienation is all too familiar.  According to the NZ Herald:

A stand-off between French police and a gunman suspected of a spate of killings in the southwestern city of Toulouse is entering its sixteenth hour. It’s has been revealed the suspect, Mohamed Merah, had been under surveillance for years for having “fundamentalist” Islamic views following visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The wider family of the murderer has also been involved.   These recent atrocities are not an act of spontaneous rage, but follow a long considered, long planned course.  There is a trail of conspiracy to murder and actions consistent with those plans. 

Prosecutor Francois Molins said the gunman was a self-taught radical Salafi who had been to Afghanistan twice and had trained in the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan.  Molins said the gunman’s brother Abdelkader had been implicated in a 2007 network that sent militant fighters to Iraq.

An Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Merah has been under surveillance for years for having “fundamentalist” Islamic views.

But, we are assured that Salafi teachings and Islamic terrorist groups are not responsible in any way.  It’s only the alienation of a second generation immigrant, don’t you know.  This, despite Salafi orthodoxy advocating murderous jihad against civilians not just as a legitimate expression, but a required act, of Islam itself.  This, also despite the fact that salafi’ism is at the very centre of Sunni orthodoxy. 

So how is that alienation thing working out in non-immigrant land?  Let’s go to Iraq.  According to Al Jazeera: 

Al-Qaeda’s front group in Iraq has claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks that killed 46 people across the country this week, and said the violence exposes how weak government security is ahead of the upcoming Arab League summit in the capital, Baghdad.

The statement by the Islamic State of Iraq, posted on a website on Wednesday, said its “Sunni lions” targeted the plan of the “fool government preparing” for the summit. Attacks on Tuesday struck Shia pilgrims in the holy city of Karbala, set cars on fire near a police headquarters in Kirkuk and targeted security forces and government officials in Baghdad.

In all, the extremist groups struck eight cities in just under six hours, killing 46 people and wounding 200.  “Within a few hours, all the security measures adopted by the Shia government have collapsed and the enemy was taken by surprise,” the statement said. “Several government and security headquarters were attacked.”

But Islam is in no way responsible.  Its all those second generation immigrants in Iraq–disaffected, alienated, poor, Sunni Muslims. They oh-so-understandably vent their frustration and alienation by killing other (Shia) Muslims. 

The supine, guilt-ridden Commentariat in the West overlooks one big fat reality.  All these “extremist” Muslim groups (Salafi’s, Wahhabi’s, Al Qaeda) have a common theme: each claims to be strictly following the teachings of Mohammed himself as they kill and maim.  This is not to be compared with, say, nominal Jews who joined Stalin’s cause.  Not for one moment did they claim that their communist ideology was due to their strict following of the Torah.  They were lapsed Jews, liberal Jews, apostate Jews–and everyone knew it, including they themselves. 

Islam is a violent, oppressive, bloody false religion.  That is not to say all Islamic people are thus violent, oppressive or bloody.  It is to say that those who seek to follow its teachings strictly inevitably are. 

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck . . .

>Lee Stranahan–an Honest Lefty

>Lock-Stepping in the Public Square

Lee Stranahan is a left-wing journalist who has been co-operating with Andrew Breitbart on a story of government corruption, known as Pigford. This task has led him into contact with right wing and conservative blogs and news sites. It has dawned upon him that the Left in the US is not just shrill, it has a violent undercurrent and a mindlessness that he finds alarming. He also complains that this reality is ignored or glossed over by the media.

The recourse to mindless lock-step violence does not surprise any who have taken the time and trouble to study left-wing ideology. This ideology is grounded in a belief that the poor(er) are victims. In order to right the wrongs the government must extort private property from some and distribute it to others. The state must positively discriminate and actively redress socio-economic inequality to stop the oppression of poor(er) people.

When this ideology is thwarted politically or opposed, an “enemy” rapidly materializes from the gloom. The opponent is an enemy because he is a morally bankrupt and foul person: by (ideological) definition he is someone who exploits the defenceless and the weak, preys upon them, engorges and satiates himself upon their misery. But a subtle concomitant also materialises. If those who oppose are enemies because of their moral turpitude, those on “our side” must be be holy and righteous.

Left-wing ideology, when opposed, is constantly pulled towards extreme and violent methodology. Taking care of victims easily becomes an emotive, holy crusade. If the “system” does not allow redress through the ballot box or through lawful means, then the system itself becomes an enemy. The morally foul exploiters have gamed the system and use it to gorge upon others–therefore, the system must be broken down or overthrown. At that point, the Left veers willingly and aggressively into the contemplation of violence. The Weathermen spring to mind. Revolution is necessary.  The commentariate excuses such notions by appeals to pity: of course the oppressed are going to react this way.  It’s understandable. 

The Left is implicitly teleologically driven: the end (a non-exploitative, egalitarian society) is what really matters. This goal is so important, it justifies whatever means might be needed to achieve it.

Clearly, not all left-wing people are like this. Many are moderates. But the more frustrated left-wing folk become because they are not making sufficient progress, the more prone they are to “militarising” the struggle, seeing things through the discourse of class warfare. The more violence becomes a righteous response.

Moreover, clearly there are right-wing extremists who also have reached the amoral point of believing that the end justifies the means. It is hard to distinguish between right wing and left wing extremists: whilst they have used different routes, the destination is the same. The Nazis were “right wing” extremists. The European communist states were “left wing”; the outcomes and methods and tactics were eerily similar.

Stranahan talks about “lock-step” left wing behaviour in the US. This suggests that radicalisation and extremism is increasingly the norm. The lock in the step is a common commitment to “tearing the bastards down”.

Anyway, here is Stranahan writing in the Huffington Post.

Shame: Ignoring Death Threats to Wisconsin Politicians Is Media Bias
Three questions for you.

1. Do you think of Republicans and the Tea Party as dangerous, violent extremists?
2. Do you think the Wisconsin protests over GOP Governor Scott Walker’s move to strip public sector employees of collective bargaining were peaceful?
3. Do you scoff at the right wing notion that mainstream media like the New York Times, the TV networks and NPR have a liberal media bias against the conservatives?

If you answered ‘yes’ to all three of those questions, then let me ask you one more…
Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the death threats against Republican politicians in Wisconsin?

Try to set aside whatever biases or preconceptions you might have for a moment and ask yourself why death threats against politicians aren’t considered national news, especially in the wake of the all too fresh shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other bystanders. And there hasn’t just been one death threat, but a number of them.

Here’s an example and it’s real. According to Wisconsin State Department of Justice, authorities have found a suspect who admitted to sending the following email:

I want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and your republican dictators have to die. This is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, this isn’t enough. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message. So we have built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) the 8 of you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. The 8 includes the 7 senators and the dictator. We feel that it’s worth our lives becasue we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. Goodbye ASSHOLE!!!!

After the Giffords shooting, authorities have to take this sort of threat seriously. The media should too, even if the disturbed person who sent that email was motivated by exactly the kind of rhetoric that’s been used by many liberals against GOP officials over and over again during the Madison protests. And there are more threats floating around the internet, in varying degrees of scary and credible.

If you read liberal blogs, you might have heard of some of these threats. Indirectly, anyway. Sarah Palin said the rhetoric should be toned down. The threats themselves were ignored and Palin was mocked.

On the other hand, if you read conservative blogs or listen to conservative media, you know all about these threats because people like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and websites like Newsbusters and BigJournalism have not only been talking about the death threats for days now but they’ve been talking about the mainstream and liberal media ignoring the threats for days.
Ignoring the story of these threats is deeply, fundamentally wrong. It’s bad, biased journalism that will lead to no possible good outcome and progressives should be leading the charge against it.

Just before writing this article, I did a Google search and it’s stunning to find out that the right wing media really isn’t exaggerating — proven death threats against politicians are being ignored by the supposedly honest media. If you’ve never agreed with a single thing that Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly et al have said about anything, you can’t in any good conscience say that they don’t have a point here. Death threats are wrong and if a story like Wisconsin is national news for days, then so are death threats.

I’m in an odd position. In the last few months, I’ve had one foot in the left wing news stream and one foot in the right. My media duality began when conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart hired me to work with him on the Pigford ‘black farmers’ settlement story. I’m a pro-choice, pro-single payer, anti-war, pro-gay rights independent liberal with years of work in print and film backing those positions. Breitbart hired me to bring a different perspective to the non-partisan issue of corruption in Pigford.

Since then, I’ve written both here for the left-leaning Huffington Post and at Breitbart’s right leaning BigGovernment.com. I’ve ended up reading a lot more conservative sites and dealing firsthand with a lot more conservatives than any time since I attended a high school dedicated to the principles of Ayn Rand about 30 years ago.

Unlike many on the left, I didn’t view the Wisconsin battle as the end of days. I wasn’t convinced that I had a dog in that hunt, in part because I think there’s a strong case to be made those public employees shouldn’t have the same collective bargaining rights as private sector workers — a case made well by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said…

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.”

Roosevelt’s statement makes sense to me; it does seem that public employees are different than private. I’m not at all anti-union. (I’ve publicly supported unionizing the visual effects industry, for example.) I’m open to a good rational argument against the case FDR made but in discussions on Twitter and elsewhere, all I got in response from people on the left was anger and insults. I saw little light and felt much heat.

That tone of extreme hostility I experienced brings me back to the death threats in Wisconsin. Frankly, the bile and invective in that threat reminded me of the tone I saw directed at me from many so-called liberals because I committed the heresy of taking a different position from them on the issue of collective bargaining for public sector employees… based on something FDR said.

Is this really what liberalism has come to in 2011?

Since working with Breitbart, my position on political issues hasn’t changed but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m deeply disappointed by the virulent, lockstep attitude I see on the left. My experience in the last few months tells me what I would not have believed possible; on any number of issues (including Pigford, by the way) I’ve seen liberals act much nastier and with less factual honesty than the conservatives… and this includes on issues where I disagree with conservatives.

Burying the death threat story is a clear example of intellectual dishonesty and journalistic bias.
Don’t take my word for it, though. Look into the story of death threats in Wisconsin yourself and see who has been covering the story and who hasn’t. Try for a moment to see this story from the perspective of those who you may disagree with on policy and ask yourself how this looks to them. Can you blame them for feeling that way? Then take a few seconds and read those questions I asked you at the beginning of this article.

And then ask why progressives shouldn’t expect more from our media — and ourselves — than we expect from our political adversaries.

An end note:  it has been our experience that when left-wing folk hurl false accusations against their political opponents there are grounds to expect that whatever they are accusing their opponents of is precisely what they themselves are doing as their standard MO.  For example, in New Zealand we had repeated instances of left-wing, Labour politicians accusing their political opponents (falsely) of all kinds of corrupt practices only to have it emerge later that they themselves were the very ones engaged in those same corruptions all along.  As our parents used to tell us: it takes one to know one. 

For two years now we have had left wing organs and politicians denounce right wing grass roots activity as racist, violent, extremist, and revolutionary.  Without a shred of credible evidence.  We have even seen cases of manufacturing and stage managing such behaviour and then attributing it to the Tea Partiers or whatever.  The complicit media has dutifully reported it all as indisputable reality.  It now becomes a bit more likely that all along these folk have been projecting their own image upon their opponents.  They risk appearing certain that their opponents would be engaged in the same kind of things they themselves have been doing all along. 

As Churchill once said, a lie will have gone around the world three times before the truth has put its trousers on. 

>The Washington Times Nails It

>

<br>

EDITORIAL: The Pope and Islam

Well said, Sirs. Autre apposite.

>An Aftermath of the Columbine Massacre

>Congress Did Not Expect This

We have heard recently of the spate of family murder/suicides, mass shootings, and other crimes with guns in the United States. This has led to renewed calls for gun controls. The ideology of the “ban” is alive and well.

A Congressional House Judiciary Sub-Committee has been conducting hearings on this matter and at a recent sitting heard from the father of one of the victims of the Columbine Massacre, Rachel Scott. Her father, Darrel Scott gave the following unexpected, profound, insightful testimony. Needless to say, it was apparently not well received nor appreciated.

Since the dawn of creation there has been both good & evil in the hearts of men and women. We all contain the seeds of kindness or the seeds of violence. The death of my wonderful daughter, Rachel Joy Scott, and the deaths of that heroic teacher, and the other eleven children who died must not be in vain. Their blood cries out for answers.

The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field. The villain was not the club he used.. Neither was it the NCA, the National Club Association. The true killer was Cain, and the reason for the murder could only be found in Cain’s heart.

In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA. I am not a member of the NRA. I am not a hunter. I do not even own a gun. I am not here to represent or defend the NRA – because I don’t believe that they are responsible for my daughter’s death. Therefore I do not believe that they need to be defended. If I believed they had anything to do with Rachel’s murder I would be their strongest opponent.

I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a tragedy — it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies! Much of the blame lies here in this room. Much of the blame lies behind the pointing fingers of the accusers themselves. I wrote a poem just four nights ago that expresses my feelings best.

Your laws ignore our deepest needs,
Your words are empty air.
You’ve stripped away our heritage,
You’ve outlawed simple prayer.
Now gunshots fill our classrooms,
And precious children die.
You seek for answers everywhere,
And ask the question “Why?”
You regulate restrictive laws,
Through legislative creed.
And yet you fail to understand,
That God is what we need!

Men and women are three-part beings. We all consist of body, mind, and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice, and hatred to rush in and wreak havoc. Spiritual presences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation’s history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historical fact.

What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God, and in so doing, we open the doors to hatred and violence. And when something as terrible as Columbine’s tragedy occurs — politicians immediately look for a scapegoat such as the NRA. They immediately seek to pass more restrictive laws that contribute to erode away our personal and private liberties. We do not need more restrictive laws. Eric and Dylan would not have been stopped by metal detectors. No amount of gun laws can stop someone who spends months planning this type of massacre. The real villain lies within our own hearts..

As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes, he did not hesitate to pray in school. I defy any law or politician to deny him that right! I challenge every young person in America, and around the world, to realize that on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School prayer was brought back to our schools. Do not let the many prayers offered by those students be in vain.

Dare to move into the new millennium with a sacred disregard for legislation that violates your God-given right to communicate with Him. To those of you who would point your finger at the NRA — I give to you a sincere challenge.. Dare to examine your own heart before casting the first stone!

My daughter’s death will not be in vain! The young people of this country will not allow that to happen!”

Hat Tim: The Patriotic Resistance

>Hamas Rockets

>A Modest Proposal

The government of Gaza has repeatedly broken both international law and the Law of God. It has repeatedly attacked Israel, neighbouring state, with home made rockets. Moreover, these rockets are not targeted at military installations, but civilian populations.

Israel has a right in law to retaliate. A defensive war is always a just war. Israel also has a right under the Law of God to defend itself. It is the duty of civil government to protect its people from aggression and to punish the evildoers who murder and take life.

This is all pretty simple stuff–ethically speaking. But it never ceases to amaze us how a host of irrelevancies are allowed so quickly to cloud such crimes.

From the convenience of our armchairs we would like to pan a few of the irrelevancies and make some suggestions.

The appeal to pity currently being made worldwide is a fallacious irrelevance. The picture that is painted of David-like Hamas bravely constructing some home made low-tech rockets, going up against the high-tech Goliath, and therefore deserving of sympathy is an ethical blight. Counting up relative civilian casualties is also not that helpful.

Painting the Palestinian people as historical victims of Jewish or Zionist or western policy of lebensraum is not relevant either as a justification for their aggression. We have no doubt that the historical acts were wicked; they represented theft by the worst kind of force; the taking of property of Palestinians was just plan wrong. But–and here is the big but–developing a culture of victimhood and revenge out of historical injustice is equally wicked and wrong.

We believe that most western governments find themselves utterly unable to call Palestinians to account at this very point because they themselves trade daily in the politics of victimhood.

In the providence of God, virtually every people on earth can claim historical injustices which have been perpetrated upon their ancestors. Virtually every people on earth has been forcibly dispossessed at one time or another. There is no mandate to attempt to right historical wrongs by seeking vengeance in the present. The Scriptures teach us to accept the past, do away with vengeance, do good to one’s neighbour, and get on with living as God’s servants. This is the command of Christ–those who would disregard it will reap the consequences. Thus, Jerusalem would say to both Israel and Gaza that all historical grievances and claims and injustices must be laid at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ, left there in His hands, and forgotten.

Thus, both Israel and Gaza must be called to live in a holy and just way in the present. When we do that, the matter becomes very straightforward, ethically. Shooting rockets at neighbouring countries, damaging property and killing its citizens is both theft and murder, It must be punished. The lawful authority appointed by God to punish is the government. It can no more not be punished than ignoring murderers.

Hamas is the lawful government of Gaza, elected by the people. If the lawful government of Gaza will not punish those who have manufactured and launched missiles into Israel, then the government of Israel must. It would be derelict in its God given duty not to act to punish the evildoers.

The next question that is begged is, how to act? Here is where practical wisdom ought to apply. Israel’s apparent current objective of destroying Hamas seems to us to be both impractical, unachievable, and inappropriate. For one thing, it takes the focus off the lawless crimes perpetrated by the government of Gaza and introduces far wider issues of national sovereignty, rights to exist or not as a nation, regime change, and so forth.

From the very first time a rocket was launched into Israel in an unprovoked attack, Israel should have made clear its policy and intentions. Its declared policy should be one of punishing murderers and thieves: the method of punishment will be according to fundamental principles of justice and equity. An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.

Then, in open court, before the world–particularly before the Arab world–the government of Israel should count up the number of rockets fired into Israel every day, announce the number (offering observers from Arab nations to confirm the number, if necessary), and pronounce to Gaza that it will launch the exact same number of rocket attacks upon Gaza within the next twenty-four hours as a judicial sentence for the criminal acts. It should also make clear that it will take no further action because justice would have been served once sentence is carried out. However, it should make clear that any future criminal acts will be punished in a condign manner. Then, when the sentence is carried out, it should also announce this fact also to the people of Gaza.

It should pursue this policy with relentless faithfulness until the government of Gaza stops its lawless and murderous actions. This would also avoid the need for endless hand wringing by the international “community”, calls for cease fires, vain attempts to broker peace–all of which deflects and distracts from the heart of the matter. Israel would simply say to the world–punishment for crime will stop when the criminals stop. Using the exact number of retaliatory rockets as launched against it would serve to underscore this fact repeatedly. Constant announcements of sentence and their being carried out would also reinforce the judicial nature of the action–and this is a critical point. It is a matter of justice, not politics, or international relations.

The same action should be taken with respect to suicide bombing. If a suicide bomber is established as having come from Gaza, the formal announcement of sentence should be made, and of the punishment that will fall. Once again, this should be done formally and in open court as it were. If the government of Gaza failed to bring the perpetrators and conspirators to justice by executing them within a given time frame, punishment would fall upon the nation by rocket strike or bombing. Some people will complain that this will result in and endless cycle of violence–but should the fact that crime is committed every day be a reason for the state to stop prosecuting and punishing criminals?

It is a fundamental duty of the government of Israel to punish governments or people responsible for attacking its citizens. To the extent that it has supinely accepted unprovoked rocket attacks for years, it has failed its people and its duty under God. To the extent that Israel has now escalated this into wider political objectives, such as destroying Hamas, it shows it has failed to focus upon its fundamental duties. It has muddied the waters. It has obscured the fundamental legal and ethical issues. It has given ammunition to the islamists and their fellow-travellers in the West. It has allowed politics to occlude the work of justice.

Thus, indeed, we will once again fall back into the endless cycle of violence in the Middle East. This will continue until governments decide that they will obey God, and not men.

>Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man

>A Day In the Life of Dave Pizzini

Detective Senior Sergeant Dave Pizzini is a busy man. He is rapidly achieving a reputation as the police officer of the moment to dish out warnings to those considering using force to defend themselves. Pizzini has now made two more high-profile arrests of people for using unreasonable force—one of those arrested is a highly regarded police officer.

Not content with his success at arresting Gilbert Road Discount Liquor store owner, Virender Singh earlier this month for defending himself and his family and his business with a hockey stick against knife-wielding thugs—an arrest for which he won widespread public acclaim—Pizzini had a busy day yesterday, making two more arrests of similar ilk.

One arrest followed an incident at a fairly remote farm at Mangatawhiri. Reports are sketchy, but apparently an armed intruder had entered the farmhouse early in the morning, threatening the life of the occupants—a mother and two children. The farmer—who happened to be a registered gun collector and a champion long range rifle shot—heard the screams from the implement shed in which he was working, about fifty metres away. His gun collection was kept in two large metal safes, with five inch walls in the implement shed.

He is reported to have opened one of the safes, remove a tripod mounted Sako with telescopic sights and take up a firing position about fifty metres from the house. He then called out, challenging the gunman to come out and leave the women and children alone. Eventually, the gunman emerged from the house, holding a three year old child by the arm. The gunman screamed obscenities at the farmer and told him to come forward or he would shoot the child.

The farmer took careful aim and shot the gunman through the chest, killing him instantly. When the police arrived, “reasonable defence” expert Dave Pizzini was called to the scene. Three hours later he arrested the farmer for using unreasonable force. The farmer will be charged with murder, and will appear in court tomorrow. He has interim name suppression.

“People just cannot point guns at other human beings and kill them, no matter what provocation they may be under,” said Pizzini. “The arrested man was a marksman and a gun collector. The dead man was carrying only a point 22 rifle. Using a marksman’s telescopic sighted Sako against a point 22 rifle—which incidentally did not have telescopic sights and was ‘sawn off’—is a case of using overwhelming and unreasonable force. The arrested farmer made no effort to negotiate or solve the situation by less violent means. People need to learn that they cannot take the law into their own hands like this,” Pizzini said.

But Senior Sergeant Pizzini’s day was not over. Immediately after making the arrest, he was urgently called to Whangarei. Arriving by police helicopter two hours later, he was asked to assess the shooting of a distraught woman by an Armed Offenders Squad (“AOS”) member earlier that morning.

According to media reports, the woman had gone into a Vodafone store in the main street of Whangarei, presented a rifle and held one of the staff hostage, while others escaped out the backdoor. The AOS had surrounded the shop. Eventually the woman came out and confronted the police. She was challenged, aimed the rifle, and was promptly shot and killed by a single shot to the chest by an AOS sniper. The woman was carrying an air rifle.

After reviewing events, Senior Sergeant Dave Pizzini arrested the AOS member, who has name suppression. He will be charged with murder. The head of the Police Association, Greg O’Connor is livid—claiming that reasonable force had been used in the circumstances. Dave Pizzini promptly dismissed Mr O’Connor’s opinion. He wanted to remind the Police Association and the public that the same standard for what constituted reasonable force applied both to the public and to sworn police officers.

While not wanting to prejudice the court case, he said there was prima facie evidence in this case that the force used had not been reasonable. The AOS had not made any attempt to negotiate with the offender. She only had an air rifle—and while these could be deadly at close range the nearest police officer was fifty metres away.

Police need to set an example, he said. “If sworn police officers were seen to be using unreasonable force, it would set a very bad example to the general public. Things would escalate out of hand, and we cannot allow that to happen. I feel very sorry for the arrested man’s colleagues, but we have to be even handed and consistent in the way we deal with situations like this,” he said.

He also expressed condolences to the family of the shot victim. When asked whether he would like to send a message to the hostage and his colleagues, he said that he realised they had been through a terrible ordeal. However, they had to realise that they had acted in a provocative manner, and bore some of the blame in this situation. If they had offered no resistance, it would have likely had a calming affect on the deceased.

While they may not have intended it, when the colleagues of the hostage escaped out the back, it no doubt provoked the deceased, leading to the subsequent confrontation out in the street, and the tragic death of the woman. “They should have stayed where they were,” he said. Senior Sergeant Pizzini said that his inquiries were continuing and it was likely further charges would be laid. He was considering laying charges against the store workers who had fled out the back door, saying that they appeared to be “accessories before the fact” to murder. “These are very, very serious matters,” he said.

Police investigations are continuing: ten detectives and twenty constables have been assigned to the inquiry which is likely to take several weeks. Similar resources have been committed to the crime scene at Mangatawhiri. The Auckland regional police commander acknowledged that this would severely stretch police resources and would result in major delays in other investigations which had been underway, but which were now suspended indefinitely.

>Abortion and Violence

>Family Violence: Of Course It’s OK

A recent Auckland University study, according to a report in the NZ Herald, found that there was a clear link between domestic violence and abortion—at least according to the lead author, Janet Fanslow. Of those women who had suffered domestic violence, twenty-one percent had had an abortion. There also appears to be a higher rate of miscarriages amongst women who have suffered domestic violence. However, domestic violence is also associated with higher rates of drinking, smoking, and unwanted pregnancies.

Now you always have to be very very careful, if not more than a little sceptical, about social surveys that trumpet linkages and causation. The mere appearance of two factors does not establish causality.

Fanslow and others are implying that there their data suggest a causal relationship between domestic violence and abortion—that is, domestic violence causes women to have abortions. Dr Fanslow is quoted as follows: “Women currently experiencing intimate partner violence, or with a history of violent relationships, may feel less prepared (emotionally, socially, or financially) to care for a child. This may contribute to their decision to terminate a pregnancy.”

To her credit, Fanslow puts this forward as a suggestion, not a fact. It is supposition, after all. In the end, who would know why violence and abortion occur in higher frequency together? For starters, it may be that the causality works in reverse: abortions lead to higher family violence. Statistical surveys on their own will never be able to establish causality beyond doubt.

However, philosophically we can explain how family violence and abortion occur together–as well as higher rates of drinking and smoking. Abortion always involves the expression and acting out of moral beliefs. This is inescapable. The following clusters of beliefs, or belief system, always flutter around the act of aborting—which is to say, the act of dismembering—a child:

1. The child is not a human being. The intellectual, moral, and social contortions Unbelievers go through to arrive at this position are legend. The rationalistic categorisations attempting to discriminate between being and non-being are at the same time phantasmagoric and stupid. Unbelievers intone about potentiality versus actuality; dependence versus self-actualisation; clusters of cells versus personhood; trimesters; viability versus non-viability—and on and on it goes. The intent is clear: Unbelievers are seeking for some rationalistic ground to determine when a human being is, or is not, a human being. And the ground keeps changing. The debates keep raging. But one thing is beyond debate in the realms of Unbelief: the unborn child is definitely not a human being; all that is lacking is a credible, authoritative ground upon which to rest the assertion.

2. Man has a right to determine for himself what is human and what is not. All people involved in the abortion trade, and all who have had abortions, have adopted a religion which asserts that Man is the determiner of life and the decider of what constitutes human life.

3. The rights of the individual carry the highest ethical weight and moral suasion. When there is any conflict of rights, it is the individual who is sovereign. So, in the matter of abortion, a woman has a right to her own body. This right is sufficiently sovereign that it justifies the killing of the unborn child. This asserted right over one’s own body means that a woman can exercise choice with respect to her children—she can choose to have them terminated or to continue their existence. Her sovereignty over herself is so fundamental that she holds the power of life and death over her unborn child.

The application (or not) of violence is how the choice is expressed. Of course, rights are not restricted to members of the female sex. Men too have rights—and they also are entitled to press for and insist upon an abortion when the unborn child, once born, is going to damage or restrict or displeasure the man. The “rights” doctrine at the very least entitles the man to leave and desert the woman if she wishes the pregnancy to continue and he does not. (While we are not aware of any actual case law, it would seem there is a good case for the father to argue successfully in current Athenian law that they have no subsequent financial obligation to the child if the mother bore the baby against the father’s wishes, and that the father insisted upon the aborting of the child, government agencies notwithstanding.)

4. Human rights can be defended and asserted by violent acts.

These four ethical principles underlie all abortions. For many they may not be consciously held; however, they are definitely at play in all abortions. When a woman seeking an abortion looks to the medical establishment and the state to carry out her wishes, all the advice and counseling she receives, all the medical input, will subtly and overtly trade in and propound these three key ethical principles.

The problem lies here: these four ethical principles, intrinsic and essential to every act of abortion, have far wider application and ramifications than abortion only. They are universal principles, with universal application to all human activity. Thus, the act of abortion links together the doctrine of sovereign individual rights, on the one hand, and the defence of those rights by violence, on the other.

The assertion of sovereign individual rights over against another human being, sanctioned by violence and brute force can be equally applicable to all domestic relations—and so it proves to be. If I can kill a child because having it displeases me, I can surely hit, abuse, scorn, or spit at a “partner” or any of my born children when they act in a way that displeases me. I have a sovereign right to treat them as in-human or sub-human, since in the final analysis, I, as the sovereign individual, determine what is, and what is not, human. The ethical continuum with the act of abortion is close, direct, and tight.

Now, we are not arguing infallible causality between the act of having an abortion and the subsequent outworking of family violence—as if the abortion causes all subsequent family violence—although this may indeed true in many cases. What we are arguing instead is that abortion is a particular act of familial violence which draws upon the same four ethical principles as all other incidents of family violence. Moreover, these principles are intrinsic to Unbelief; they are essential to the very constitution of modern Athens.

This explains why Athens’s bridling at family violence, the “It’s not OK” propaganda campaign, and the increased zealousness of the police against domestic violence lack any moral force or traction whatsoever. It explains why such campaigns and police actions will never work. Everybody in Athens knows that it is just politically correct window dressing, unable to be taken seriously—they are just ashamed to say it out loud. Everybody knows that of course family violence is OK. If killing an unwanted unborn child—the ultimate act of family violence—is not only OK, but morally laudable, in the name of a right to one’s own body, then hitting out at disagreeable child or “partner” when one’s individual preferences and rights are threatened has to be equally “OK!”. The greater act of violence has to justify the lesser.

Within the grotesque and distorted moral myopia of Athens people are asked to believe that violently killing an unborn child is not only OK, but it is one of the highest standards of human dignity and freedom. At the same time (and almost in the same breath) they are told that bashing a child or a “partner” is not OK. Yeah, right! You have to be kidding. As long as Athens holds to the four core ethical beliefs which are used to justify abortion, any Athenian argument against lesser family violence has no moral or ethical merit whatsoever.

So, to Unbelievers, we say this: every year there are over 18,000 officially sanctioned and encouraged acts of ultimate familial violence of the worse kind in this country. Don’t even try for one moment to suggest that you are serious when you propagandize that, with respect to family violence, “It’s not OK.” Your actions speak much louder than your words.

Of course it’s OK. Stop spouting such hypocritical dishonest priggish cant. Your corrupt morality and your bent ethical principles are writ far too large for you to be taken seriously.

>A Prison Without Bars

>Maori and Family Violence

We have become immune to seeing the appalling statistics which shows a massive over-representation of Maori in acts of family violence. Nowadays, because of the dominance of egg-shell like political correctness, the uber-vigilance of the Human Rights Commission, the febrile superficial sensationalism of the media, and the overwhelming predominantly left-wing, statist, socialist orientation of the country’s universities, such statistics tend to be reported in small print, and then largely left. No-one wants to engage in commentary, reflection, or public debate. It is sort of like the embarrassing open secret that everybody knows, but nobody talks about.

An example occurred recently when Simon Collins of the NZ Herald was reporting on a recent University of Auckland study on the frequency of abortion broken down by ethnicity. The last line of the article said: “Maori women were much more likely to have suffered violence during pregnancy (22 percent) than Pacific women (7 percent), Europeans (6 percent) or Asians (1 percent).” Thank you, Simon. And now, the sports news.

A plethora of pseudo-explanations for this correlation between Maori and family violence has surfaced over the years, all designed to excuse it in some way or other. None has really captured the field. It would appear, however, that the most acceptable explanation to Maori themselves is “victimology”—that is, the cause of (and therefore the blame for) the grossly disproportionate over-representation of Maori in family violence statistics is that they had their cultural and societal roots stripped away from them by marauding European colonialism. The subsequent loss of cultural identity has meant that their traditional family structures were unable to sustain them: caught between two worlds, Maori have simply fallen apart, socially speaking.

A typical example of this ideology was provided by Tariana Turia, co-leader of the Maori Party, when, during the national furore over child abuse that surrounded the Bradford Bill, Mrs Turia blamed the predominance of Maori violence toward their children upon the missionaries of the nineteenth century. Apparently up until Christianisation, the Maori loved their tamariki and indulged them, not needing to correct them. It was the missionaries who persuaded Maori to use corporal discipline upon their children—thus, starting the descent into violence we see today.

This kind of blame shifting is as old as the Garden of Eden (“it was the woman’s fault . . . ; no, it was the serpent’s fault . . .”); it is part of the universal human condition of sin, so it should not surprise us to see it recrudescent here. However, such explanations or justifications for evil behaviour are acceptable only to the superficially minded or the guilty looking for excuses. “You have got to be kidding,” is the appropriate response.

So, let’s try to be a bit more profound than Mrs Turia, and offer some better analysis.

Firstly, we are convinced the problem is not racial. Race is a huge red-herring. To say that Maori family violence is a produce of race is to say that it is genetically in-bred into Maori. Some geneticists have claimed, in recent years, to have isolated a “violence” gene in Maori, or a genetic configuration that predisposes Maori to violence. Even if that were true such a gene would be ethically neutral; it is how it is channeled or expressed that is at issue here.

We have no doubt that if there is a “violence” gene, of itself it is an excellent thing. We have desperately needed warriors in the past (witness the Maori Battalion) and we will no doubt need them again. There are many historical examples of warlike peoples and warrior cultures—but they were not necessarily known for beating their wives and children. It is all to do with how the aggression is channeled and controlled.

Secondly, we do believe the problem is cultural. Culture is the externalisation of one’s world view. What you believe determines is the final determinant of how you live and act. Moreover, cultures are communal, not racial. When people believe together, when they share beliefs, their acting out of those beliefs becomes more overt and prominent because a belief held in common with a community is easier to apply and work out. The community encourages the practices, endorses them, approves them, and assists in them. World-views (and therefore cultures) are combinations of beliefs that are true and false, good and evil, correct and wrong. To the extent that a community “takes on”, then externalises, false, evil and wrong beliefs, its culture will be weak, sinful, and degenerate.

So, what might be some of the wrong, false and evil beliefs held in common amongst Maori communities and consequently externalised in their lives? (We should add that these beliefs are not unique to Maori—but are common to all mankind to one extent or another. Severe problems will only arise when such false beliefs are strongly held or widely shared in particular families, communities, or groups—whether socio-economic, ethnic, or geographic). We believe, in no particular order, the following wrong or false beliefs are reaping a bitter fruit:

1. Bitterness over historical injustices; grievances due to past events. Becoming a victim of injustice or hardship is universal throughout human history; bitterness over it is not. Virtually every people, every culture could find examples in their past when their ancestors were raped, pillaged, hounded off their land, and unjustly persecuted. It has been a universal human condition. But the vast majority of peoples and cultures moved on.

One only has to reflect upon the extreme deprivations and gross injustices inflicted upon the Scottish Highlanders and the Irish peasants during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the British—even to the point where their culture was outlawed—to see that any historical deprivations experienced by Maori in New Zealand were neither unique nor particularly extreme. We mention the Scottish and the Irish deliberately, because within two generations they had scattered over much of the known world, but their subsequent cultural, social, political, and intellectual impact upon the world has been prodigious. (The Scots Highlanders are particularly instructive because of their warlike and violent history.)

These people “moved on”. Yes, what happened to them was grossly unjust. Yes, they lost family members to persecution, disease, starvation. Yes, their culture was oppressed and rent. Yes, they lost their ancestral lands. But they believed the future was more important than the past, and they left their homelands to grasp it–just as many Maori, incidentally, have left to grasp a better future in Australia. (We have not seen any research, but we would expect that were some credible work to be done, we would find that the Ngati-roo are far more future orientated than their families in New Zealand, and far less pre-occuppied with historical grievances).

The Scots and Irish did not believe (probably because they were not told) that they were victims who needed compensation. They did not allow themselves to become bitter. They went on, in their own way, to make a better living for themselves. One of the most debilitating false beliefs a person can ever entertain is that they are damaged goods because of what has happened in the past, and that they will therefore never amount to much, unless they are apologised to and compensated in some way. This false belief makes the past a prison.

2. A tolerance and acceptance of state welfare. Sir Apirana Ngata, during the parliamentary debates on state welfare when it was first introduced to New Zealand by Michael Savage prophesied that it would be the death of his people. He has been proven right. State welfare is a poison pill because it makes one economically, and therefore culturally, dependant. It enslaves. In fact, it is the worst form of slavery imaginable, insofar as the chains become internal not external; and the slavery is of the heart.

Under historical slavery, at least the enslaved could take a modicum of pride in what they did, what they achieved each day. State welfare enslaves without chains. It makes one dependant, and strips away even the self-respect that comes from the achievements of work.

State welfare has other destructive effects. It undermines and rots family structures. When men are on welfare, they become redundant and “past their use-by date” for the family duties and responsibilities. Their wives and their children will be taken care of whether they are there or not, whether they work or not, whether they earn a living or not. Moreover, since welfare is related to children and is child-based, mothers become the primary conduit of income into the family. The prevailing redundancy, irrelevance, and useless of men under state welfare is one of the most destructive influences upon social and family fabric.

To the extent that state welfare is more predominant amongst Maori communities, to that extent Maori families are weakened and torn apart. But, don’t blame the state welfare system: the blame needs to fall squarely on the false belief that accepting income from the state is OK. It’s not OK! It’s deadly.

There are many other wrong or false beliefs which are bearing rotten fruit amongst Maori people—leading to the over-representation in family violence, crime, and other socially destructive behaviour. As we said above, these false beliefs are not unique to Maori, they are not errors or weaknesses of race; they are, however, cultural falsehoods. They have to be addressed: clearly, firmly, unequivocally.

Who might address them? Clearly not the left-wing intelligensia. Clearly not the government and its various departments of state. Clearly not the media. These are all part of the problem. They largely share the same false world-view that is causing the problem. It needs to be addressed by individual Maori leaders who are prepared to stand up and tell the truth to their own.

We await more Maori leaders who will stand up and say, “It’s not OK to believe that you are disadvantaged and oppressed. It’s a lie.” Or, “It’s not OK to live on state welfare. It’s slavery. Get off it. Get a job.” Or, “It’s not OK to live in envy of successful family members. Imitate their example—sure—but it’s not OK to put the hand out to them.”

Those Maori who have stood up and spoken—and there are numerous examples—we believe are the true heroes and heroines of their people. We salute them, and hope that many follow in their train.

>"It’s Justice, But Not as We Know It, Jim"

>When Public Justice is Pathetic

Over recent days a very interesting case has hit the headlines. A high profile sports broadcaster several years ago was ending a relationship with a woman who was the marketing manager for a large corporate. In the midst of a stormy argument, the broadcaster assaulted her physically in some way (details have not been disclosed). The former couple resolved the dispute. The resolution included the payment of $170,000 to the assaulted female. Nothing was disclosed in public. Both parties went their separate ways.

Recently, several years later, the incident and the payment of money has come to light. The sports broadcaster has been roundly and soundly condemned by everyone who has spoken up on the matter. Apart from the wrong of physically assaulting another person, and in particular, a man assaulting a woman who is the weaker vessel, criticism has focused upon other “transgressions”.

Most have expressed moral distaste and repugnance that the woman was “bought off”, that her silence was “purchased.” This we will call the pathetically puerile condemnation.

Others have condemned the failure to have the assault brought before the courts, and the offending broadcaster jailed. This we will call the arrogantly unjust argument.

First, the pathetically puerile argument that the woman was “bought off.” It’s instructive how emotive and irrational public media has become. Let’s just change the language and see what happens. Let’s use the words “compensation” and “restitution” and “victims’ rights.” Here is a wonderful case of justice being done in the private sphere—in a manner and result far superior to the kind of pseudo-justice that obtains in the public sphere.

From what we know, both parties chose to resolve the situation privately. The broadcaster admitted his sinful actions. The two therefore worked out a way of compensating the victim in a way that was acceptable to her. She was reportedly restituted for hurt and humiliation, pain, and forgone earnings while recouperating. Was justice done? Absolutely. Was it constructive, helpful justice? Apparently, for both parties have moved on and are living productive lives. Was the victim left angry, hurt, bitter, non-restored, depressed, on medication? Apparently not. She continues in a successful career. Did it restore the offender? Clearly, yes. Did the victim receive far more compensation and restitution than she would ever have been granted in the public justice system? Without question.

One would have thought that this was the kind of outcome the justice system and Athenian society craves, but seldom gets. But now we find out that when Athens does get a wonderful example of the kind of justice it says it wants, it reviles and vilifies the parties. We believe this is childish petulance of the worst kind. It calls for a thorough smack on the collective rear end.

Finally, before we turn to the “arrogantly unjust” argument, we cannot pass on without noting the supreme arrogant condescension displayed in this puerile criticism towards the victim. A criticism which we believe to be implicitly sexist. She is implicitly portrayed as venal, carnal, weak, easily manipulated, cheap, easily bought off—one could go on—but nowhere is she respected as a human being making responsible choices that truly reflected her own preferences. “Oh no—we, the great public chattering classes of Athens’ narrow fetid streets, we know better. We know her true interests better than she does. We know what’s best for her, and we are going to make sure that she humbles herself and submits herself before us, so that she can receive from our superior hand.”

The “arrogantly unjust” argument is slightly different. It approaches the whole event not from the concern for justice, but for the driving needs of propaganda. There are those who have opined that violence is a huge problem in our society and zero tolerance must be shown. Showing zero tolerance requires that all cases must be duly prosecuted and the the guilty punished in the public square.

In this argument justice is reduced to being a mere function of perceived public behavioural impact. Therefore the private agreement has to be rejected as inherently unjust—for justice is all about public impact and propaganda. The “arrogantly unjust” argument makes justice irrelevant and unimportant. Thus it is unjust because, at least in cases of violence, justice is of little concern. It is arrogant because it believes that society can be molded and shaped by such stratagems.

What will be the outcome of this latest paroxysm of indignant outrage, of Athenian foam dribbling down the collective chin? It is hard to predict—but high on the cards must be the two individuals concerned leaving New Zealand for countries less banal, less benighted, less arrogant, and less unjust.