The parliament in New Zealand descended into tribal Stone Age grunting on behalf of so-called indigenous rights. This is a preview of what our country could look like if we keep apologizing for our history…
Watch the segment about New Zealand:
Following is extracts of the transcript about New Zealand – the full episode is available HERE
Well, it’s no secret that as Americans, we mostly focus on domestic politics in our own country… But every once in a while, something happens in the parliament of a foreign country that’s hard for us to ignore here in America…
The viral moment that just took place in the parliament of New Zealand, does have some relevance for Americans. It’s one of the more important political stories of the year: several politicians in New Zealand just broke out into a primal stone age war dance called the haka…
Now, this haka dance is very dangerous – the people doing it think it’s real spooky and scary, real intimidating. And they’re right. It is dangerous because it may cause everybody in the vicinity to die of second-hand embarrassment…
It’s painful to sit through…
Now, it’s a little hard to see in all the pandemonium, but they’re getting in the face of a politician named David Seymour, who introduced a bill that they don’t like.
The people doing the screeching identify as Maori, meaning they see themselves as the allegedly indigenous people of New Zealand, and they’re chanting like barbarians and making gun gestures at David Seymour while saying something that apparently translates to evil.
And before I get into the specifics about this vote, what it was about, it needs to be reiterated that this whole haka thing is just silly and embarrassing. Maybe you’re not supposed to say that, but it’s obviously true and everybody who sees it feels the same way…
We’re not allowed to have any negative opinions about anything that a non-white culture does, but we all know that it’s just lame and stupid as hell. And, we can say just knock it off. This is ridiculous. You’re making fools at yourself. These people are really embarrassing themselves in every context that this haka is performed – it’s cringe worthy to an immeasurable painful degree…
Back to the viral clip that, that people are talking about.
The so-called indigenous people had a meltdown in Parliament over a Bill. What you may not have seen is what proceeded that moment. David Seymour laid out some rational and calm arguments in favour of his legislation. And then the so-called Maori politicians launched into a volley of personal attacks…
This is how you know these people have no argument: they’re only capable of shouting shame and resorting to personal attacks – to the point that they repeatedly get thrown out of parliament…
Turns out the concept of equal protection under the law is actually extremely controversial in New Zealand. So here’s the background.
Hundreds of years ago, around the late 13th century Polynesian settlers arrived by canoe in New Zealand and they became the Maori people.
Depending on who you ask, they were either the first to arrive or they massacred everyone else who was already there when they got there.
In any event, before long, the Maori wiped out a different tribe called the Moriori who were pacifists living in the Chatham Islands in the East. And they got enslaved and beheaded and cannibalized by the Maori. This kind of thing was not out of character for the Maori. The Maori routinely enslaved and brutalized their enemies… The moment they acquired muskets from European traitors, they fought a series of battles amongst themselves called the musket wars, which led to tens of thousands of deaths and even more slavery. These are wars, of course, that Maori now blame the British for.
They also bartered with severed heads… They would cut people’s heads off and tattoo them and then use them for trading. This is kind of what Maori culture was all about. You know, cutting heads off each other, bartering, cannibalizing – a big thing with the Maoris.
Eventually the British came in and provided some stability with something called the Treaty of Waitangi. The idea was that New Zealand would become a British colony, but that the Maori would have their rights protected, they could keep their land and so on to the extent that was possible.
And then in 1975 New Zealand recognized this treaty in law… But there were still a big, big grey areas to what exactly this treaty required. It established tribunals and led to a lot of rulemaking by judges, but Parliament mostly stayed out of it.
Now with this new bill, David Seymour is trying to change that. He’s proposing concrete legislation that will clarify that everybody in the country in New Zealand, whether they are Maori or not, is entitled to the full protection of the law. He also wants to make it clear that New Zealand is self-governing. The Maori are not a nation within a nation…
So, these are clarifications that, if you want to live in a modern civilization instead of a backwards hellhole, seem pretty reasonable. But it does mark a change from what’s happening at the moment.
Right now, New Zealand explicitly provides reparations to people who identify as Maori. In addition to affirmative action and financial redress… New Zealand politicians also regularly give lengthy apologies to the tribes…
Yep, just keep apologizing. 500 years of apologies won’t be enough. Just keep on forever. It could be a thousand years from now. We need more apologies. Just keep, keep on apologizing. This kind of thing has been going on for decades in New Zealand. They fly the Maori flag, they apologize to them incessantly, pay millions of dollars, and in the end it’s not enough.
The demands keep coming. As a result, now their news reports are barely comprehensible because they’re all speaking a foreign language…
The bill proposes to take those principles to a referendum for the public once passed, but it’s a bill that looks doomed to never get to that stage.
It turns out that the Maori want the ability to remain autonomous from New Zealand, which in a democracy seems pretty questionable. Maori don’t care what the people of New Zealand think about what should happen in New Zealand.
But the people of New Zealand should care, and we should care as well, because what’s happening over there is a case study that we should pay attention to.
And what I mean by that is that New Zealand has bent over backwards apologizing for the alleged evils of colonization. They’ve paid out reparations, they’ve flown the flags, they’ve done everything. They’ve centered their whole society around land acknowledgements and so on. And, and now there are pagan chants breaking out in the middle of parliament. That’s what they get for all of this, for all of this kowtowing and bowing and submitting, this is what they get. The Maori are explicitly campaigning against equal rights and they’re threatening politicians who don’t agree with them. This is a sort of enrichment that Western societies can expect when they start apologizing for their own existence…
So, the Maori were a violent, brutal people. They practiced cannibalism, many other forms of horrific brutality. But just because they made it to New Zealand a few hundred years before Europeans, we’re supposed to see it as some great tragedy that the Europeans took over. In fact, we’re supposed to blame Europeans for engaging in violent conquest over people who themselves engaged in even more violent conquest. So keep this absurd spectacle in mind whenever you hear about reparations in this country, or about how oppressed some indigenous groups allegedly are. Even if, you give these people what they want for decades, they will always want more no matter how much you apologize and pay money, it doesn’t matter. The moment you suggest withdrawing some of these privileges – or even expanding it so that everybody benefits – they revolt, descend into primal chants on the floor of parliament, and turn your entire government into an international laughing stock.
That’s why the only approach to dealing with people like this, the one that New Zealand should have adopted a long time ago, is to deny them any special privileges in the first place and to deny them the pleasure of hearing you apologize when you’ve got nothing to apologize for. Or how about this? How about saying to anyone – any indigenous group anywhere in the world – you apologize first, okay? You get up and make a big show and fall to your knees apologizing for all the terrible things your ancestors did. You apologize first… and then we can talk…
Now, as the saying goes, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. And at this point now that Stone age war chants have broken out in parliament, it is probably too late for New Zealand to correct their mistake.
And that should be a pretty big clue to everybody in this country that unless we also want to return to the stone age, we should take a very different approach.
We should affirm the greatness of western civilization and make no apology for it. We should take pride in our heritage, in our culture, in our history. We should reject the false narratives, the cartoonish, simplistic narratives about our history that turn us and our ancestors into cartoon villains.
That’s how you neutralize the grievance mongers and the guilt merchants so they have no power. They can do their tribal chants all they want. They can do them in the shower, in their own homes… whatever. The rest of us will be doing what New Zealand is apparently now incapable of doing: we’ll be living a functioning self-governing democracy. And if there’s one lesson from these bizarre, embarrassing clips out of New Zealand, it’s that no one should ever take that for granted.