It should have been routine. A police caution for a broken tail light. A ‘get off the road and get it fixed’ situation. Until something went very wrong. The I-phone 11 didn’t appear and start filming until Lee Ropata was on the ground bleeding from a blow to the head. Had the cop lost his temper and taken out his baton and his frustrations on a defenceless Maori teen? Or had the 95kg promising prop forward fancied his chances of a king hit and a getaway?
No one knew. But when Lee died in hospital a day later, the NZ media and the metropolitan elite assumed they did. Racist white cop, innocent brown victim. Newspaper editorials, TV pieces, Twitter tirades and on-line outrage parroted the same narrative: this was just the most egregious example of a society rotten with systemic racism. The whole horror show had to be brought down and now. Out they poured into the streets, led by the activists and radicals (BROWN LIVES MATTER!) but soon joined by their middle class hangers on, Uni lecturers and their charges. School kids too, truant, many urged on by their socially conscious teachers.
10,000 swarmed Aotea Square. Inflammatory speeches provoked a crowd already primed by schooling and media for resistance, violent if necessary, to ‘White Supremacy’. Shops looted, cars set on fire, three innocents dead due to mob beatings. By the end of the day Queen St was a war zone.
In Wellington an even larger crowd surrounded the parliament buildings. Things really kicked off after the first Molotov cocktail was thrown…
Is this an implausible nightmare from the feverish imagination of a conservative bore? Or a reasonable projection from things currently ominous in our national life?
Allow me to argue the latter.
The violent civil disturbances wracking America at present, although ginned up by lockdown frustration and unemployment and hardly helped by the poor leadership of Trump, can be squarely blamed on the Left. For years their allies in media and academia have been pushing the fiction that America as a nation is defined by a pervasive institutional racism so monstrous that the only solution is its complete re-making.
And the exact same thing is happening here.
Witness ‘Time to Dismantle Our Rotting House’, an article written for the online magazine Newsroom in response to the George Floyd protests. Its author: a lecturer at Auckland Law School, Dylan Asafo.
In this quite remarkable piece of agitprop, Mr Asafo begins by claiming, without the inconvenience of having to provide any evidence, that “peoples of colour in Aotearoa… constantly (have their) humanity denied by the white supremacist state.” So entranced is Mr Asafo by his notion of white supremacy that he mentions it no less than six times. It only took me one perusal of the NZ Herald (6/06) to find evidence to the contrary; many DHBs funded by this “white supremacist state” presently working through the lockdown backlog of elective surgery have decided to prioritize Maori and Pasifika people. Perhaps Mr Asafo is unaware. He continues heaping odium on our institutions, including in his words our “so called democracy” and “the white supremacist (again) system of capitalism”. The only facts mentioned are the context free airing of “66 percent of those shot by police in the last 10 years were either Maori or Pasifika, and 51 percent of the prison population are Maori and 12 percent Pasifika”.
Is this out of proportion when measured against all those who came in contact with police or were convicted of crimes? If not then these ‘facts’ are irrelevant. He goes on to advocate not just for the abolition of prisons but the entire police force ending with a ‘revolutionary’ call – “The rotting house must be dismantled, and a new system needs to be built.” Perhaps most troubling of all, he sees hope for the enacting of his lunatic scheme in (NZ having) “somewhat weaker barriers to radical constitutional change than in the US.”
Has there ever been a more dangerous prescription for national anarchy argued in mainstream (it was picked up by MSN) media? And by someone at the heart of one of our major seats of learning?
Holding a Master of Laws from Harvard University, Mr Asafo seems to have done quite well for himself out of our “White Supremacist structures”.
Another example of media colluding with academia in laying the groundwork for civil breakdown is in the warping of popular history. Again American experience is being mimicked here. Late last year the New York Times published the ‘1619 Project’ attempting to rewrite U.S history by taking the year African slaves first set foot on U.S soil as the founding of the country. It was riddled with errors, the most serious being that the American side in the War of Independence (the true founding of the country) was fighting to preserve slavery. This was easily disproven by the truth that slavery was still legal in the Great Britain of the time that was yet to discover its emancipatory mission. When this was publicly pointed out by an academic employed by the NY Times itself as a fact checker you would have thought the ‘project’ would have been dead in the water. Instead it received the Pulitzer Prize and was sent out as an education pack to schools.
Here in New Zealand, last year’s commemoration of Captain James Cook’s first arrival in New Zealand was marked by protest and revisionism. Cook was reframed in media as a racist villain itching to go on a Maori turkey shoot rather than the enlightened and brave explorer he undoubtedly was. Also last year after numerous pieces in local media promoting the idea, the government decided to make coverage of New Zealand history and in particular coverage of the Land Wars compulsory in all schools. I’m all for the study of New Zealand history but the chance that this will not be an exercise in ‘white’ guilt tripping is, given the political leanings of educational bodies in this country, a slim one. We can look forward to teenagers armed with a highly coloured version of our history, versed in all its sins but none of its virtues and ready to enact ‘social justice’ along Mr Asafo’s lines.
By seeding racial division and undermining our national institutions, radical academics and a compliant media are busy making the nightmare scenario I opened with more and more likely. The left often claim to be animated by a feeling of ‘injustice’. Isn’t it time conservatives felt a similar injustice, even rage, that the foundations of our successful nation are being so blithely demolished?
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.
