"The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution."

"The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution. The revolution proceeds through conflict and strategic framing of polarised manufactured 'sides.' The issue is just an excuse (or mediator) to orient the conflict in the direction of Leftist 'progress'."

~ James Lindsay explaining the process of "dialectical progress"

"The top-down Māori nationalist revolution is not yet complete – but it has, most certainly, begun."

"New Zealand is currently living through another top-down revolution. Though far from complete, it has already captured control of the commanding heights of the public service, the schools and universities, the funding mechanisms of cultural production, and big chunks of the mainstream news media.
    "The ideology driving this revolution is not neoliberalism, it’s ethno-nationalism. A potent amalgam of indigenous mysticism and neo-tribal capitalism has captured the imagination of the professional and managerial class and is relying on the latter’s administrative power and influence to drive through a revolutionary transformation of New Zealand society under the battle-flags of 'indigenisation' and 'decolonisation.' The glue which holds this alliance of Māori and Non-Māori elites together is Pakeha guilt....
    "The origins of the present ethno-nationalist revolution may be traced back to the early 1980s – specifically the 1981 Springbok Tour.... The [Māori] nationalist activists ... created a movement towards 'Māori Sovereignty' in which revolutionary Māori would lead, and guilty Pakeha would follow.... The Guilty Pakeha’s 'long march through the institutions' had begun.
    "Only one more strategic victory is required to complete the Māori nationalist revolution: Pakeha pride in their past and in their culture has to be undermined. The men and women once celebrated as nation-builders have to be recast as colonial oppressors. The country famed for being 'the social laboratory of the world' has to be re-presented as just another sordid collection of white supremacist, treaty-breaking, killers and thieves.
    "Māori, too, are in need of a complete makeover: from slave-owning warrior-cannibals, to peace-loving caretakers of Te Ao Māori – a world to which they are bound by deep and mystical bonds. Inheritors of a culture that sanctioned genocidal conquest and environmental destruction, how can the Pakeha hope to lead Aotearoa towards a just future? As in the 1980s, the Twenty-First Century journey requires revolutionary Māori to lead, and guilty Pakeha to follow. And those guilty Pakeha in a position to make it happen appear only too happy to oblige.

    "Which is why, in March 2023, New Zealand has an educational curriculum dedicated to condemning colonisation and uplifting the indigenous Māori. Why Māori cultural traditions and ways of knowing are elevated above the achievements of Western culture and science. Why representatives of local iwi and hapu wield decisive influence over private and public development plans, as well as the credo and content of media reporting and university courses.
    "The Māori nationalist revolution is not yet complete – but it has, most certainly, begun."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'The Revolution Has Begun'

The long march through the schools...

"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."

           ~ Abraham Lincoln

 

A howling wind

 

So, a tumultuous weekend, wasn’t it. And that was only the weather!

And while the wind was howling over here, over in the Land of the Formerly Free the new president and his team were basking the glow of taking on the media over the crucial issue of who can count best up to 1.5 million.

And the world’s women (or at least 1.5 million of them) were out there in Washington and around the world howling against Trump and for “women’s rights.” Except, since the march was organised by a practicing Muslim, whose religion routinely practices the subordination of women – about which practices the marchers were resolutely silent – you do wonder how seriously we should believe women’s right’s to be their animating issue. Not to mention that of the folk dressed in black burning cars and breaking windows.

It’s all both fascinating and sort of frightening. The left having won their “long march through the culture” they are so used to having one of their various versions as figurehead they now erupt in a tantrum every time things don’t do their way (so maybe they shouldn’t have nominated one of the most corrupt women on the planet as their figurehead, you think?), or they don’t recognise the new overlord as one of their own (so maybe they shouldn’t have been quite so keen to make a position of overlord with so many executive powers, you think?).

Which is all pretty fascinating. Especially so because the new president is so keen to grasp those powers, and so many who are genuinely deplorable are keen to cheer on his doing so. Which makes his occupation fairly frightening.

Sure, he’s done the day-one “visual impact” things that might suggest something different like signing an executive order banning all new Federal regulation until he says so. And he’s had the White House climate change website taken down. All good as far as that goes. But now he’s rolling up his sleeves to get on with his serious business of declaring war on free-market economics and building both a physical and economic wall around a country originally made great by free trade and free immigration – while, bizarrely, dressing up his programme of economic protectionism, white supremacism and tribalism as a defence of western civilisation.

It’s the last bit that gets the rubes excited. It’s the former part of the programme that keeps the cronies happy. It’s all of it that gets the tantrum-mongers so unhappy, because they can’t see in the programme the focus on the special interests they’re so used to.

For those of use as unhappy with the current presidential programme as the left’s own cultural programme, that leaves us enjoying watching their tantrums emotionally while being rationally concerned about what the presidency itself will lead to.

Charlotte Cushman reminds all groups of a profound truth that really did Make America Great that has been all-but forgotten as the winds of identity politics have blown through the culture:

[America] used to be unified by the principle of individual rights—not women's rights, not black's rights, not gay rights, but individual rights. Now, thanks to Socialism people view themselves as a member of a group that fights against other groups. People need to rediscover the meaning of the Declaration of Independence that [recognised] each and every individual with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Wouldn’t that be a wind to see howling through the culture once again.

Here’s Graham Parker:

 

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GUEST POST: Harmless window dressing?

Guest post by Reuben P. Chapple

New Zealand’s recent adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is not binding and lacks an enforcement mechanism. Nonetheless, this document is far from harmless.

The Declaration’s high-sounding phrases on the rights of indigenous people to self-determination, to maintain their own languages and cultures, to protect their natural and cultural heritage, and manage their own affairs, will surely embolden the Maori Sovereignty movement.

All ideas have a pedigree. The ideological underpinning of both the UN Declaration and the Maori Sovereignty movement lies in the early 20th Century writings of Communist revolutionaries Lenin and Stalin on something they called “The National Question.”

Communists specialise in creating social discord to divide an existing society into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups. They work tirelessly to persuade the supposedly downtrodden that they have a grievance then promise to help them get what they want.

Around 1905, Lenin and Stalin noted that Tsarist Russia consisted not just of ethnic Russians, but upwards of 80 formerly tribal subject peoples, conquered by the Czars over the preceding 500 years and forcibly Russified. To expand the Bolshevik support base, these peoples were promised “the right to manage their own affairs,” “the right to self-determination,” “the right to speak, read, write, use, and be taught in their own language” etc. It is this more than 100 year-old Communist cant that now surfaces in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

"We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left”

Skimming the newspapers to check their Berlin Wall coverage, Sean Gabb from Britain’s Libertarian Alliance discovered an unusually good piece in the Daily Mail.  It’s not just unusually good (especially for the Mail), but it offers a good lesson in activism, as Sean explains in the postscript:

    It's an article by Melanie Phillips and it titled "We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left. They're back - and attacking us from within". The key paragraphs are:

"Soviet Communism was a belief system whose goal was to overturn the structures of society through the control of economic and political life. This mutated into a post-communist ideology of the Left, whose no-less ambitious aim was to overturn western society through a subversive transformation of its culture....
    "But as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down.
    "This was what might be called 'cultural Marxism'. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.
    "This key insight was developed in particular by an Italian Marxist philosopher called Antonio Gramsci. His thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals - who are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.
    "Gramsci understood that the working class would never rise up to seize the levers of 'production, distribution and exchange' as communism had prophesied. Economics was not the path to revolution.
    "He believed instead that society could be overthrown if the values underpinning it could be turned into their antithesis: if its core principles were replaced by those of groups who were considered to be outsiders or who actively transgressed the moral codes of that society.
    "So he advocated a 'long march through the institutions' to capture the citadels of the culture and turn them into a collective fifth column, undermining from within and turning all the core values of society upside-down and inside-out."

    It's a good article and is worth reading in full. I mention it, however [says Sean], because Mrs Phillips might have been quoting from my book Cultural Revolution, Culture War. Indeed, I know that someone bought 50 copies of this two years ago and set them out to various opinion formers among whom was Mrs Phillips.
    I don't normally boast about influence. However, I had a long conversation yesterday with a friend who was rather depressed about the Libertarian Alliance's lack of impact in British politics. This is my answer. I will not claim that I am the only person putting this argument …  However, I do think it reasonable to claim that I have *helped*, since I began writing about "The Enemy Class" back in 2001, to provide the conservative and libertarian movement in this country with a narrative that explains what has happened in England over the past few generations.

And not just in England!  Here in New Zealand one person putting this argument has, of course, been Lindsay Perigo – who argues that “we lovers of reason and freedom have to do a Gramsci of our own.”

Who’s with us?