By Niall McCrae:
Across the West leaders have been strangely silent on the sudden cultural revolution unleashed on their cities. Statues of national heroes are being defaced if not toppled by social justice warriors, who believe that racism runs through the veins of society. Sculptures reinforce imperialism and white supremacy, we are told.
Nigel Farage is doing Boris Johnson’s job for him, decrying this destructive tantrum of the militant Left. But perhaps the most forceful critic is the deputy prime minister of New Zealand, Winston Peters. We don’t hear much of Peters in the UK, because the media fawn over Jacinda Ardern as the embodiment of a liberal and progressive idyll on the other side of the world.
Ardern is in the limelight following New Zealand’s successful battle against the Covid-19 pandemic. Enjoying perfect isolation in the south Pacific, a thousand miles from Australia, the Kiwis imposed a lockdown on themselves while barring foreigners from their shores. The media imply that a liberal leader defeated the virus, although this was achieved by totalitarian means.
New Zealanders did not actually vote for Ardern, the Labour leader, as PM. She rose to the top in 2017 after the National Party lost the support of kingmaker Winston Peters, a controversial Maori populist. Peters has been an antidote to the identity politics of Ardern, ensuring that New Zealand has not become a woke dystopia.
Now Peters is confronting the global anti-racism protests as they strike in post-colonial New Zealand. He described the demand to remove statues as a ‘wave of idiocy’. Already the statue of Captain John Hamilton has been removed from the city named after him. This action was taken by the authorities in response to a Maori activist’s threat to knock it down during a planned protest. No consultation, simply submission to thuggery.
‘Woke New Zealanders feel the need to mimic mindless actions imported from overseas’, Peters stated. ‘A self-confident country would never succumb to obliterating symbols of their history, whether it be good or bad or simply gone out of fashion’. And where would this lead, he asked.
‘If one doesn’t approve of war we pull down our cenotaphs? Should we demolish every school that once applied corporal punishment? Should Gandhi’s statue be thrown in the Wellington harbour because we don’t agree? Should knighthoods to the undeserving be post-humously withdrawn? Do Māori now disown our mixed heritage?’
Captain Cook, commemorated throughout the north and south islands, is now demonised, just as Guardianistas have targeted his statue at Whitby in Yorkshire.
Peters exclaimed: ‘The idea that statues of Captain Cook, the greatest maritime explorer of his age, be pulled down because of the history that followed him is disgraceful’.
Peters, a great orator, came to his swashbuckling conclusion: –
‘The woke generation are the equivalent of a person with no long-term memory, stumbling around in the present without any signposts to guide them. If a person, like a country, doesn’t know where they have come from, they have no way of knowing where they are going’.
The woke generation tell older people to ‘educate themselves’. Peters is having none of that, turning on those who want to erase history and begin at Year Zero: ‘Grow up and read a book’.
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