justice – Page 76

National Alt-Centrism

A wide range of different political positions have been tried over the past 4,000 years, each one leading to varying but terrible amounts of human suffering and misery. If it is true that politics is the art of compromise, then all political philosophies are sets of compromises. This essay discusses one such: the philosophy of national alt-centrism.

National alt-centrism is the answer to all problems. In particular, it’s the answer to three massive questions that have divided people (both mentally and physically) since the dawn of civilisation.

The first question of politics is the question of how wide to throw open the circle of solidarity. Keep it too narrow, and you risk your people becoming insular, myopic, small-minded and inbred. Open it too wide, and you no longer have any bonds of solidarity that would cause a person to act bravely on behalf of another one, and you will be conquered.

This question has long been understood by political philosophers, who have had to strike a balance between the xenophobia that leads to a culture collapsing out of insularity, and the xenophilia that leads to a culture collapsing out of no longer possessing common bonds.

The fashion today appears to be in favour of removing borders, but it isn’t plausible that the human species is ready to unify as a single entity. The range of behaviours exhibited by people in various places around the world is so vast, that they cannot all mingle together peacefully any more than chimpanzees could freely wander the main streets of major Western centres.

Disagreements are already so numerous that no one single world authority could possibly hope to mediate them all without unrest. Worse, no one world government could possibly have the trust of the whole world, for it will inevitably be comprised of people who have deep historical antipathy towards other people who they intend to rule. The only possibility would involve the introduction of totalitarianism.

On the other hand, however, it’s obvious that very small units, such as city-states, are not viable (outside extremely unusual circumstances) on account of their inability to project any meaningful force on the world stage, which means that they quickly get overrun by larger neighbours. This suggests that a balance between global and parochial, such as national, is the right size of circle to optimise the benefits of solidarity and co-operation.

The second question is essentially the question between left and right. There are a variety of ways of posing this question and there are a number of ways of summarising what this question all boils down to. It’s apparent that the right is masculine and the left is feminine, but there are a near-infinite number of different ways of interpreting what this means.

In either case, it can be seen that the political solutions offered by either extreme are insufficient, and only cause the political pendulum to swing back equally as far as it is initially pulled. Leftist solutions are short-sighted, naive and reckless, and this inspires right-wing countermovements. Right-wing solutions are cruel, exclusionary and narrow-minded, and this inspires left-wing countermovements.

This swinging back and forth along the left-right paradigm has torn all nations of the West in two. None of them work as true nations any more: they are comprised only of a cadre of politicians and their wealthy backers trying to screw an ever-increasing horde of suckers as hard as possible. No-one has any national solidarity any longer because both sides have imported so many randoms that no-one has anything in common.

The left-right paradigm has to be abolished because it induces people to put their class interests above the national interests and, in so doing, makes it impossible for the people to have any real solidarity. Instead of being members of the nations, people self-segregate into social circles based on ideology. In doing so, they are divided and conquered.

Here it can be seen that a centrist position is the most naturally fitting to those who have already decided to operate on a national level. This avoids at once the cruelty of the right and the stupidity of the left, striking a balance in much the same way that silver is alchemically speaking a balance of iron and clay. This gives us National Centrism.

The third question is whether to go along with the established systems or to overthrow them. Regardless of the precise balances struck on the range of solidarity and the left-right questions, one separate question has to be asked: whether to co-operate with the established systems or to overthrow them if those systems are hopelessly corrupt. This is the alt question.

It’s apparent that the centrist parties have failed to create a worthy compromise between the left and the right. Rather than taking the best from both they have either taken the worst from both (in the form of neoliberalism) or adopted a piss-weak compromise that satisfies no-one except for major moneyed interests (such as most of the centrist parties in Europe). This is a political error akin to the balance fallacy in philosophy.

Alt-centrism is the refusal to fall prey to the balance fallacy. It seeks to harness both the strengths of the right and the strengths of the left. The right may be cruel, but within that cruelty is a healthy self-interest that can induce a people to stand up proud. The left may be stupid, but within that stupidity is an honest and earnest will to make the most out of what life offers.

Alt-centrism is, by contrast, an uncompromising position. The emphasis is not on the insipid compromises that have destroyed public faith in the West but rather on a dynamic fusion of the yin and the yang. This naturally eschews materialism by way of appealing to metaphysical ideals, and therefore leaves room in the national consciousness for the spiritual, which is the major domain in which the current political system has failed.

National alt-centrism is, therefore, a revolutionary nationalist philosophy that seeks to combine the orderliness of the wealthy with the creativity of the poor, for the benefit of both sides as one nation. It solves at once five separate problems: the problem of opening the gates to barbarians, the problem of becoming insular and weak, the problem of hoarding wealth in too few hands, the problem of losing touch with reason, and the problem of how to deal with an incumbent political system that is rotten to the core.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

Minister For Female Supremacy

New Zealand is a Military Outpost Masquerading as a Country

New Zealand: plenty of money for guns, no money to feed kids

Many of the decisions made by New Zealand politicians are baffling to the average Kiwi. How can it be possible that we can find $400 million a year to enforce cannabis prohibition, which the people don’t want, but we can’t find $100 million to feed our own children, which the people definitely do want? This essay explains why so many of these decisions are made: New Zealand is not a real country, but a military outpost masquerading as one.

Key to understanding this is understanding the guns and butter model of government spending. Essentially, we can measure the degree to which a government acts as a steward of its people – compared to using them as tools to achieve the economic ambitions of the ruling classes – by measuring how much of the nation’s production is diverted to consumer goods as opposed to military goods.

Understanding this helps explain why our Government would approve a $20 billion military spending bill while rejecting a $100 million proposal to feed hungry New Zealand children.

Why is buying weapons two hundred times more important than feeding our own children?

The answer is grim, and dark. New Zealand isn’t really a country, in the sense that other countries are countries. We’re not an association of families that formed a tribe and then met other tribes to form a clan and then made peace with other clans to form a nation. Most of us just washed up here, many of us without the consent of the people who already lived here.

It’s obvious that New Zealand itself has no need to spend $20 billion on armaments, any more than Iceland does. But to think like this is to commit the error of seeing New Zealand as an actual nation, whose will is that of individual New Zealanders and made manifest through its leaders, like European nations. That isn’t how it is.

The accurate way to conceptualise New Zealand is as an Anglo-American military outpost in the South Pacific, something like a forward operating base for moneyed interests that mostly operate out of the City of London, who have enslaved the New Zealand population by way of a debt-based central banking system.

Most Kiwis don’t understand the geostrategic importance of the archipelago they live on. It’s very easy to look at a static map and think that New Zealand is a long way from anywhere, and therefore that it can’t have much strategic value. This way of thinking reflects a myopia that’s typical of New Zealanders. The truth is much more involved.

Firstly, whoever controls New Zealand controls Australia, in effect, because controlling New Zealand enables one to project force into the East and South of Australia, which is where all the people live. The Japanese Empire realised that landing an expeditionary force in Northern Australia and then marching to Sydney was not practical, and so their Imperial Navy’s invasion plans assumed a prior invasion of New Zealand. It just makes sense.

Secondly, whoever controls Australia controls Asia. This is because Northern Australia serves as a staging ground for the projection of power into South Asia, in particular naval power into the South Asian Sea, which is necessary in order to keep the main sealanes open (and therefore the global economy humming). Given that the Anglo-American Empire already has effective bases in Japan and the Philippines, being able to project power into the Southern South China Sea is the last piece of the puzzle.

Seen like that, it’s obvious why the New Zealand Government would vote for guns sooner than food for its own children. Because New Zealand isn’t a real country, there’s no incentive for the Government to act in the interest of increasing the well-being of its people – the Government doesn’t represent those people. New Zealand is first and foremost a military outpost run by imperial interests, and as such the mental health of its citizens is far from the top priority, as evinced by our OECD-leading homelessness and youth suicide rates.

If growing up poor, scared or traumatised means that a person will be more useful in a military capacity, then that is what the Government will encourage. Inequality correlates positively with psychopathy, with America being the obvious example. The rulers of New Zealand have also calculated that an underclass of poor and desperate people will make it much easier to recruit the necessary numbers for a professional volunteer armed force, and have structured society accordingly.

Hermann Goering once said “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.” Understanding this sentiment is the key to understanding the spending decisions of the New Zealand Government.

The New Zealand ruling class is simply not interested in keeping the population in good physical or mental health, which is why nothing is ever done about our suicide rate or housing crisis. All that matters is keeping the population in a state of war readiness in case it should later be necessary to use them to achieve some geopolitical objective.

The cannabis laws follow the same principle. Every idiot knows that it’s worse for the people to have alcohol legal than to have cannabis legal, given the plague of violence, sex crimes and drunk driving deaths that follow in the wake of alcohol use. So why have that legal, while criminalising a recreational alternative that doesn’t make people aggressive, impulsive and violent? The answer is, sadly, because our ruling class wants broken, damaged, fearful and violent people.

Unfortunately for us, the reason why New Zealand is not run along the lines of Switzerland or Japan or even South Korea is because our supposed leaders are beholden to foreign interests. We are not an independent nation, and we will never be, for our independence would pose too great of a threat to the military position of the Anglo-American Empire. Kiwis are, as Dwight Eisenhower put it when he warned us of the Military-Industrial Complex over 55 years ago, hanging from a cross of iron.

The New Zealand Government Has Been Separating Children From Their Cannabis-Growing Parents for Decades

This is no worse than what our own Government is doing to us

Today’s mass media assault on consciousness involved emotional images from America of Mexican children in cages. The ensuing outrage was based around the fact that when a Mexican family is apprehended crossing the American border illegally, the children are temporarily separated from their parents. Although this is regrettable, what the media is ignoring is that the New Zealand Government has been doing the same thing to its own citizens for decades.

For one thing, it’s standard practice for the New Zealand Government to separate children from their parents if those parents are going into custody for breaking the law. In this regard, the New Zealand Government’s normal actions are no better than what the American Government is doing. Even worse than this is the fact that many of those parents are going to jail for offences that don’t harm anyone, unlike (arguably) illegal immigration.

The fact that cannabis is a medicine is a fact near enough to universally acknowledged by the young people of the world, even if Baby Boomer politicians have been slow to understand it. However, cultivation of it remains a crime punishable by up to seven years imprisonment in New Zealand, despite that the plant has a wide range of medicinal effects and is used all over the country to alleviate needless suffering.

Because cannabis is so good for alleviating suffering – taking away pain, nausea, insomnia among other maladies – people continue to grow it, despite the law. But because of the law, a significant number of these people end up being apprehended by Police and sentenced to prison.

Many of the medicinal cannabis growers who have been put in prison over the past 40 years have had children. Those children were forcibly separated from their parents by the New Zealand Government for the sake of enforcing a law that should never have been a law.

So all the perfectly natural dismay that Kiwis have been induced to feel at what the Mexican children at the American border are forced to endure – a traumatic forced separation from their parents as a consequence of an arbitrary law enforced by armed men – could just as well arise as a result of thinking about what Kiwi children have to go through as a result of cannabis prohibition.

In fact, our own children have it worse, because they will often not get to see their parents again for a long time.

So if people in New Zealand are going to get upset because of an outrage that the global corporate media manufactured in order to target a conservative American President, let’s get equally upset about similar and equally evil actions in New Zealand.

Every time a New Zealander gets put in prison for a cannabis offence that has harmed no-one, leaving a child on the outside who is now missing a parent, we ought to react with the same outrage towards our own Government as we had today for the Trump Administration. If we’re going to expend energy on outrage let’s at least direct it somewhere where it can do some good.