What El Salvador Could Teach New Zealand About Solving The Gang Problem

Nayib Bukele is the President of El Salvador, having won re-election earlier this year with almost 85% of the popular vote. Most of his popularity is a result of his security strategy, which has transformed El Salvador from an extremely dangerous country to a safe one. On X, Bukele describes himself as a “philosopher king”. His security philosophy might be applicable to other places plagued by gangs.

Bukele’s approval rating today is some 89%, making him arguably the most popular leader of any country. Understanding why he is so popular requires understanding the difference between the El Salvador before Bukele took power, and the El Salvador now.

El Salvador used to be the most violent country in the Western hemisphere. The MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs had reduced the country to a battleground. With everyday life under gang control, El Salvador was in danger in collapsing into Haiti-style anarchy. The homicide rate in 2015 was over 100 per 100,000 people.

Bukele came to power in 2019. The homicide rate had fallen from its peak since then, but was still extremely high. In March 2022 there was a spike in homicides due to MS-13, wherein 87 people were randomly murdered by the gang over a three-day period. This was apparently an attempt by MS-13 to intimidate the people of El Salvador into submission.

The response was a ‘War Against the Gangs‘, launched by Bukele that same month. He had described gangs as the metastases of a cancer that is killing Salvadorean society.

The crackdown saw the arrest of around 2% of the Salvadoran population and the construction of a 40,000-person maximum security prison, known as the “Terrorism Confinement Centre”. Since these measures were taken, El Salvador’s homicide rate has plummeted. In 2023 it was a mere 2.4 per 100,000 (c.f. Canada at 2.3).

Could a similar strategy work here?

For one thing, New Zealand gangs don’t cause as much damage as the gangs in El Salvador. The homicide rate in New Zealand is lower than even the 2023 rate there. New Zealand gangs might be feral by New Zealand standards, but by Latin American standards they’re standard-bearers of civilisation.

However, the general cancer metaphor is apt. As family members of gang members can tell you, the damage caused by gang members is not limited to crime. Immeasurable quality of life damage is caused by the constant threats, intimidation and antisocial behaviour that comes with the presence of gang culture.

Moreover, existing gangs could cause extreme damage in the future. The example of El Salvador shows that the homicide rate can increase manyfold in a short period if the economic and social environment permits. Given the ongoing economic collapse of the Anglosphere, anyone could confidently predict a rise in both volume and intensity of gang activity in coming years.

Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Centre has room for 40,000 people. New Zealand was known to have 8,300 gang members nationwide near the end of 2022. We could, therefore, build a much smaller prison – one that fit 10,000 people – and still have enough room to put every single gang member in it for life.

Other anti-gang measures could readily be adopted from El Salvador.

One of these is the reduction of the age of criminal responsibility, from 16 to 12. Having the age at 16 makes sense in a high-trust, high-social capital environment where most people want to do good. In a low-trust environment, however, tolerance and kindness just gets taken advantage of. Gangs exploit that tolerance and kindness by getting younger teenagers – too young to be charged – to commit crimes. This phenomenon also exists in the New Zealand gang scene, so we might benefit from a similar reduction in the age of criminal responsibility.

Of note is that one element of Bukele’s crackdown was banning media from expressing pro-gang sentiments. If implemented in New Zealand, this would prevent The New Zealand Herald offering a column to former Black Power pack rapist Denis O’Reilly. It would also prevent the numerous hagiographies about gang leaders doing community work.

Unfortunately, no measures will be taken to protect the New Zealand people from the gang menace as long as globalists are in power.

What New Zealand needs is a leader that cares about the New Zealand nation first and foremost.

Also of note is that the political philosophy of Bukele’s movement is explicitly anti-democratic. Bukele’s Vice-President, Felix Ulloa, has said “The democratic system that existed for years in El Salvador only benefited crooked politicians.” The system that exists in New Zealand also only benefits crooked politicians. That suggests that solving our leadership problems might require also solving the democracy problem.

All this might be too much for New Zealand for now – we are yet to see the Mongrel Mob, the Headhunters, Black Power or the Hell’s Angels murder random civilians in New Zealand to intimidate the Government. But the worse our gang problem becomes, the more we will need to consider the need for a Nayib Bukele-style crackdown.

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Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2023
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2022
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2021
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017

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Workamania

Society in the Clown World of 2024 is full of mental illness. This mental illness operates on all of the individual, family, community and national levels. Although some of this mental illness is organic, resulting from the natural struggles of biological life, most of it is artificial. One of the most prevalent psychiatric problems today is almost entirely artificial: workamania.

Workamania, simply put, is the artificially-generated obsession with working as much as possible.

This involves the obsession with being in the workplace for as many hours as possible. It particularly involves being seen in the workplace for as many hours as possible. From this mindset comes the phenomena where workers try to arrive before their boss but not leave until after them, and where employees are on-call 24/7. From these phenomena come all kinds of stress-related mental and physiological disorders, most of which are considered normal when they’re really caused by workamania.

Workamania comes with its own complete moral schedule.

In the same way that, for money worshippers, a person’s value can be measured by their net worth, for workamaniacs a person’s value can be measured by hours worked. In truth, it is not hours worked but amount suffered that is the measure of moral value for the workamaniac. But hours worked serves as a useful proxy.

For money worshippers, the outgroup are the poor. For workamaniacs, the outgroup are the idle. Beneficiaries are a special enemy. No-one is permitted to live a low-consumption lifestyle in an effort to reduce environmental pressure. Hippies are almost as low as beneficiaries.

The deep ingroup are employers, who are like gods. Employers give meaning to life. Before the employer came into the world, all was chaos. A person is only considered a legitimate human being if they have an employer giving them directions all day. Anyone without an employer has no real status to the workamaniac. One’s employment is one’s identity.

The concept of a universal basic income is anathema to the workamaniac. The automatic assumption is that a UBI would encourage laziness, and no-one would ever work again. This masochistic logic reveals that Protestant Christianity is one of the major influences on workamania.

Implicit to workamania is the acceptance that an employer can never offer so low a wage that a job isn’t worth doing. No matter how miserly the wage, it’s good honest work. In fact, the worse the working conditions, somehow the more honest the work. In any case, the experience will no doubt be invaluable, the workaholics say. In no case is a worker permitted to think that an offered wage is too poor to accept a job.

Another aspect of workamania is that all is forgiven if you work a lot. You can beat your partner, abandon your kids, drive drunk and cause accidents, but if you work a large number of hours then you’re still an upstanding member of society. This goes double if you have worked for a large number of years at the same place.

Likewise, a person who is known to not work long hours is irredeemable. Even if that person spends their time looking after elderly family members or doing volunteer work in the community, they’re still a bad person if they don’t have a job. Taking a holiday is only acceptable if your doctor says you have to do it for stress-related reasons.

It’s crucial to note that workamania is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon. It’s pushed on us by a sadistic, slave-driving ruling class that controls the mainstream media and, by so doing, controls our moral sentiments.

Our rulers want two things from us: productivity and obedience. Productivity makes our rulers rich and powerful, by giving them a big surplus to skim off our labour. Obedience makes the position of our rulers secure. Workamania achieves both objectives, which is why people are brainwashed into it through the school system, the media and in their place of employment.

In C-PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving, Pete Walker describes four major types of reaction to traumatic stress: fawn, freeze, flight and fight. Flight is the moderately extraverted response that involves using high amounts of energy to escape a situation. In today’s society, many people with traumatic stress disorders develop into workaholics. This is because they can’t sit still and enjoy their own thoughts.

Workamania can be considered the collective-level equivalent of what workaholism is to the individual level. It’s a traumagenic self-hatred that leads to an inability to enjoy everyday life. It’s when an entire people cannot appreciate its own company, and has to keep itself busy to avoid coming face-to-face with that fact.

Workaholics and workamaniacs naturally get on well together. After all, they share very similar goals. The difference is that the workaholic is escaping something and is thus usually in a state of low-excitement depression, whereas the workamaniac is in a state of high-excitement hysteria.

None of this is to suggest that working is bad, or that a work ethic is not important. The high standard of living that has been built in the West in recent centuries has been made possible largely through a good work ethic. Working hard is the most likely way to go from poor to comfortable.

We need to draw a line, however, between a healthy amount of work and workamania. A healthy amount of work is one that maximises the worker’s quality of life. An unhealthy amount of work is one that maximises the profits of the worker’s owners, to the exclusion of all other considerations.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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VJM – New Zealand’s Most Suppressed Author And Thinker!

Not since Arthur Desmond has a New Zealand author created as much controversy as myself. The simple fact that I am an educated, working-class Kiwi man willing to speak the truth has resulted in a devoted horde of haters. The purpose of this photoessay is to chronicle the Establishment’s attempts to destroy me.

The first sign I had that the Establishment wanted to shut me up was in May 2019. For a couple of years before then, I had been selling ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ t-shirts on TradeMe as a way to wind up Communists. Sales had been slow, until one day I sold three shirts in the space of an hour. A friend rang me up, and told me to check the news.

The Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt, had taken to the mainstream media to declare there was “no place” for my satirical political expression. Calling me “ideologically adjacent” to Brenton Tarrant, Hunt intimated that selling such t-shirts was somehow anti-social in and of itself. The listings were soon taken down by TradeMe after a deluge of lies about how ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ was actually a white supremacist call to action.

The next move was the Establishment sending cops to my house to harass me as part of Operation Whakahumanu. This came in the form of a rap on my front door at about 10am one morning in July 2019. I opened the door to find a couple of uniformed officers, who wanted to ask me some questions about comments I had made on FaceBook. Apparently this was in the belief that I was at risk of shooting up a mosque. They had no warrant, so I asked them to leave immediately.

It was an unmistakable threat. The political establishment clearly saw me as an enemy. I understood directly that this opinion was a result of my VJM Publishing work, wherein I had explained to people for some years how the political system manipulates them against their best interests. My work to explain the psychology of submission and control was giving too much power back to the New Zealand people. I had to be countered.

Learning that the Establishment was targeting me, various sycophants and arselickers, attempting to curry favour with the powerful, followed suit.

The first of these was terrorist fundraiser Byron Clark.

Talia Levin’s book Culture Warlords mentioned an article about globohomo I had published in November 2018. Levin mentioned VJM Publishing as part of an effort to smear the counter-globalist resistance as deranged racists. Clark seized on this opportunity to attempt to have VJM Publishing books cancelled from TradeMe. His harassment campaign mostly involved posting lies about me to his Twitter account.

While this was going on, the Establishment was working behind the scenes with major tech firms to silence wrongthinkers such as myself. This was a consequence of the Christchurch Call.

I discovered that this had been happening when Google slashed traffic to the VJM Publishing company page by 75% overnight. Presumably Ardern had given them a list of New Zealand websites considered wrongthink, and Google had reached into their algorithm and given those websites a massive penalty. VJM Publishing traffic fell from around 200 hits a day to around 50. Over the next few years, before I stopped using Google products, it would fall to around five.

This was especially annoying as VJM Publishing had just released Clown World Chronicles, our best-selling book of all time, and the Google traffic to the Clown World Chronicles main page was the central plank of the marketing effort. This one move, more than any other, crippled my ability to make a living from speaking the truth.

Somehow the Establishment also recruited former Uruwera terrorist Rangi Kemara to do its dirty work harassing, stalking and slandering me. Kemara has clearly been given (or assumed) an agenda to associate me with neo-Nazism by adding this term before my name every time he gives his moronic followers an update on my activity.

As someone who has repeatedly criticised authoritarianism in all its forms – Nazi, Commie, Abrahamic, neoliberal – I can only assume this line of slander is being pursued because I am openly a nationalist. The VJM Publishing company page is full of essays and articles decrying war and authoritarianism, but it also features several arguing for the merits of nationalism and criticising globalism. It is for these latter reasons that I am so heavily targeted.

Almost as annoying as the loss of Google traffic to the VJM Publishing company page was when Byron Clark and friends were rewarded for their ongoing harassment and slander campaign. TradeMe finally caved to the bleating and removed Clown World Chronicles from sale (as well as the 2021 annual compilation of our best essays and articles).

Donna Carson, an “extremism researcher” at the notoriously Marxist-riddled Massey University, joined the pack attack against Clown World Chronicles, taking it upon herself to email TradeMe arguing for the book to be cancelled from sale.

The Police and academia are not the only weapons that the Establishment has been able to wield against me. They also have the mainstream media.

In 2023 I wrote an essay about provincialisation in New Zealand, and how it could potentially be the answer to the lack of human rights here. Tane Webster of Reality Check Radio read the article, was impressed, and arranged for an interview between me and Paul Brennan on RCR. The interview went well, the booking agent suggested I might come on once a month, and for a brief time there was a small amount of social media buzz.

At that point, mainstream media journalists launched their attack on me: a cancel campaign to have the interview taken down. Charlie Mitchell of The Press was the most prominent of these, using an article I wrote about Jewish opposition to hereditarianism as basis for a claim that I was (wait for it) anti-Semitic and therefore have no right to speak.

RCR soon folded, removing the interview from their website and ghosting me from all further email or social media contact.

All this is enough, by itself, to make me New Zealand’s most suppressed author and thinker. But perhaps the most shocking revelation of all came from the Police themselves, who revealed in an Offical Information Act response to Cameron Slater that they monitor the VJM Publishing website for potential wrongthink.

That’s right – the New Zealand Police spends money paying someone to read every essay or article that goes up on the VJM Publishing company page and to make a note of any counter-globalist sentiments that may be expressed. Any anti-immigration or anti-government sentiments are duly recorded (and presumably held on file against my name).

Why would the New Zealand Police take note of the fact that I “allege” that Muslims and Africans commit an enormous amount of violence and sex crimes wherever they go, an assertion that is borne out by law enforcement data from all over the Western World? Simple: noticing things is verboten. Only agreeing with my globalist masters is permissible.

In summary, I am monitored by the New Zealand Police, officers have been sent to my house to harass me, the Government teams up with major social media companies to restrict my reach, globalist activists work in packs to deplatform my books from TradeMe, terrorists on the Government payroll slander me all over the Internet, and mainstream journalists take to Twitter to cancel me from the alternative media.

All this yet I’ve never been arrested for a crime. This is all simply because I speak truth to power.

Never before has New Zealand produced an author or thinker who has attracted so much hate and aggression from the ruling class and their enforcers. I, VJM, your humble servant of truth, am the most dangerous man in New Zealand. This is for no other reason than because I take the side of the New Zealand people against their oppressors.

If you appreciate the risks I am taking to bring you the truth, then read my essays and articles, share my videos and buy my books, because they will kill me sooner or later.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Deep Implications Of The Recent Thuringen Election

The Free State of Thuringia is one of the sixteen states in the German federal republic, with a population just over 2.1 million. Normally, little of importance would come from Thuringen – but the state elections earlier this month have upset that. The much-feared Alternative fuer Deutschland party – regularly dismissed as neo-Nazis by the opinion-shapers in the mainstream media – won 33% of the total vote, taking first place.

Mainstream commentators were aghast at the AfD’s success, labelling it a return of Nazism. But in the hysteria over the AfD result, other results with deep implications have been missed.

One of the most striking of these was the Buendnis Sahra Wagenknecht winning 15.7%.

The BSW is also nationalist and also opposes Germany getting sucked into the war in Ukraine. Hence, they are as anti-Establishment as the AfD. But, unlike the AfD, they are a leftist movement that wants to empower the negotiating position of workers, and which has no interest in the Christian dogma so common to alternative right movements (the BSW also lists ‘reason’ as one of its two core values).

Sahra Wagenknecht is a former top-ranking Die Linke (The Left) candidate, which means that she’s coming from a very leftist perspective. If the AfD had done well and the BSW not, it might be possible to blame everything on TikTok. But because the BSW also did so well, it’s impossible to speak of a “right-wing wave”. The BSW winning over 15% shows that support for nationalism, not just support for the AfD, is what’s rising.

Perhaps the most striking change from the previous election was the collapse of Die Linke. They were the biggest party in 2019, with 31% of the total vote. Their 2024 vote was a much humbler 13%. The vast bulk of this fall can be attributed to the rise of the BSW, which didn’t exist in 2019.

In total, the nationalist bloc of AfD and BSW won 48.7% of the Thuringen vote, more than the 47% for the globalist bloc of CDU (23.6%), Die Linke (13%), SPD (6.1%), Gruene (3.2%) and FDP (1.1%). Nationalists outpolling globalists in a Western European region the size of Thuringen is something unprecedented since World War II. Since that war, nationalists have been reduced to small minorities. For them to become the majority again, anywhere, came as a shock to many.

Even more shocking was the voting breakdown.

The first result of note here was that some 49% of working-class voters in Thuringen voted AfD, and a further 16% voted BSW. This means that 65% of working-class voters went for a nationalist party, as opposed to a mere 30% for the five major globalists.

This is a remarkable result because it speaks to the extent to which working-class people feel themselves betrayed by the globalist establishment, in particular the leftist globalist establishment.

One of the issues that forced Sahra Wagenknecht out of Die Linke (along with COVID-19 measures and Ukraine/Russia policy) was German refugee policy. Die Linke supported the globalist approach of constantly and permanently increasing the refugee quota. Wagenknecht abandoned Die Linke in the belief that many left-wing voters would prefer a nationalist option to a globalist one, and she has been vindicated by this month’s polling.

Of even more import is the fact that this process has just begun. The AfD has been around for a while but the BSW is new. If they can already poll this high in a regional election, they can dream of doing so at a federal level. Then the possibility arises of an AfD-BSW coalition ruling Germany.

The second result of note here relates to age. If one looks only at voters aged 18-24, who are traditionally globalist left voters, we can see a radical seachange towards nationalism. 55% of men and 46% of women in this age group voted for one of the two nationalist parties.

The only real supporters of the establishment now are the Boomers whose rental property portfolios and stock portfolios are the prime beneficiaries of mass immigration. The Western ruling classes have denied for 80 years that mass immigration leads to higher rents and lower wages, but the people of West widely understand now, and the working-class understands well. Many of those people are now desperate for an anti-establishment alternative.

As the Boomers continue to die off over the next decade, globalist sentiments in the West will continue to weaken further. Those who believe that nationalists are only rising because of social media may succeed in banning that social media to a major extent. But they won’t stop what’s coming, because it’s not a social media phenomenon. It’s the inevitable end consequence of many tens of millions of unpleasant encounters with the diversity that the globalists have imported.

These results of note, taken together, suggest that the vast majority of young, working-class men in Thuringen are now nationalist. Perhaps then, a smaller majority of young, working-class men in the West in general might be nationalist. This means that the nationalist forces now control the loyalties of the precise demographics needed to control the streets – or overthrow the government.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!