society – Page 93

The Creeping Normalisation of Political Violence

“Milkshaking” and “Egg Boy” are new terms in the popular mediascape, as minor political violence continues to become normalised. Both of these phrases refer to a spate of minor assaults on anti-Establishment politicians in Britain, Australia and elsewhere. This essay looks at how this phenomenon arose and where it might lead to.

In 2002, the European political Establishment had a serious challenger in the form of Pim Fortuyn. This flamboyant Dutchman was a ferocious opponent of mass Muslim immigration, stating that the Abrahamic cult was “an extraordinary threat”. His attitude was that, as a homosexual, he had a lot to lose from increased Islamic influence in Dutch society, as did women.

Like all anti-Establishment figures, Fortuyn believed strongly in free speech, stating that it was more important than any other freedom. This was probably driven by his (correct) perception that there were many who wanted him silenced.

The Dutch Establishment, addicted to the ready supply of cheap labour that the Muslims represented, responded by throwing all kinds of invective at him. Like Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984, Fortuyn was demonised every day in the Dutch media, compared to Hitler and described as a megalomaniacal psychopath. This steady stream of rhetoric had inevitable consequences.

On 14th March 2002, Fortuyn had a pie thrown at him. This was a minor incident, but it foreshadowed the next move. On the 6th May, he was shot dead by a deranged leftist, who stated at his trial that he didn’t want Muslims to become scapegoats for populism.

The murder of Fortuyn follows the blueprint for how the Establishment defends itself against ideological mavericks. They don’t need to send the Police to arrest men like Fortuyn and put them in concentration camps – those are crude and unsophisticated methods that provoke reactions. Much better to manufacture popular consent for that person’s destruction and let social forces do the dirty work.

The sophisticated, modern method is for the Establishment to use its control of the apparatus of propaganda, in particular mainstream media, to create the impression that the anti-Establishment target simply has to be destroyed for the sake of the greater good, and that anyone who does so will be a hero. It is by way of such encouragement that assassinations have been conducted ever since President McKinley was killed in 1901.

Make no mistake – the Establishment has always supported violence against its challengers. The Establishment has always demonised them, caricatured them as evil and dangerous, blamed them for the Establishment’s own failures and whipped up fear among the masses. It does this primarily through the mainstream media, which legitimises and normalises these sentiments.

They know that if they do this successfully enough, some weak-minded fool will let the propaganda get the better of them and strike out against one of the people that the Establishment has painted a target on. There will always be some young, impressionable idiot who doesn’t have the sense to understand how they’re being manipulated, and many of these are happy to do something obscene for the sake of fame.

So when anti-Establishment candidates in 2019 have milkshakes thrown over them and eggs cracked over their heads, and when the mainstream media lionises the people doing so and justifies their actions, we can observe that this is simply a repeat of the same pattern that the Establishment used to destroy Fortuyn. The Establishment are hoping that the mob will kill their enemies, and are shaping the mob’s behaviour in that direction.

Although no-one has yet tried to kill Fraser Anning or Nigel Farage, there have been several violent attacks on Tommy Robinson, some involving mobs hurling bricks. With the hysteria about Brexit reaching fever pitch, it’s possible that the milkshaking attacks will lead to a murder attempt. The mentality that Farage is destroying Britain by scapegoating the oppressed is not far from the mentality that Fortuyn’s killer possessed.

The Establishment would love nothing more than for another far-left extremist to put a bullet in a Marine Le Pen, a Jimmie Akesson or a Thierry Baudet, because such acts of terror would discourage other nationalists from coming forward to represent their people. The Establishment is unashamedly globalist, and therefore nationalists are anti-Establishment by default.

What the rest of us can probably expect are increasing tensions that eventually lead to outright conflict. It’s as clear as day from the reactions to the milkshaking and egg cracking that the pro-Establishment masses are howling for the blood of those who challenge their masters. They bear massive resentment borne of their own weakness and ineptitude, and they hate to see anyone strong enough to challenge the system.

One can expect that this increase in tensions will lead to further violent actions. Whether this leads to any genuine acts of anarcho-homicidalism are unclear. So far, the attackers are only attacking those who challenge the Establishment, not the Establishment itself. The creeping normalisation of political violence will, however, put the idea in a lot of people’s heads.

Eventually, however, we can predict that something like the Freikorps vs. Communist street battles of 1920s Germany will return as tensions lead to people chimping out. At this point, either things will disintegrate into chaos or someone imposes a new philosophical order. If the former, the violence will be terminal; if the latter, a new Golden Age will arise.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

The 2020 General Election Will Be The Royal Rumble of New Zealand Elections

Next year’s General Election is going to be the Royal Rumble of New Zealand elections. Everyone wants to play a part in it, but only one can win. It seems that every fortnight a new party casts its hat into the ring. Numbers man Dan McGlashan, author of Understanding New Zealand, explains the electoral ramifications of this large field.

We already know that all of the parties with a finger on the brass ring will try to keep it there or to strengthen their grip. Labour, National, the Greens, New Zealand First and ACT will all get a fat chunk of electoral funding pre-election and mainstream media publicity leading up to it, on account of their current Parliamentary presence. These parties, however, will have to contend with an usually wide field of challengers.

Not only are all the usual challengers present, but so are a range of newcomers.

The Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party will run again, potentially taking a seat’s worth of votes from other parties. Despite heavy pressure from the Greens to shut down their operations, the ALCP looks likely to not only run again but to do better than usual. Many people who habitually don’t vote on account of having no confidence in politicians will turn out to vote in the cannabis referendum, and they will be heavily tempted to throw a vote the ALCP’s way.

Green supporters tend to make the lazy assumption that, because the Greens champion cannabis law reform, ALCP voters must naturally have strong sympathies for them. In reality, the bulk of ALCP voters are Maoris and New Zealand-born white people, both of who are highly suspicious of the globalism of the Greens. ALCP voters are also much more rural than the urbanite Greens.

The Maori and Mana parties will be back, as the supporters of both parties have previously experienced the Parliamentary trough and want to be return there. Both of these parties appeal to a slightly wealthier constituency than the Maoris and Pacific Islanders who vote for Labour, which means that the presence of those parties threatens to skim those voters off the current Labour support.

This week brought news that Brian Tamaki of the Destiny Church is having another crack at Parliament. Tamaki already ran in 2005 with the Destiny New Zealand movement, winning 14,210 votes. Although this was less than 1% of the total vote, he seems to have been encouraged enough by the experience, and has entered his Coalition New Zealand Party into the 2020 race.

Tamaki’s voters will no doubt reflect the demographics of his church, which are being pulled apart by the two opposing poles. On the one hand, his constituents are poor, which inclines them to vote Labour, but on the other hand, they are horrified by Labour’s passionate support for the most degenerate aspects of the Globohomo Gayplex. His voters will be those who feel caught in the middle, as they will be most easily persuaded to vote for someone else.

Also running for the first time is the Sustainable New Zealand Party, led by Vernon Tava. This putative blue-green movement seeks to strike a balance between entrepreneurialism and ecomanagement. They are aiming at the centre of the political spectrum on account of their belief that the Greens cannot effectively negotiate from the left of Labour.

As I have written previously, Tava’s movement will compete directly with The Opportunities Party, who aren’t lying down. Although TOP have been beset by internal squabbling, they still have the cash, the profile and the will to mount another campaign. They came about halfway to getting over the 5% threshold last time, and this will enthuse them to try again.

The combined effect of all of these parties will probably be to draw votes away from the Labour Party (in the case of the Coalition New Zealand, Mana, Maori and ALCP parties), from the Green Party (in the case of Sustainable New Zealand and TOP) and from New Zealand First (in the case of the same parties as Labour). None are likely to win representation.

This doesn’t mean that the situation favours National. Not only can they expect to lose some votes to Sustainable New Zealand and perhaps even to Coalition New Zealand, but they have their own new challengers on the right to worry about.

The hard conservative vote will be stretched by the New Conservatives, led by Leighton Baker and Elliot Ikilei. They appear to appeal to the remnants of Colin Crag’s Conservative Party – conservatives who are disaffected by the current direction of things, i.e. reactionaries. They already have a devoted social media following, and they aren’t the only ones contesting the right-wing protest vote.

Alfred Ngaro looks set to run some kind of Christian Zionist party aimed at a demographic that is similar to Tamaki’s, only wealthier. This party will also fight for the votes of those who oppose reform on issues such as abortion and euthanasia. This will mean that the Christian centrist voters will be split over at least three new parties.

If all of this sounds to you like these new parties have very little chance of achieving anything, you’d be correct.

The bizarre irony of our political system is that there is almost no point to setting up on either wing, because the most you can hope for is to win 5% off the largest party on that wing, and what you will realistically achieve is to suck a few percent away and to cause that wing to get less representation in Parliament. Setting up on the left tends to favour the right, and vice versa.

Thus, the net result of all these parties running – and all but certainly not winning any representation – is, ironically, to disenfranchise their own voters, who might have otherwise supported a similar party that did win seats.

In any case, much like the actual Royal Rumbles, New Zealand elections are rigged. Labour and National have set up a system where challenging them is almost impossible. Not only do challengers get a fraction of the electoral broadcast funding that the Establishment parties get, but they also have to overcome a MMP threshold designed to deny momentum to any new movement.

It’s as if Andre the Giant and the Undertaker got together with Vince McMahon and arranged to have them enter the Royal Rumble last and second-to-last, and with a five-minute gap between their entry and the third-to-last competitor.

The realistic mostly likely outcome of having a large number of small parties competing is the complete fracture of the territory they are contesting, i.e. the centre and the far wings. This will mean that the winner of the 2020 Election will be the largest of the remainder of Labour or National. They will win not because of superior policy or popular support, but from having the fewest competitors for their voters.

Most alarmingly, whoever wins might well win an absolute majority, on account of that the centre will be shattered. This will lead to an absence of any moderating force that can act to restrain the majority winner, as New Zealand First did after the 2017 General Election. The possibility of an absolute Labour or National majority in 18 months’ time is very real.

Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing, is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people. It is available on TradeMe (for Kiwis) and on Amazon (for international readers).

The Case For Cannabis: Cannabis Is A Medicine

Of all the ways that cannabis prohibition causes harm to people, maybe the worst is how it denies many people an effective medicine. The problem is not just limited to the effect that prohibition has on accessing the substance – prohibition also makes it harder to research it and to learn how to best use it. As this article will examine, this has the effect of causing a lot of needless suffering.

Cannabis has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. In fact, as Professor David Nutt wrote this year in the British Medical Journal, it’s probably the oldest medicine known to humanity. Its medicinal effects for treating conditions like depression were known to the scientific literature as far back as 1890.

The fact that cannabis is known to be a medicine today can be demonstrated by going to Google Scholar and typing in “medicinal cannabis”. This returns (at time of writing) 44,000 results, which means that there are over 40,000 medical journal articles and papers investigating medicinal cannabis.

Frustratingly, it’s possible to go back as far as 2008 and see that there are already 14,100 results for a Google Scholar search for “medicinal cannabis”. If one considers that medicinal cannabis was made legal in many American states when even less was known than this, it strikes one how glacial the pace of change has been in New Zealand.

The medical conditions for which cannabis has shown promise include eating difficulties, sleeping problems, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, nausea and vomiting, pain and wasting syndrome (cachexia) and even mental health conditions like anxiety, schizophrenia, depression, social anxiety disorder and psychosis. In chronic pain situations it can lead to less opiate use.

The problem is the law.

Because of the long-standing prohibitions on cannabis, it’s difficult to properly research the substance. For a university research program to conduct a proper study, they need to test the effects of cannabis on a large number of people, in a controlled and replicable environment. This requires getting hold of a large amount of cannabis – very difficult when cannabis is illegal.

Without being able to conduct large trials, it’s difficult to collect a sufficient amount of data to pass certain levels of proof. Because of the ever-present threat of charlatanism in the pharmaceutical industry, it has become necessary to demand rigourous testing before a prospective medicine gets governmental approval to be sold. Prohibition makes it harder to cannabis to get that approval.

Despite this, there is still a fair bit known about the medicinal effects of cannabis.

It’s acknowledged by honest researchers today that “therapeutic benefits of medicinal cannabis are well documented in the treatment of a variety of medical conditions”. The problem is that, because of prohibition, it’s impossible to arrive at standardised models of production, distribution and prescription.

This is more of a problem than it might first appear to be.

Without a standardised model of production, it’s difficult for doctors to have any confidence in what they’re prescribing. Because many medicines have dosage-dependent adverse side-effects, it’s important to know exactly what proportions of effective medicine are found in each pill that’s being dished out. Impurities are to be avoided. Absent this, it’s impossible for a doctor to know what to prescribe.

Without standardised prescription guidelines, it’s impossible to know how much to prescribe. It’s not just a matter of getting as much cannabis into the patient as possible. Responsible medical practice means being aware of potential side-effects and interactions with other medicines, and how these work with factors like age and body weight. If this knowledge is not present, it might seem wise to err on the side of prudence and ignore cannabis.

After all, even if cannabis prohibition was repealed tomorrow and doctors had access to all the cannabis in the world, they would still need to know how to use it safely before they could feel comfortable prescribing it.

Despite the presence of these hurdles, the fact remains that knowledge of the medicinal applications of cannabis are becoming ever-more widespread. Indeed, even Zimbabwe is aware that cannabis is medicinal. Not only has the impoverished Southern African state had medicinal cannabis since 2017, but their Health Minister is getting praise from other Southern African nations for their relatively forward-thinking stance on the issue.

Some might argue that the New Zealand medical establishment has shown itself to be more interested in toeing the legal and bureaucratic line than actually helping their patients, and that their reluctance to deal with what was clearly an important issue for many of their patients was cowardly. This might be true for many doctors. The point, however, is not to apportion blame, but to determine the correct path forward.

The major problem with unlocking the medicinal potential of cannabis is the law. It’s the law that keeps researchers and scientists from finding out which applications of cannabis make medicinal sense and which ones don’t. Since people are going to use cannabis anyway, it makes sense from a harm reduction perspective to expand our knowledge of the plant. This would make it possible to make better-informed decisions about its use.

Legalising cannabis would restore sanity to the situation. It would allow companies and universities to conduct full-scale trials of medicinal cannabis products. This would allow those medical professionals who are interested in learning about the therapeutic effects of cannabis to have more accurate data upon which to base their prescription decisions.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

The Case For Cannabis: Prohibition Harms Social Cohesion

Cannabis prohibition does a lot of harm to various groups within society, as other articles here have shown, but it also has an effect on society as a whole. Not only does society have to pay for the cost of enforcing cannabis prohibition, but it suffers at a collective level the same harm done to individuals: as below, so above. As this article will examine, cannabis prohibition harms social cohesion.

Our society relies on co-operation between different groups at all levels.

One of the most important ways is the solidarity between generations. In order for the young to be willing to care for the old when the time comes, the youth have to feel some kind of solidarity with those older ones. They have to feel like those older ones managed the country in such a way as to leave them a worthy inheritance. They have to feel like the old cared about them.

As Dan McGlashan showed in Understanding New Zealand, there is a sharp distinction between young and old when it comes to support for cannabis law reform. The correlation between voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017 and being in the 65+ age bracket was -0.43 – not extremely strong, but strong enough to suggest that the average person in that age bracket is decidedly against cannabis law reform.

There are several reasons why a young person might feel that the generations before them had failed in their duty of stewardship, but the unwillingness to reform the cannabis laws are one of the foremost. For a young person today, the thought that the nation’s elderly are sitting back on a fat pension drinking whisky and chomping painkillers, while at the same time putting you in prison for growing a medicinal flower, seems obscene.

Given these reasons, why would the young not come to see the elderly as evil? The indifference of the elderly towards the suffering caused to the young by cannabis prohibition certainly appears evil to those suffering it. As a result, their coming to hate those pushing it on them is inevitable. And by such means, society is divided and conquered.

Cannabis prohibition doesn’t just divide society on the basis of age.

Understanding New Zealand also showed that the correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and being New Zealand-born was 0.73, which is very strong. This is because cannabis use is an integral part of Kiwi culture – it brings Maoris and white people together as well as rugby and barbecues, and especially when it comes to younger demographics.

Because of the central role of cannabis in Kiwi culture, cannabis prohibition is something that pits New Zealand-born Kiwis against immigrants. This is a recipe for deep resentment, because this plays along a pre-existing fracture line in society. If the New Zealand-born would come to feel that it was only because of recent immigrants that they were not allowed to freely use cannabis, they could become very angry.

Neither is the damage done to social cohesion just a matter between different groups. Cannabis prohibition also destroys solidarity within groups.

There are occasions where people don’t get together because the illegal nature of cannabis means that some people don’t want to be associated with others. Many a party guest has been uninvited because the hosts were not sure that the guest would be comfortable with the cannabis being smoked there, or because the hosts didn’t want the guest bringing cannabis to their house.

In such ways, all manner of natural social bonds have been broken because one or the other party was a cannabis user. This isn’t just seen at parties but in romantic relationships and in the workplace too. If cannabis is illegal, then cannabis users will naturally not trust non-cannabis users and non-cannabis users will naturally not trust cannabis users. These divisions are so needless.

As mentioned in another chapter, cannabis prohibition has had a severe impact on people’s respect for the Police. But cannabis prohibition impacts other industries as well. Some people no longer trust their doctors because of their inability to speak honestly about the medicinal value of cannabis. Some people no longer trust journalists because of their past fearmongering and sensationalising over the issue. This loss of trust impacts social cohesion.

Worst of all, prohibition has caused some people to dislike their country and society, when that need not have been the case. This is especially true of those who have faced the wrath of the justice system.

How can a person respect a society that wants to put them in a cage for using a medicinal plant? How can a person respect the hypocrisy that sees hundreds of people kill themselves with alcohol every year, while at the same time targeting others for something much less harmful? Cannabis prohibition is such a poor idea that it cannot be enforced without stoking massive anger and resentment.

All this anger and resentment has had an injurious effect on social cohesion. Prohibition has caused people to dislike and mistrust each other when they otherwise wouldn’t have done so. This has had the total effect of making society worse. The only way to fix it is to legalise cannabis.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.