Category: government

Is There Room For A Nationalist Green Party In New Zealand?

The Green Party of New Zealand, like the other Green parties of the West, is so closely associated with globalism that the two seem inseparable. This, however, doesn’t mean that environmentalist movements are necessarily globalist. In fact, as Dan McGlashan will examine in this article, a nationalist environmentalist movement might get even more support than a globalist one.

The Green parties of the West have grown to occupy a permanent place on the far left of the political spectrum. In New Zealand, the Green Party supports the current Government and is polling at around 5 to 6%. Incredibly however, the Greens in Germany – where the environmentalist movement began in earnest – are now the highest polling party. They could well climb from their current 26%.

There is one striking paradox about the Greens: despite being, on average, considerably wealthier than the average Kiwi, they claim to represent the poor and disadvantaged. The correlation between median personal income and voting for the Green Party in 2017 was 0.36, not that much less than for the National Party (0.49). Despite this, most of their rhetoric is aimed at helping the disadvantaged.

The poor who they claim to represent are not well served by the globalism that the Greens otherwise promote. Importing a great supply of cheap labour can only lead to the deterioration of working-class incomes, but the Greens flat-out deny this fact. The working-class individuals that the Greens claim to be representing, however, are well aware of the economic logic, which is why they are much more likely to vote New Zealand First.

The problem with all of the current Green movements in the West at the moment is that they are globalists. Many of them explicitly so. The logic is that the world’s environment is global, and environmental effects like pollution often cross borders. Because environmental problems are global, global solutions must be required. This means giving more power to, for example, the United Nations and its ancillary bodies.

The problem arises when the Green Party starts to forget whether globalism is a means to the end or the end itself. This can be seen when the New Zealand Greens introduce polices such as raising the refugee quota to 5,000. Such a policy can only bring great suffering to the New Zealand people, as evidenced by the results of similar policies in Europe.

It doesn’t make any sense, from an environmental perspective, to transport people from poor countries to rich ones, especially when those people are to live in the rich countries forever. That would entail that those people start consuming like people in rich countries do – great for the banks, terrible for the environment.

A more logical environmental perspective would reduce the refugee quota to zero. The $130 million this would save could then be used to grant tax-free status to the first $14,000 of every New Zealander’s income. Such a proposal would gain much more support from the working-class that the Greens claim to represent. However, a globalist Green party would never propose this.

If environmentalism is to continue to grow in support (as the current polling results from Germany suggest may happen), then the internal tensions within the Green movement might cause it to split. This would likely entail a split between the urban elites who form the core of the party loyalists (and who are much more likely to be globalists) and the working-class rural dweller who actually lives on the land (who are much more likely to be nationalists).

All of this suggests that there might be room in the electoral landscape for a nationalist environmentalist movement. Such a movement would be similar to that of the pre-existing Greens, but instead of being run by urbanites who place the emphasis on global solutions, it would be run by ruralites who would put the emphasis on local solutions.

This might involve focusing on local beautification programs, or revitalisation of threatened local ecologies. It might even involve collective labour efforts such as mass planting of trees. What it would mean more of is consultation with Kiwis and genuine grassroots movements, and what it would mean less of would be United Nations directives.

Any nationalist environmentalist movement would have to cope with being called Nazis by the globalist-controlled mainstream media. This would especially be true if they made the argument that opening the borders to the undeveloped world was a bad idea from an environmental perspective. It’s all but inevitable that the media would describe such concerns as a ruse to disguise racist sentiments.

However, there are ways around this.

Any nationalist environmentalist movement that would arise in New Zealand would have a high proportion of Maori support. The suggestion given above, to reduce the refugee quota to zero and make the first $14,000 of every Kiwi’s income tax-free, would benefit them heavily, on account of that a high proportion of Maoris are working-class. Their support would counter such accusations.

This hints at another point of divergence: a nationalist environmentalist movement might incorporate a return to native spirituality, celebrating Matariki and the solstices and equinoxes. This suggests an embrace of cannabis, because cannabis is a favourite not only of Kiwis but of the sort of Kiwi who cares about the environment.

They may have to go even further, and allow for the full-scale legalisation of psychedelics such as psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine. This would allow for a unique point of difference with the globalist environmentalist movement, because the United Nations is not at all interested in legalising psychedelics. It would also appeal to the rural voter who makes up a large part of such a movement’s likely target audience.

Environmentalist concerns will likely grow as the old unionism represented by the Labour Party continues to decline. If they become large enough in New Zealand, this will open up space for a nationalist environmentalist movement that appeals to those ignored by the globalism of the existing Green parties. Such a movement could become a major player in an age of mass refugee movements.

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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).

Old Colonialism and New Colonialism

‘Colonialism’ is one of the dirtiest of dirty words nowadays, bringing to mind images of Belgian Congolese getting their hands chopped off for failing to meet the day’s rubber quota. The problem with this simple sentiment, as this essay will explore, is that colonialism is still going strong. We used to plunder the world for its natural capital – now we plunder the world for its human capital.

Back in the Age of Discovery, there were great riches to be had from despoiling the world of its reserves of gold and silver. There was the minor problem of the people who lived on top of these gold and silver reserves, but in most cases they could either be driven off the land or enslaved to help mine it.

This didn’t stop once we ran out of gold and silver – we simply switched to Africa and plundered them of diamonds, slaves, rubber, more gold, cocoa, coffee etc. By the end of World War II, and in the aftermath of this great slaughter, we had come to realise that this course of behaviour was wrong, and we were very sorry – or at least pretended to be.

Since about 1960, the economic equation of production had permanently changed. No longer were the fattest profits in raping developing countries of their natural resources. We had moved from manufacturing economies to service economies, and that meant the fattest profits were now in raping developing countries of their human resources. This we do through the immigration system, and it’s the new colonialism.

It costs a lot of money, time and effort to raise a small child to the point where they can make a meaningful economic contribution to society. From kindergarten to the end of a Bachelor’s degree is usually 16 years of education, and for a professional degree even more than this. Every year requires, at a minimum, teachers and school infrastructure. The total cost is inevitably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

With the new form of colonialism, we don’t send troops to developing countries and force the locals to build mines and collect rubber. As mentioned above, human capital is now more valuable than natural capital. Instead, we just let the developing countries stagnate – or cause them to – making it much harder for them to keep hold of the talented individuals who naturally arise among the population. Then the capital comes to us.

Proof that the new colonialism is no less nasty than the old comes from observing the actions that the West takes to cause those developing countries to stagnate. It’s common for Western countries to offer massive “loans” to developing countries, supposedly out of goodwill. Inevitably, the loan money gets stolen by local elites, and the country remains indebted with no way to pay the loans back. The Western countries who offered the loans then try to bargain this debt for influence.

In other words, developing countries are now enslaved by debts instead of by force of arms. Chains of iron have simply been replaced with chains of silver. One of the men who was employed to do this, a John Perkins, described his occupation as “Economic Hit Man“. This enslavement naturally leads to those with the greatest human capital trying to escape so as to get the best return.

When they do escape (usually to the West), they bring their human capital with them, depriving their home nations of the benefits of it. They also grant the West all the benefits of that human capital, despite that the West paid nothing to produce it.

Of course, it is spun as if we are generously granting rights to these unusually productive people. The propaganda tells a story of draconian immigration restrictions holding these people back from being able to make a real contribution to the world, and that we’re doing a great and moral thing by allowing them to emigrate and to work in the West.

The reality is that the nations of the West are impoverishing the developing world by sucking out its human capital. This means that the developing world now lacks the human capital that it needs to develop its own means of production and become wealthy themselves. This locks them in a vicious cycle of poverty.

Ironically, the West usually ends up getting a two-for-one deal from all this. Because we take in the most productive people from these countries, they are often left without the engineers, physicists and chemists that they need to develop their own natural resources. As a consequence, those resources often sit undeveloped until a Western company comes in to exploit them.

Desmond Morris makes an extremely insightful point in The Human Zoo. He writes that the moral values of any time and in any place are always dictated by the ruling classes to serve their own interests. In every time and place, the people tend to believe that their moral values are an expression of themselves, or the result of some process of moral development, but this is an illusion.

Many of today’s moral values have, likewise, been forced on us to suit the wishes of the ruling class, the new colonialists.

The reason why we are being encouraged to accept diversity is not because we realised that it’s the morally correct thing to do. It’s because accepting diversity makes divesting the developing world of its prime human capital a smoother process. There’s no need for blackbirding when you can induce the labour to voluntarily emigrate to the West instead.

Colonialism never went away – it simply changed form. In the same way that slavery still lives on in the private prison system and in people being paid less than they can live on for a full day’s work, so too does colonialism live on, in the rape of the human resources of the developing world. Much like colonialism was in the 19th century, this new colonialism is spun to us as being the morally correct thing to do. The lie is exposed by the fact that the new colonialists are the same people as the old ones.

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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 Case For Cannabis: Effectiveness of The Prison System

One of the major problems with cannabis prohibition is that it makes other parts of society function sub-optimally. In the same way that prohibition makes policing more difficult, and makes a mockery of the justice system, it also makes a mockery of the prison system. This article looks at the argument for cannabis law reform from the point of view of the prison system.

The prison system, in practice, serves a wide variety of objectives. Ideally speaking, however, it needs to fulfill one primary and one secondary objective. The primary objective is to keep society safe from the predations of criminals. The secondary objective is to rehabilitate those criminals so that they don’t come back.

Cannabis prohibition is in direct conflict with this primary objective. The idea of keeping society safe from someone who grew a medicinal flower doesn’t make any sense, because growing medicinal flowers helps people and doesn’t harm them. In fact, doing so makes society more dangerous, for a number of reasons.

The most obvious harm is caused by taking a person who probably wasn’t malicious (a cannabis user), and putting them in close contact with genuinely dangerous people, who are apt to teach that cannabis user how to become dangerous themselves. Prisons serve as a university of crime, because crime is the one thing that anyone in a prison can count on having in common with other people in a prison.

There’s no overall benefit to putting someone who has grown a cannabis plant in prison with people who are going to teach him how to manufacture methamphetamine, or to embezzle, or to commit other serious crimes. The end result will only be an actual criminal. From the perspective of harm reduction, it’s counter-productive to take a person who wasn’t harming anyone and turn them into a person who does harm people. It’s madness.

Even worse is the harm done to the families of the people incarcerated for cannabis offences. The stress on the partner or parent of someone imprisoned is great, and lasts for at least the time of the sentence. Perhaps the worst of all is the damage done to the children, who, after seeing one of their family members locked up for nothing, inevitably come to see the state as their enemy.

One other consideration is that a person sentenced to prison for a cannabis offence may become embittered. Getting locked in a cage like an animal for an action that caused no harm is not the sort of thing can easily be forgiven. It’s the sort of thing that a person tends to resent for the rest of their lives, making them a nastier person. Everyone loses from this.

In the context of cannabis prohibition, the concept of rehabilitation – the second major objective of the prison system – doesn’t make any sense either.

The idea of rehabilitation involves convincing a criminal that their previous actions caused unwarranted suffering to innocent people, should not have been done, and should not be repeated. If a criminal can learn this, then they can be released into the community and be expected to not commit that crime again. As a result, the community becomes safer.

In the case of a cannabis offence, however, what’s to rehabilitate? How can one go about “rehabilitating” a person who hasn’t caused any harm to anyone? The fact is that it’s all but impossible to convince a normal person that they are a criminal on account of cannabis. It’s impossible to appeal to the harm caused, unlike a genuine crime, because there isn’t any.

Many people who are in prison for cannabis offences grew cannabis to meet other people’s medicinal needs. These people are the opposite of criminals – they are heroes. Although they might not be seen as such by the “Justice” System, they are certainly heroes in the eyes of the people with medical conditions who couldn’t otherwise access an effective medicine.

Every honest person knows that the cannabis laws are an example of illegitimate, unjust dictates, and therefore there’s no “rehabilitating” a person who defies them. The laws make our prison system into a sham by putting non-harmful people there. This causes harm to everyone related to the cannabis user, as well as harm to the average person’s faith in authority.

Legalising cannabis would return our prison system to its primary objective of keeping people free from harm. This would mean that our prisons were only populated by those willing to harm others, and not medicinal flower growers. This would not only make the prison system more effective, but also less cruel.

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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 Doesn’t Work

Although this book is full of arguments for cannabis law reform, all of them are technically forms of one great metaargument. All of the arguments for cannabis law reform, as the reader will discover, explore different facets of the failure of cannabis prohibition. This essay examines the fundamental argument at the core of the case for cannabis law reform – that prohibition doesn’t work.

Although there are a plethora of different kinds of cannabis law reform, all of them are based on the recognition that cannabis prohibition has a number of costs that could be saved. Although it’s denied by many, prohibition does have costs – the cost of law enforcement, the cost of prisons, the cost of faith in the Government, the Police and the medical establishment, among others.

Therefore, in order for this cost to be justified, cannabis prohibition has to do something good. There have to be profits somewhere to make up for all the costs. If there aren’t, then cannabis prohibition is a failed experiment and must be ended.

So let us ask: what is the objective of cannabis prohibition?

If the objective was to prevent people from using cannabis, that has failed. In 2008, 14.6 percent of the New Zealand population had used cannabis within the past 12 months, which is comparable to the prevalence rate of tobacco use. A decade later, cannabis is even more popular than before, and tobacco even less.

No intelligent person seriously believes that the law can override the people’s will to use cannabis. Exactly like alcohol prohibition, which failed to stop people from using alcohol, cannabis prohibition won’t stop people from using cannabis. Not only do people have a will to use it, but they feel that they have the right to do so. They’re going to keep using it forever.

If the objective was to protect people’s mental health, that too has failed. Not only is there no correlation between rates of cannabis use and prevalence of mental illness on the national level, but there is ample scientific evidence that cannabis does not cause psychosis or schizophrenia. The cannabis-psychosis link is best explained by the fact that cannabis is medicinal for many mentally ill people, and so they seek it out.

Instead of protecting people’s mental health, cannabis prohibition leads to the further social isolation of cannabis users by making them unwilling to speak candidly to mental health professionals, or to their friends or workmates. If cannabis is illegal, then confessing to using it is tantamount to confessing to criminal activity, so many mentally ill people who need help would rather just sit in silence.

If the objective was to protect children from psychoactive drugs while their brains are still developing, that too has failed. Because cannabis is on the black market, and therefore sold by criminals, there is nothing in the way of age checks between young people and the cannabis supply. Gang members will happily sell bags of cannabis to 12-year olds if they have the cash.

People often make the “think of the children!” argument when it comes to cannabis law reform, but the simple fact is that prohibition makes it easier for minors to get hold of cannabis. Proof for this is as simple as asking a minor if it’s easier to get hold of alcohol or cannabis. They’ll tell you that it’s harder to get hold of booze because those selling it are serious about keeping their liquor license.

If the objective was to instill respect for authority, that’s completely backfired. Cannabis prohibition is so stupid an idea that the people at large have lost respect for those pushing at and those enforcing it. Although the idea that one’s politicians are stupid and evil is far from new, these sentiments become problematic when they’re applied to other segments of society. Prohibition, however, makes this all but inevitable.

Many New Zealanders have now come to feel that the Police are their enemy, because Police officers have shown themselves willing to confiscate people’s medicine and to imprison them for using it. Far from being the trusted community servants that they are seen as in places like Holland, they’re seen as enemy soldiers waging an immoral war against an innocent people. To a great extent, this is the fault of cannabis prohibition.

All of these arguments (among others) are discussed at length in the various chapters of this book, but they all support the central thesis – that cannabis prohibition doesn’t work. It doesn’t achieve its stated aim of reducing the sum total of human suffering, and if it doesn’t achieve its stated aims, then it isn’t justified to continue with it any longer.

The men who pushed cannabis prohibition on a naive and unsuspecting public almost a century ago are now dead. Whether they knew they were speaking falsehoods or whether they were genuinely misled is no longer material. The right thing for us to do is to assess reality accurately, so that we can move forward in the correct direction.

If we look around the world honestly, it’s obvious that prohibition has failed. Not only is cannabis culture thriving, even in the most unlikely places, but support for cannabis law reform is rising almost universally, across all nations and demographics. The most striking sign is the ever-increasing number of states, territories or countries that have recently liberalised their cannabis laws.

The cynic might say that this is an example of the bandwagon fallacy, but that is not an accurate criticism. The reason why so many countries are changing their cannabis laws is because the evidence against cannabis prohibition has now mounted so high that it can no longer be ignored. There are now many countries liberalising their cannabis laws for the simple reason that the evidence suggests that it’s a better approach.

Cannabis prohibition simply doesn’t work. There is nowhere in the world that has prohibited cannabis and observed any result other than more poverty, distrust, misery and hatred. It’s fundamentally for this reason that the cannabis laws ought to be reformed.

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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.