Category: politics

Is It Now Time To Charge Peter Dunne With Manslaughter?

Withholding medicine from a sick person who needs it, leading to that person’s death, is manslaughter – should Peter Dunne face charges for withholding medicinal cannabis from sick Kiwis who needed it?

Peter Dunne announced today that he will be stepping down at next month’s election and will not contest his current Parliamentary seat of Ohariu. It’s apparent that the National ship is sinking and, like a rat, he’s getting off while the getting’s good. However, that doesn’t mean he should get away with the suffering he caused to innocent Kiwis while in office.

The New Zealand Crimes Act sets out the definition for culpable homicide, one form of which is the crime of manslaughter. One example of culpable homicide is “causing that person by threats or fear of violence, or by deception, to do an act which causes his or her death”.

The threat of using the criminal justice system to put a person in a cage for using medicinal cannabis definitely qualifies here. Peter Dunne has acted to uphold cannabis prohibition ever since his agreement to support the Fifth Labour Government in exchange for no progress on cannabis law reform.

This has had the effect of causing people to avoid using cannabis medicine for fear of arrest and imprisonment.

Lying about the medicinal qualities of cannabis also qualifies here. Telling the people of New Zealand that cannabis is not a medicine, when its medicinal use is saving lives in dozens of overseas jurisdictions, is a form of deception that has caused a number of deaths.

If New Zealand was a fair society, if justice existed here for every person and not just for the wealthy, Dunne would be charged with causing those deaths.

Studies have shown that in American states with legal medicinal cannabis, deaths from opioid overdoses have decreased by 25%. This is because many suffering people would rather use cannabis than the highly addictive opioid-based painkillers that frequently lead to death by overdose.

Because Dunne blocked medicinal cannabis law reform for so many years, the use of prescription opioids in New Zealand has soared. A mainstream media article from a couple of months ago, titled Serious pain coming as NZ’s prescription opioid use soars, details some statistics that point towards the looming health disaster that Peter Dunne has dumped in our laps.

There’s no doubt that if a New Zealander went into someone else’s house and took away their insulin, and then that person died, then the person who took that medicine away could be charged with manslaughter. So why can’t Peter Dunne be tried for the people who died because he kept medicinal cannabis out of their hands?

If the case of sick Kiwis dying from having an effective medicine withheld from them is not enough to press charges, the ongoing spate of deaths from people using recreational alternatives to natural cannabis might be. Peter Dunne’s action in delaying the legalisation of recreational cannabis, at the same time as opening the floodgates for a variety of mystery drugs cooked up in Chinese labs and labelled “legal highs”, has been linked with nine deaths last month alone.

The fact is that these people are only dying because their first choice of recreational drug – natural cannabis – has been denied to them, incentivising them to use alternatives. Therefore, it can be argued that Peter Dunne, insofar as he blocked cannabis law reform for so long, is responsible for these deaths.

His disastrous Psychoactive Substances Act, one of the most overreaching and totalitarian laws ever passed in New Zealand, has had the effect of making a huge range of safe cannabis alternatives illegal, delivering this massive industry directly into the hands of the black market and the criminal gangs that exploit it. Because of the total absence of quality controls in the black market, recreational drug consumers have absolutely no idea what they’re getting when they buy a cannabis alternative.

As the Minister chiefly responsible for this shambles, Peter Dunne ought to face manslaughter charges for the innocent Kiwis who have died through having cannabis denied to them.

Can You Hear The Echoes Of The 1920s On Our Streets?

The 1920s were a tumultuous time in the Western World. Rebuilding from the carnage of World War One, Westerners – especially Europeans – found themselves unable to decide on a peaceful way forward, and this absence of agreement expressed itself violently in the streets. This essay examines whether or not we’re looking at a repeat.

The German defeat in World War One saw a revolution that swept away the monarchy of Wilhelm II, replacing it with a fragile democracy known as the Weimar Republic. The well-founded fear of those who wanted peace in Central Europe was of a civil war between the socialist forces that had inspired the revolution and the reactionary conservatives representing those who held power and wealth under the Second Reich.

Communist agitation, inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, was eventually put down by an alliance between the ruling Social Democratic Party of Germany and right-wing paramilitaries known as the Freikorps, and peace finally reigned.

But it wasn’t to last.

The severe economic problems of the 1920s, coupled with a sense of humiliation at the restrictions imposed on Germany by the victorious Allies, alongside continued communist agitation and growing nationalist sentiment, meant that chaos would soon usurp the shaky peace.

The far left didn’t like the Weimar Republic because they considered it to be holding back a communist revolution, and the far right didn’t like it because they preferred the authoritarianism that existed under the previous monarchy.

This state of affairs is very similar to what faces the West today.

Just like 1920s Weimar, the streets are again filling with far-left and far-right extremists who want to fight each other

Communist agitators have made a significant impact on Western society in recent years. They have successfully destroyed belief in tradition, resulting in plummeting birthrates, mass immigration that has changed the make-up of Western nations forever, and widespread and righteous anti-white racism.

Nationalist agitators have also made significant strides recently, most notably with the election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency. Many Trump supporters are shameless authoritarians, and much of the appeal of this authoritarianism lies in the belief that they are protecting the West from degeneracy.

The surge in both groups of extremists has led to increasing levels of street violence in America, most notably at the ‘Battle of Berkeley’ and then last weekend in Charlottesville. A sense of unfinished business lingers over both of these incidents, and after a fatal terrorist attack in Charlottesville the desire for revenge is a factor predicting further bloodshed.

What is the most foreboding is that Antifa is growing in strength because of rhetoric about the need to resist Nazism, and the far-right is growing in strength because of rhetoric about the need to resist Communism.

The echoes of the 1920s come from the fact that both sides are correct in their basic fears of the other side. Both sides are growing in strength because of sharply increasing dissatisfaction with the idea of liberal democracy, in a very similar way to how increasing dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic led to widespread street violence.

The left opposes liberal democracy because it wants to shut down free speech and free expression. The Communists believe that they need to control the narrative in order to bring about revolution, and this demands that even scientists like Richard Dawkins be denied the right to speak at a university.

The right opposes liberal democracy because it wants to shut down the free movement of people. The Nazis believe that the West is sinking into chaos, anarchy and degeneracy, and only by rallying around authoritarian figures can a sufficient degree of order be imposed upon society.

Both of these sides, therefore, have grounds to eschew dialogue and democracy in favour of raw assertions of power in the streets.

Also foreboding is the belief, shared by many commentators, that the economic hardships of the Weimar Era laid the foundations for massive German discontent with the idea of democracy, which paved the way for extremists like Adolf Hitler.

The West has not really recovered from the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Employment prospects are poor all across the West, with the dream of owing your own home now out of reach for most young Westerners, and working-class resentment at the amount of money spent on refugees risks growing into further discontent.

Perhaps all of this is building towards another climactic struggle.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto VI

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (c. pages 366-425), Breivik traces some of the reasons for the weakness of the modern West. Although the reasons for the West’s decline are many, some weigh more heavily than others.

Curiously, from the perspective of 2017, the document points out that in the absence of a meaningful life people will gravitate towards mindless destruction. In this sense, the document appears to be somewhat prescient.

Breivik laments a lack of order and structure in the modern West. Society, he claims, has essentially broken down. Nobody wants to have children any more because they want to live carefree lives of perpetual adolescence. The plummeting birthrates have led to a demand from many quarters for mass immigration to replace the non-existent native children.

And so, conflict between the natives and immigrants becomes ever more likely, following the maxim “demography is destiny”.

Not that mass immigration is proposed merely for economic reasons. Breivik details a large conspiracy on the part of European elites to radically transform the make-up of their nations, especially in Britain under Tony Blair. Interestingly, Breivik is willing to criticise big business for their complicity in mass immigration – something that few on the right are willing to dare.

Perhaps unavoidably for a document of this length, the rhetoric swings from entirely reasonable libertarian critiques of Marxism to unreasonable demands, such as the total banning of the discipline of sociology. Sociology is inherently untrustworthy: “Their academic weapons are to deliberate spread their falsified and corrupted Marxist world view.”

Breivik makes an accurate criticism when he points out that the advocates of cultural Marxism are seldom the black, poor or disabled people that the Marxists claim to be agitating on behalf of. Instead, the vast majority of Marxists in the West are from privileged, wealthy families.

When Breivik writes that “Cultural Marxists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful” he agrees with some of the columnists of this newspaper, who have previously written about the overlap between modern leftist thought and slave morality, in particular the feeling of resentment that induces the weak to oppose anything strong.

This tendency is also equated with the feminine, with masochism and with suicidal ideation.

He also echoes this newspaper when he quotes a British politician as saying “When all the politicians agree, the rest of us should suspect a plot against the ordinary citizen.” Like this newspaper, the intent in raising such paranoid conjectures is to crystallise dissent against the system.

Breivik makes no effort to hide his dissatisfaction with the political process. Electoral politics is dismissed as an “empty ritual” directed by the collusion of the political and media classes. Important issues are not discussed by the media, who has failed to do its job as a Fourth Estate holding the government to account. Instead, they are decided upon “behind closed doors”.

In this section, Breivik manages to list who his enemies are. In short, his three major groups of enemies to the European people are:

1. The media and academia, who have an anti-Western bias
2. The political elites, who seek to remake the world in their image regardless of the cost, and
3. Muslims.

For Those Ignored By The Political Class, The Only Real Protest Is Not Voting

Several opinion pieces have appeared in the mainstream media in recent days exhorting Kiwis to vote in next month’s election. With choice phrases like “not voting won’t solve anything”, “the 2014 result was determined by the people who turned up” and “Voting builds our political power”, all mainstream propaganda organs are doing their best to get you to consent to the status quo.

Because that is all that voting is – you giving your consent for things to carry on pretty much exactly as they already are. The political class will interpret the fact that you voted as a sign that you are content with the overall system – and therefore as a sign that nothing need be changed.

And so, your vote has a zero percent chance of changing anything. You might as well dance naked in a thunderstorm praying for the lightning gods to strike down the enemies of the nation.

How the country will be run for the next three years has already been decided by the mutual agreement of the sort of person who politicians really do listen to – rich old people, who have got together long ago with those politicians and hashed out the precise details of how things are going to be, whether the masses like it or not.

If you’re not a wealthy Baby Boomer, the politicians couldn’t give a fuck what you think. But they do want your consent for what they’re going to do to you.

If they don’t have that then they run the risk of provoking the rise of some kind of revolutionary movement that might actually make a difference to how society is run. Such as: a movement that campaigned on an expensive universal basic income, or on an equally expensive capital gains tax, or on an immigration policy that reflected the will of all Kiwis instead of just multiple property owners and those looking for cheap labour.

And this is the reason why there is all the propaganda right now to get people to vote. Voting in a democratic system is the same as you giving your consent to how the country is governed – and to the people who own both sides of the political system, the consent of the population they’re exploiting is the only thing left that they don’t already have.

If you do vote, then politicians of both the left and right wings of the ruling party tend to naturally assume that you’re more or less happy with the direction of things.

Knowing in advance that the winner of the election is going to ignore your will in favour of those who have money, your only means of protest is to not vote at all. Past a certain level of disenfranchisement, the only action one can take to affect the system is to not vote. A refusal to vote is the only way your voice can really be heard.

If the turnout rate in next month’s General Election was less than 50%, the measured degree of public discontent would be too great to just shrug off, it would then become possible for some hard questions to be asked about the direction the country was going. The mainstream media would be forced to ask whether or not the political system was really a democracy or just an oligarchy masquerading as one.

The higher it is, the more likely it becomes that political discourse is replaced with photos of spaghetti on pizzas, videos of dropping in to London for a sister’s wedding, and witch-hunts against outsider candidates.

You can help force New Zealand politicians to take the will of New Zealanders seriously by withholding your vote this September 23rd.