revolution – Page 21

The Case For South Island Independence

There has been some talk recently about a South Island independence movement, and the initial reaction of most has been to assume it is a joke. If one thinks about it rationally, however, it actually makes more sense for the South Island to become independent than for it to remain part of New Zealand. This essay will argue that North Islanders and South Islanders are a closely related, but fundamentally different people, and therefore that South Islanders ought to have the right to govern themselves separately.

There are five major reasons for this.

The first is legal. The mainstream propaganda tells us all that the Treaty of Waitangi was the founding document of the nation, and that this gave the British the right to settle here in exchange for Maoris being given the protection accorded to British citizens. Like most mainstream propaganda, this is a heavily North Island-centric viewpoint which ignores the reality of the situation for South Islanders.

The truth is that British sovereignty over the South Island was never asserted on the basis of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like Stewart Island, the South Island had so few people living on it that the British asserted sovereignty over it by right of discovery. This occurred on the 21st of May 1840, and is an undisputed matter of historical record.

If the Treaty of Waitangi was not why British sovereignty was asserted over the South Island, then it does not apply. Therefore, those of us who live on the South Island are not bound by it, and neither are we bound to the grievance industry (based on the American model) that has sprung up around it. The Treaty of Waitangi applies to the North Island only – legal recognition of this would require that the South Island becomes independent from New Zealand.

The second reason is historical, and relates to the first. The North Island and the South Island have developed in very separate ways since the first European settlement of these islands. The South Island was not really “discovered”, but, thanks to the efforts of Ngati Toa war chief Te Rauparaha, it was close to empty when settlement began. This meant that immigration from Britain was able to proceed without much of the cheating and swindling that characterised land purchase arrangement up North.

As a consequence, relations between Maoris and white people are mostly respectful on the South Island. There is none of the pointless shit-stirring and separatist hysteria that has poisoned race relations up North. On the South Island, white people and Maoris tend to see themselves and each other as equal participants in a collective battle against the elements and against the ennui inherent to life. North Islanders have a different, darker and more antagonistic history.

Furthermore, South Island independence will give us the chance to avoid the recent monumental historical mistakes of Europe and Canada (it is already too late for the North). We don’t want to become Brazilianised like the North Island, which is now little more than a patchwork of racial enclaves and ghettoes, utterly divided and conquered and incapable of self-determination. We want to keep our own historical character, and independence is the best vehicle to achieve this.

The third reason is cultural, and relates to both the first and the second reasons. The culture of the South Island is much more like large parts of Australia than it is like the North Island. After all, the North Island has by far the densest population of any state South-East of Indonesia with the exception of the ACT, whereas the South Island, like all Australian states (again with the exception of the ACT), is sparsely-populated.

South Islanders aren’t city people. The thought of being crammed into tight suburbs like sardines being presented for consumption is alien to us. Even people who live in Christchurch get out of the city and into Nature most weekends. South Islanders look at the North and see “a greasy take away after the soul is gone”; North Islanders look at the South and see a terrifying, chaotic wilderness. Mentally, we are fundamentally different.

More difficult is the fact that neither Maoris or white people have the same culture in the North and the South. Te Rauparaha is a war hero on the North Island; on the South he is a genocidal maniac akin to Hitler, responsible for the extermination of many peaceful tribes around Nelson and Marlborough. North Island Maoris have a grievance culture where the white man is to blame for everything, whereas South Island Maoris just get on with life (and consequently become considerably wealthier, healthier and better educated than their North Island kin).

White culture is also significantly different. The colonists of the South Island are unrepentant; we don’t have ethnomasochists. Maoris are our equals and anyone who tries to split us apart with rhetoric about unsettled grievances can go fuck themselves. There are very few virtue signallers down here. North Islanders will spend all day crowing on FaceBook about how open-minded they are, and then go to parties where only white people are in attendance – we prefer real people.

The fourth reason is practical. The geography of New Zealand is such that it encompasses a wide range of different latitudes – from 34 in the North to 47 in the South. New Zealand is actually a fairly decent-sized country, roughly the same size as Britain, Japan and Germany, all of which have administrative subunits. The South Island is very poorly served by laws made in Wellington to suit Auckland.

For example, houses on the South Island ought to be built with a fair amount of insulation in order to be safe, but North Islanders write the New Zealand building code, and they did so mostly to suit Aucklanders. Moreover, laws that need to encompass a wide variety of people are sometimes necessary in the North and not on the South. People in the South Island have things in common with each other, such as a strong commitment to genuine environmental guardianship, and this cultural homogeneity must allow for a different degree of freedom.

The alcohol laws are another good example. The South Island has a strong and deeply entrenched cannabis culture. In Nelson, the West Coast and large parts of Dunedin and Christchurch, cannabis is more popular than alcohol. This newspaper has called for cannabis cafes on Bridge Street before, and will continue to do so. Many of us down South have moved on from pisshead culture – but the Wellington-based Government, beholden to major alcohol manufacturers based in Auckland, force cannabis prohibition on us anyway.

The fifth reason is purely selfish. The North Island, by itself, looks like a province of Brazil. The racial ghettoisation and segregation is so advanced that cities like Auckland and Wellington are starting to suffer from pronounced white flight. In the North Island, no-one knows their own neighbours, and there is no sense of community or solidarity. The North Island has no soul; it’s just 3.8 million people trying to make quick money by selling ever more expensive houses to each other.

The South Island has an excellent opportunity to jettison the greed-fuelled, no tomorrow thinking of North Islanders before it drags us down with it. Let’s keep our culture, let’s keep our soul. We don’t have to open the immigration floodgates just to prop up house prices and consumption; we can admit that neoliberalism has not delivered. Let the North Islanders have this insane, rape-the-planet ideology and suffer the consequences of it.

Not only would the South Island free ourselves from what is by any honest measure a failed society, but we could profit immensely from the fees that we would charge on electricity and agricultural produce, which the North Island is far from self-sufficient in. We would naturally keep the immigration channels open to North Islanders, especially Maoris and highly-educated people, but the insanity of letting in hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Africans – currently fashionable among North Islanders – would be avoided.

The details would remain to be worked out. Certainly this proposal will meet with some alarm in certain centres up North, especially those whose waste and inefficiency is subsidised by hard, honest work by Southern people. Nevertheless, the conclusion is inescapable: for both selfish and moral reasons, the South Island ought to break away from the North and become its own country.

SOUTH ISLAND PRAYER (for BT)

God
Don’t let me die in Auckland
Rotting in the heat before your
eyes are closed:a greasy take
away after the soul is gone.
Jessus,no

Let me go with the old southerly
buster:river stones in the grey
flecked sky and that white wind to keep your chin up.
Christ, yes.

– Owen Marshall

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).

Why Minds is Vastly Superior to Facebook

FaceBook, otherwise known as FaecesBook, is like the Titanic about half an hour after hitting the iceberg. They are no longer gaining new users, and many of their current users are discovering other social media networks, such as Minds. This article shows why Minds is a vastly superior social media network, for decent people, than FaceBook is.

The reason why FaceBook used to be fun is because it used to offer an escape from all the shit in the world. It was a space where people could speak freely and avoid censure for off-colour jokes and pisstakes. This was the reason for its initial uptake – it provided a release from the stuffy, formal nature of schooling and employment, like a virtual clubhouse.

This was, of course, some years ago now, and FaceBook has since deteriorated into a Big Brother-style cyberdystopia. From being a bastion of free speech and free interaction, it’s now a place where you can’t even say ‘faggot’ without getting banned – not even if you are using the term ironically in defence of homosexuals. The demands of advertisers have induced Mark Zuckerberg into making FaceBook like television. Hitler jokes, race jokes, nation jokes, religion jokes, sexual orientation jokes: all banned.

Minds is different, and appears to intend to stay that way. Free speech is the reason for many people joining the network: you can say what you like, without fear of getting banned. The easy-going, fun and joking culture that FaceBook once had still exists there. There is no feeling that the Thought Police are monitoring and censoring your speech to ensure compliance with a corporatist globalist agenda.

Another reason why Minds is a superior social network is the relative absence of the human lowest common denominator. FaceBook is the McDonald’s of social media. This means that, much like television, the information on FaceBook is aimed at people with IQs of about 90-100. This maximises the possible audience.

One drawback with this is that content tailored for people at such a level of intelligence tends to be simplistic. People with IQs of 90 cannot understand complex sentences, so the material shared is often little more than a list of bullet points, with no deeper analysis possible. This means that a truly comprehensive and accurate understanding cannot be gained.

The major drawback, though, is that this content also tends to be outright false. Advertisers know that people with IQs of less than 100 are not educated and therefore are not very good at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Therefore, it’s possible to target them with sensationalised false news and to thereby sway their beliefs to whatever the advertiser wishes. If not enough people believe the fake news, it’s a simple matter of buying more advertising.

The major and most distinctive factor, however, is that Minds is prepared to reward its users for posting quality content.

Like any broadcaster, FaceBook sells advertising. As a consequence, like any broadcaster, they need engaging content that they can broadcast between the ads. On FaceBook, this content is mostly provided by the users themselves in the form of posts and status updates. FaceBook therefore makes a product out of its users – and this is before they start selling your personal data to advertisers.

Minds works on a different principle. There, posts that get likes, comments and shares are rewarded with a share of the daily advertising proceeds. In other words, Minds shares with its users some of the value of their content, unlike FaceBook, which keeps it all for itself.

Ultimately it has to be conceded that Minds is a vastly superior social network from a user perspective (unless said user is a pleb). FaceBook might have its advantages for corporate advertisers or political entities looking to influence a large group of people, but Minds is a better choice for intelligent people looking to broaden their horizons.

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.

Why Neoliberals Love Mass Immigration

Mass immigration is often supported by the left, but it happens to also achieve a number of major right-wing goals

Neoliberalism is a right-wing movement in the sense that the ultimate aim of it is to take power away from the poor and give it to the rich. However, it is not a conservative movement, because neoliberals don’t care at all about the disruption that their policies have on people’s lives. So some of their positions are hard to understand at first. This essay seeks to explain why neoliberals love mass immigration so much.

Classical conservatism recognises that the wealthy already have the power, and so the wealthy try to keep things the same to preserve their good position. Change is therefore considered bad. Where this differs from neoliberalism is that the neoliberal tries to entrench the already strong position of the wealthy by further weakening the position of the poor. Accordingly, changes to the social structure are permissible if they make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The basics of labour solidarity work like this. The rate of pay is a function of the supply and demand of labour. As long as labour is not available below a certain level of pay, then the rate of pay must rise above this to meet a higher equilibrium. So if all the workers in a certain area or industry get together and agree to not work for less than, say, $15/hour, this constricts the supply of cheap labour, which presses the price of labour upward.

To counter this, employers like to import cheap labour from outside of the area. The most infamous example of this is the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the importation of labour doesn’t have to be involuntary. To the contrary – there is a virtually infinite supply of cheap labour in the world that can willingly be brought in to work for less, because there are always impoverished shitholes with high birth rates that people want to escape from in exchange for the McDonalds lifestyle.

Seen in union-busting terms, immigrants who are brought into the country by capitalist interests to work for less money than the locals are effectively scab labour. After all, there’s no real difference between scab labour that breaks a picket line and someone willing to immigrate to another country to do work at a wage lower than the locals would accept: both push wages down.

Not only does this outside labour have the effect of lowering wages through the scab effect, but it also makes future labour organisation more difficult. It’s much harder to conduct the conversations necessary to start a union when the workplace has no common language, and no-one is going to start a union anyway if their work visa is dependent on pleasing their employer.

It can be seen, then, that liberalising immigration through globalising the workforce has the immediate effect of not only driving wages down by increasing the supply of labour, but it also makes it harder to agitate for a higher wage, a double effect.

In other words, mass immigration is simply another example of the same union-busting behaviour that the ruling class has always used. The only difference is that it destroys the bonds of solidarity on the national level, instead of only destroying them in a certain area or industry. With a menagerie of different languages and cultures in the same area, the solidarity necessary to resist the divide and conquer attempts of the ruling class cannot be achieved. If that area is the whole nation so much the better.

Regular conservatives are a bit leery about destroying the working class in quite so brazen and irreparable a manner. The fear seems to be that they might rise up in anger and riot. Neoliberals have to be understood as significantly different to regular conservatives in this manner. They’re not at all shy about rubbing the faces of the Western working class in dogshit, knowing that their complete media domination makes the threat of retaliation essentially nil.

The real beauty of the mass immigration issue, from the neoliberal perspective, is that they can destroy the Western working class in this manner with the kindest of rhetoric. Mass immigration is presented by the mainstream media – almost completely owned by banks – as a compassionate solution to foreign poverty, only opposed by racists, bigots and rednecks.

This means that the already disadvantaged classes tear themselves in half as the globalists feel solidarity with the immigrants and refugees and the nationalists with the indigenous people. The neoliberals laugh all the way to the bank.