VJM Publishing

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.

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!

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

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!

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!
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!

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!

An Open Letter To The Minister Of Justice Regarding Psychedelic Use For Spiritual Purposes

Dear Minister of Justice,

I am writing to seek clarification on New Zealand’s current stance regarding psychedelic substances, particularly in the context where these substances are considered spiritual sacraments.

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act states in Section 13 that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief”. Section 15 states that “Every person has the right to manifest that person’s religion or belief in worship, observance, practice, or teaching, either individually or in community with others, and either in public or in private”.

A fair reading of these sections suggests that New Zealanders have the right to use spiritual sacraments.

Indeed, this is already true with regards to the religious use of wine in the Christian Eucharist. New Zealand Anglicans use wine as a spiritual sacrament, the psychoactive ingredient being, of course, alcohol. But there are many other substances that serve as spiritual sacraments in the religious and spiritual traditions of the world.

The use of psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca and other entheogens has been deeply rooted in various spiritual and religious practices around the world for millennia. These practices often regard these substances not merely as drugs but as sacraments crucial for spiritual exploration, healing and connection with the divine or the deeper self.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most famous of the mystery schools that characterised pre-Christian European spirituality, running for 2,000 years and attracting anyone who was anyone in ancient Greece or Rome: Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius and the Emperor Julian were all known or believed to have participated.

Cicero wrote of them that “Though Athens brought forth numerous divine things, yet she never created anything nobler than those sublime Mysteries through which we became gentler and have advanced from a barbarous and rustic life to a more civilised one, so that we not only live more joyfully but also die with a better hope.”

Initiation into these mysteries involved the consumption of a drink known as kykeon. The mycologist R Gordon Wasson, the chemist Albert Hoffmann and the historian Carl Ruck have argued that the kykeon contained an entheogenic substance. Their book Road to Eleusis made a compelling argument that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played an integral role in the creation of Western Civilisation.

Robert Graves believed that linguistic evidence revealed the kykeon to include some kind of mushroom. Terence McKenna supported this assertion, pointing out that psilocybin-containing mushrooms had both the capacity to cause extreme psychospiritual change and the safety profile that would have allowed thousands to use them every year without getting a reputation for being dangerous.

The claimed benefits of the Eleusinian Mysteries included losing one’s fear of death, gaining a belief in the afterlife, learning to understand the will of the divine and improvement of moral rectitude. These benefits are very similar to those claimed by modern psychedelic users – Erowid.org lists hundreds of mystical experiences of people who have taken psilocybin.

It’s apparent from these arguments that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played a role in the moral and civil development of Western peoples during our greatest ages. But the potential of psychedelics to induce spiritual insight is not limited to the ancient age or to the West.

The Marsh Chapel Experiment conducted by Walter Pahnke in 1962 discovered that psilocybin is capable of inducing powerful spiritual experiences in modern people. A long-term follow-up questionnaire found “experimental subjects wrote that the experience helped them to recognise the arbitrariness of ego boundaries, increase their depth of faith, increase their appreciation of eternal life [etc.]”

One of the participants in the Marsh Chapel Experiment noted in the long-term follow-up, regarding death, “I’ve been there. Been there and come back. And it’s not terrifying, it doesn’t hurt.” Such an insight is profoundly spiritual. Many of the other participants made similar observations. One remembered their experience as “one of the high points of their spiritual life”.

This experiment demonstrated that the link between psilocybin and spirituality can be established within a modern, scientific paradigm. More recent research has supported this, with a 2024 paper in Current Psychology finding that “psychedelic use is linked with a variety of subjective indicators of spiritual growth, including stronger perceived connections with the divine, a greater sense of meaning, increased spiritual faith, increased engagement in religious and spiritual practices, an increase in feelings of unity and self-transcendence, positive changes in worldview, increased connectedness with others, and reduced fear of death”.

Albert Hofmann described how the teonanacatl of the Aztecs was a psilocybin-containing mushroom. This teonanacatl, or “flesh of the gods”, was used as a spiritual sacrament to commune with the divine. Indigenous North Americans have used psilocybin-containing mushrooms as entheogens for thousands of years. The Aztec use of entheogens, including both mushrooms and others, is extensive.

R Gordon Wasson believed that the soma referenced in the Rig Veda was the fly agaric amanita muscaria. Supporting his contention was the fact that Siberian shamans were still using this mushroom for spiritual purposes. More recently, Russian researchers have found evidence suggesting the active ingredient in soma was psilocybe cubensis. In either case, psychoactive mushrooms have a history of religious and spiritual use in India as well.

Although the record of historical psychedelic use is not as strong in Europe as it is in the Americas and Asia, there is still evidence of magic mushroom use in Spain from some 6,000 years ago.

In New Age spirituality, psychedelics are used extensively. In Nelson, where I am from, it’s common to use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments outside the purview of any institutional authority. “Mushroom Season” describes the time of the year beginning in early winter and ending around midwinter when psilocybin-containing mushrooms are foraged, dried and consumed as spiritual sacraments.

In light of all this, significant questions arise concerning the human rights implications of New Zealand’s drug laws as they pertain to psychedelic substances. Once it is understood that psychedelics are spiritual sacraments, there’s a compelling argument to be made that restrictions on their use infringe upon the freedom of religion and belief, a fundamental human right protected under various international treaties to which New Zealand is a signatory.

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to freedom of religion” and “to manifest his belief in practice”. Given the widespread use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments throughout time and space, this right must surely encompass the right to use psychedelics to manifest spiritual belief in practice.

An appropriate reading of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act suggests that the right to use psychedelics for spiritual purposes is guaranteed. In reality, however, a hierophant who wanted to conduct a sacramental ritual akin to the Eleusinian Mysteries could potentially face life imprisonment for the supply of Class A drugs.

This letter seeks to understand how current New Zealand drug laws reconcile with the rights of individuals to practice their spirituality freely, especially when such practices involve substances that are currently classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act.

The laws against the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes reflect, to a major extent, the historical Christian dogma against pharmakeia. This is the same dogma that led the Christian fanatics under Alaric to destroy the Eleusinian Mysteries in 396 by killing its priests, that led the inquisitors of medieval Europe to burn witches at the stake for using spiritual sacraments, and which inspired the Catholic invaders of the Americas to eliminate the sacramental use of teonanacatl by murdering the shamans who specialised in it.

It has also been suggested that much of the modern opposition to the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments comes from organised religious groups who want to position themselves as ticket-clipping intermediaries between the people and divinity. However, as can be seen from reading the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, Kiwis have the right to commune with divinity without the need of an intermediary. This necessarily means the right to use spiritual sacraments.

As other laws based on Christian prejudices – such as those regarding marital rape, homosexuality, prostitution and abortion – have been discarded in favour of greater freedom, the laws prohibiting the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes ought to be discarded. Indeed, many countries and territories have reformed their psychedelic drug laws, based on arguments such as the ones made in this letter, plus others.

In closing, I respectfully request a detailed clarification or review of how New Zealand’s drug policies align with the principles of religious and spiritual freedom and human rights. Understanding the government’s perspective on this matter would not only inform those within New Zealand who use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments but would also contribute to broader discussions on drug policy reform that respects cultural and spiritual diversity.

Thank you for considering this important issue. I look forward to your insights and hope for a dialogue that can potentially lead to policies that honour both the law and the deeply held spiritual convictions of many New Zealanders.

Yours sincerely,

Vince McLeod

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!