Subversion- and the strange story of the Maori Princess.

Then and now?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/subversion-within-new-zealand

Why the strange propensity of our governments to pay annual homage to Ratana, and what of Princess Te Puea’s reported attempted bargain with the Japanese in World War  II?  To find out more, check out the link above.

We are all now pretty well aware that the majority of our left-wing mainstream media journalists are pushing their own barrows. Having sold out their integrity by agreeing to the agenda behind the Public Interest Journalist Fund,  they have the new coalition  government in their sights, and are more than sympathetic to the tiny core group of radicalized Maori activists apparently obsessed by one part only of their genetic inheritance.

Although this certainly isn’t the case with all reporters, too many  have long ditched the journalists’ code of honour – i.e facts are sacred – to indulge in warping these, quite openly mischief-making. A striking example is with regard to misrepresenting ACT leader David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill – (with its intent to give New Zealanders the chance to at last examine what the supposed “principles” of the Treaty of Waitangi actually are) – as an  attempt to do away with the treaty.

Seymour  proposed nothing of the sort, and given that National’s leader Christopher Luxon (recently obligingly putting in an appearance at the  Big Gay Out festival) is now increasingly seen as weak when standing up to activists’ pressure, and saying National will not support the bill past its first reading, it’s going to be an interesting time ahead.  However, the Prime Minister’s reason for saying this -that ACT’s bill is  divisive, is regarded is feeble. Every piece of legislation can be regarded as divisive when it is promoted by one faction, and opposed by another. His was a silly statement.

Moreover, many think with reason that the Treaty of Waitangi, its intent and provisions now reinvented and distorted, should indeed be consigned to the dustbin of history. Seymour is right in emphasizing that  people have had enough of race-based rights, which was never the intent of the treaty. On the contrary.

Luxon is seen as also being far too dominating in dealing with his own party members, seemingly with a propensity to see himself as ruling over a corporation (as when he was former CEO of Air New Zealand) instead of simply primus inter pares – temporarily leader of a political party composed of individuals of varying degrees of intelligence –  some far more aware, for example, of the whole CO2 climate emergency scam so much costing us all, more than even in economic terms.

What our present Prime Minister also doesn’t seem to realize is that he is not the ruler of this county. The final say on this issue should be up to New Zealanders, and if they obviously wish ACT’s bill to be taken further, then so it should.

Most importantly, both the Prime Minister and the MSM seem to have no idea of the fact that by far the majority of part-Maori, getting  on with their  lives like all other New Zealanders, are utterly fed up with this splinter group of near fanatical extremists who are  by no means averse to twisting actual facts and making false accusations. Both ACT’s leader and Winston Peters, the Deputy Prime Minister and highly intelligent leader of New Zealand First, are themselves part-Maori. Luxon would be better to step back, talk less and listen to them more.

As for the Maori Princess…. Facts are facts. Te Puea, herself  part-European,  a woman  of extraordinary talents,  was  greatly respected during her lifetime  and undoubtedly  worked indefatigably on behalf of her own Tainui people. She was  opposed to  government conscription during the first  World War and dissuaded the Tainui men from volunteering during World War 11. She was known in her youth to be impulsive and exuberant, involved in number of relationships, including one with a European – broken off at an uncle’s  request. Were these a clue to an underlying volatility which may have made her actions as reported above more understandable –  if she thought the country at the time was going in the wrong directions?  But they remain a huge puzzle.

© Amy Brooke

Check out  www.100days.co.nz  and join us to help in the fight back against undemocratic governance – and to support this much-needed initiative to control all our political parties.

You can also order my book, “The 100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand …what has gone wrong, and how we can control our politicians.”

It is available through my  BOOKS page at www.amybrooke.co.nz –  or at Amazon’s Kindle.

We need your support – please help us get our  message further out –  see the DONATIONS page www.100days.co.nz  And thank you very much those who have already done so!

It is also very important to LIKE or SHARE  us at –

https://www.facebook.com/100daystodemocracy?ref=br_tf

Visit my homepage and best books website: www.amybrooke.co.nz
www.100days.co.nz

-- 

Why Sweden said NO to Cannabis AGAIN. Yes, again…we need to know.

Why Sweden said NO to Cannabis AGAIN. Yes, again! Jacinda’s government needs to take this on board…

https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/09/kiwi-life-2/

Amy Brooke, Convenor, The 100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand –www.100days.co.nz

 Join us to help win back this country.  Check out for yourself my book “The 100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand …what has gone wrong, and how we can control our politicians.” Available through my home page and children’s literature website BOOK Page at www.amybrooke.co.nz –  or at Amazon’s Kindle.

 

From two typically generous Australians – in contrast to our literary mafia

From two  typically generous Australians – the contrast to our literary mafia in this country?

https://ncc.org.au/newsweekly/music-cinema-books/problems-across-the-tasman-similar-to-our-own/

So-called ordinary New Zealanders are basically decent, generous people, but our literary bully-boys and- girls in this small country where well-heeled pressure groups rule the roost are really quite vicious. And as poor Charlotte Dawson found to her cost, the small world of self-regarding  media “celebrities” has also become so indoctrinated in left-wing propaganda that –  in spite of Stuff newspaper’s ludicrous claims –  fair, objective reporting and competent analysis of the issues facing us today is largely non-existent in our mainstream media.

With my enthusiastically received books for children long blacklisted by the rabid Left (as told to my distributor) because my then Dominion columns  expressed considerable concern about the takeover of education – and the exaggeration of so many treaty claims –  my timely title – The “100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand…what has gone wrong and how we can control our politicians”  was of course boycotted by reviewers.   ( I can think of one highly antagonistic and competitive left-wing writer of basically chick-lit, who has managed to publish a list of all the children’s writers in this country, well, not quite all…This,  in spite of “The Mora Stone” being  included in the Children’s Literature Foundation of New Zealand nominations for the top ten Notable Senior Fiction in its year – and in the initial list of nominees for the prestigious international Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature in the US Mythopoeic Awards for Children’s Literature. It was listed on a Yahoo site by another reviewer.as one of her top five all-time historical fantasies.

https://www.amybrooke.co.nz/books/intermediate-and-young-adults/the-mora-stone/

However, the Left apparently just don’t happen to keep up with things…especially when their ideology is challenged…

I can think of a handful of really fine New Zealanders indefatigably fighting to win this country back from its basically Marxist takeover of all our institutions. Among those contributing to the latter is Jacinda Ardern, with her radicalized, socialist determination to inflict her own extremist agenda on what was once a  far happier country. Her wish to basically make it easier to have more babies killed before birth also has Miss Ardern quite shockingly voting against allowing  doctors to supply medical help to any aborted child left to die – which goes against  the grain,  as far as New Zealanders are concerned.

And what about Ardern’s push  to have highly worrying euthanasia legislation inflicted on the country? Or her party’s  favoring of the opening of Pandora’s box with “liberal” legislation promoting the increasing use of  recreational cannabis (because, of course, this is what it will do – with all its detrimental effects on health and safety). Again, this is typical of so many of the shortfalls in thinking of  those pushing their own barrow…

Where is there any acknowledgement from this apparently ignorant government of the fact that Sweden decriminalized cannabis use in the 60s, but after 20 years, made it illegal again, in the 80s? 

For no  reason at all?

Why do our politicians never learn? Why was John Key’s government foolish enough to allow a (former?) Communist spymaster  to be given a list ranking as a national MP –  and even to refuse to expel him when they learned that he had concealed this (i.e. basically falsified) in  his CV). What has been behind the National Party’s too cosy cuddling up to Communist Chinese business interests in this country – to the detriment of New Zealanders as a whole? Yet there have long been warnings of China’s determination to infiltrate and dominate the West, buying up land, businesses  and strategic assets, and influencing governments’ policies by whatever means possible, including spying.  Key himself is on record as praising the leadership of Xi Jinping,  tyrannically presiding over a country where the punishing, imprisoning and torturing of citizens  – including, horrifically, removing the vital organs of dissidents while alive to sell to those seeking transplants  – has become part of  a pattern of horror being woven all over this unfortunate country.

It is good, therefore,  to see the rise of the New Conservative Party with new faces and policies which will resonate with majority New Zealanders, particularly those respecting the foundation values on which this  country was built. Given the decline in New Zealand First’s following, in particular on Winston Peter’s ill-advised, last-minute and unheralded support for the UN’s global migration pact – never  put to the country to ratify  –  the New Conservatives are in a strong position to cross the 5% threshold, particularly given growing recognition of the Green Party’s policies as extremist, basically anti-productive and destructive to the prosperity of this country.

It was interesting then, to read this generous Australian review of my  100 Days,  Claiming Back New Zealand…. book, focusing on the one vital provision that the clever Swiss people wrested from their own government to ensure that it is the people themselves – referred to as “sovereign”  – who are able to make the decisions concerning the future of their own country – rather than the politicians.

Two fine writers are involved here – Paul Collits – who tells of his own experiences while living and working in New Zealand –  and Peter Kelleher, editor of the excellent Australian News Weekly, supplying the kind of incisive commentary and analysis of events in this part of the world which is very much lacking in New Zealand. For this  reason alone, New Weekly deserves the support of more New Zealanders. https://ncc.org.au/newsweekly/ 

Why is it than in this country we produce nothing now to fill the gap left by Ian Wishart’s INVESTIGATE – when our neighbours can produce other fine Australia publications such as the UK/Australian Spectator, edited by Rowan Dean, with articles from exceptional writers such as Giles Auty, James Allan, and others – as well as Quadrant and the IPA Review?

With some wonderful exceptions, I have routinely found Australians  on the whole, far more generous than Kiwis writing in these and other areas. And our annual Summer Sounds Symposium was fortunate enough to attract many fine speakers from across the Tasman – including the late Hal Colebatch, Keith Windschuttle, David Greagg (Wizard Dafydd), Patrick Morgan, Warren Reed (with his prescient, 1995 book about Chinese Spying activities, treachery and secrecy already within Australian bureaucracies),   Joseph Poprzeczny, John Ballantyne, Peter Westmore, Paul Monk, David Flint and others making outstanding contributions.

The long-term outcome of these symposia was the thinking that underpins both the book reviewed here by Paul Collits,  and our movement to claim back this country  – www.100days.co.nz and  on Facebook’s https://www.facebook.com/100daystodemocracy?ref=br_tf

We need the knowledge of what as actually been happening  to reach more New Zealanders, long deprived of anything approaching a quality education in our dumbed-down state schools, where, as part of the whole Marxist agenda,  even the teaching of real history has been withdrawn, replaced with its reinvention by activists. And part of their agenda is their stealth movement to rename this country.

They will win – if not enough New Zealanders care enough to fight back. And we should remember that everything, ultimately, depends upon the individual…

Amy Brooke

Join us to help win back this country.  Check out for yourself “The 100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand …what has gone wrong, and how we can control our politicians.” Available through my BOOK Page at www.amybrooke.co.nz, or at Amazon’s Kindle.

Visit my homepage and children’s literature website: www.amybrooke.co.nz

www.100days.co.nz

 

 

 

“ethnic favouritism”, although colour-conscious programs are polarising…

CASSANDRA’S LEGACY: WE HAVE LEARNT NOTHING FROM 1995

You are here:

1. News Weekly
2. FOREIGN AFFAIRS
3. CASSANDRA’S LEGACY: WE HAVE LEARNT…

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

by Amy Brooke

As Bertrand Russell once commented, pragmatism is like a bath full of warm water heating up so imperceptibly you don’t know at which point to start screaming.

However, in embracing pragmatism, New Zealand’s political parties, including Labour and National, have abandoned a vital principle of government: even-handedness. Reacting to continual pressures, successive governments have parted company with New Zealanders as a whole, outmanoeuvred and intimidated by radicalised activists. Not only is their agenda prioritised: law and order are no longer adequately maintained.

In 1995, an article in The Economist described New Zealand as having embarked on “ethnic favouritism”, although colour-conscious programs are polarising, promoting disaffection and resentment. Yet, a succession of part-Maori activists, programmed into a deliberately nurtured grievance culture in Marxist indoctrination camps overseas, set to, spreading disaffection among their vulnerable young.

The result has been that not only young part-Maori but the country itself, including our MPs, have been sold an orchestrated litany of lies.

WAITANGI MISINTERPRETATIONS

The deliberate promotion of fanciful misinterpretations of a long-ago Treaty of Waitangi is having tragic results. The ongoing attack on the nearly 200-year-old treaty – which unmistakably established equal rights for all, both earlier Maori immigrants to this country and the later colonists – has been deliberate. Its provisions granted to the Maori tribes important legal title to their lands held at the time – with protection against predatory buyers – and for their material possessions – their taonga.

However, the word “taonga” was stretched by the flagrantly partisan Waitangi Tribunal, described by respected media commentator Brian Priestley as “a Star Chamber”, to include pre-European, Maori ownership of airways, radio frequencies, rivers, coastal foreshores and sea beds – ludicrous claims nevertheless to some extent favoured by our governments, always with their eye on the Maori vote.

It would be hard to find today an agreement whose meaning is more inexcusably misinterpreted as a “living document”, constantly reinvented to contrive even more advantages for a small minority of part-Maori extremists. On the basis of, in many cases, a tiny percentage of Maori genetic inheritance, they conveniently overlook their far larger European ancestry while promoting resentment against colonialism and ignoring its enormous benefits.

So opportunistic have been many of the claims, that even Maori Judge Eddie Durie, long-time chairman of the Waitangi Tribunal, cautioned tribal hierarchies against withholding payment from researchers if they did not agree to suppress information querying such claims. One brave historian, in a subsequent book, confessed to removing relevant material that undermined a tribe’s claim: he was refused payment otherwise.

COUNTER-CULTURAL RESENTMENT

What is happening in New Zealand is, as elsewhere, the deliberate corruption of democracy. Destabilising activism produces a counter-culture of resentment. Preferential treatment – and the never-ending raiding of taxpayers’ pockets by well-lawyered revisionist extremists – is white-anting our once far more peaceful country.

Moreover, resentment at a prevalent bias easily slides into anger. New Zealand’s now ongoing ethnic and cultural grandstanding, for financial and political ends, ensures funding for separate institutions and provisions that our MPs effectively endorse, ensuring a basic divisiveness. The Economist well argued in 1995 that, “to the wellspring of the principle that separates church from state, another should be added. That is, the separation of race and state.”

The lesson governments should have learned from history is that appeasement does not work. In dealing with a bottomless well of inherited and induced grievances, we face not so much social but spiritual problems: of rage, hubris, envy; resentments so deep that the conflagration, inflamed by unreal expectations, cannot be contained.

If there is a need to be meet, it should be met, regardless of race. Suggestions that taxpayers should continue to fund Maori-only cultural organisations are untenable.

Thanks in part to a majority compelled to pay for never-ending claims, the Maori economy is estimated at $40 billion. So, the ongoing requirement to fund Maori television and other special benefits is inexcusable. The tribes are well able to pay for these themselves. Especially given that wealthy neo-tribal corporations devoted to self-interest pay no tax, claiming charitable exemptions.

We are slow learners in this country. The Economist quotation I recently rediscovered from 25 years ago, its findings reported in a 1995 column I wrote for The Dominion, our capital-city newspaper. What were then facts remain facts, though the situation today is even worse. The promise that all multimillion-dollar tribal claims against the government (meaning, all other New Zealanders) would be settled decades ago has long been abandoned, and the treaty gravy train rolls on, and our culpable politicians are not facing the issues.

Cassandra’s legacy is apparently part of the human condition – especially in relation to the obtuseness of our hierarchies. Due to their long inaction, the flight from reality and reason – fanned throughout Western democracies by this same grievance mentality – has also gained ground here, spreading malice, mischief and misinformation throughout what was once called the Paradise of the Pacific.

Amy Brooke is an award-winning New Zealand children’s author, commentator and critic. Visit her websites at www.amybrooke.co.nz and www.100days.co.nz

 

 

 

Tross Publishing- those New Zealanders redeeming our times

Tross Publishing – we owe those New Zealanders redeeming our times …

https://trosspublishing.co.nz/ 

I have felt guilty for some time about being unable to do justice to the excellent, highly  relevant books which publishing house Tross Books manages to produce, putting our largely leftwing, mainstream publishers to shame, promoting well-researched writers addressing  the truth of issues about the actual facts, rather than media and government-supported propaganda,  in relation to the history of this country.

This is vital knowledge, given the long taken-over of our educational institutions – including the Ministry of Education – by those who initially openly boasted about being neo-Marxists when I reviewed their books for the Christchurch Press in the 1980s onwards.  However, they have long tunnelled underground, while we New Zealanders have been cushioned by our geographical isolation from the constant threat of invasion, both external and now internal, that Britain and European countries have had to face throughout the centuries. This,  and that the fact that the teaching of history has been so long deliberately withheld from the school curriculum by this same ministry,  means that New Zealanders as a whole are largely ignorant and complacent about the threat that communism, and indeed socialism,  poses to any democratic country. The silly rebuttal to those writing to raise awareness of the white-anting of this country was often that they were imagining “Reds under the beds” – a clever move from the far Left, as ridicule is a strong weapon when attacking those trying to urgently bring home the truth of issues.

However, I also remember the riposte given by a Catholic trade union leader, well aware of the infiltration taking place, to the effect that it wasn’t just a case of  “Reds under the beds” – but that  they were actually sitting up in bed and having breakfast brought in. Metaphorically speaking, he was right.

Since the demise of INVESTIGATE  magazine, produced by  Ian Wishart, we have had no contemporary journal providing much-needed analysis of the relentless attack with which we are undoubtedly faced. We owe Ian a great deal for providing highly relevant, contemporary analysis of just what was, and is, happening in this country and abroad – including the mischief-making and venality of those whose political agenda has been very much against preserving New Zealand as a democracy. This of course includes the parliamentarians signed up to handing over our independence to a One World Government movement, aiming for an over- governing body with its own army to keep dissident nations in check. Like ours?

While Australia has the excellent The Spectator, News Weekly, Quadrant and The IPA Review, New Zealand now has no important  and relevant journals – with the exception of ELocal, the community-based magazine producing worthwhile articles.

We therefore are very much indebted to Tross Publishing for consistently publishes books bringing home to New Zealanders what is actually happening – and has been happening in this country – and the threats posed to us, again internally and externally.

A quick check of the this website shows, in “Free Speech Under Attack”, how this deliberate move to exercise more and more control over all our lives,  the most fundamental tenet of any democracy, is being used as a weapon against us all.   In “The Jaws of the Dragon” and “China, Lied, Thousands Died”: The origins and spread of Covid-19”, Ron Usher examines the very real threat  China poses to the free world, about which our politicians have either inexcusably  slow to recognise – or culpably ignorant…or worse.

And what of the fact that New Zealand inexcusably keeps dropping the deadly poison 1080 – with its horrific effect on animals and birds indiscriminately dying as a result… while the government keeps remarkably quiet about the fact that it profits from its 90% ownership of the factories continuing to selling this product – with government ministers represented on the board! “The Quiet Forest: the case against Aerial 1080,” by Fiona M.F McQueen looks to be vital reading for those who have been assured of the safety of this product.

Another title that might well be read by every concerned New Zealander and by every politician is “24 Years; The trials of Allan Titford” detailing the extraordinary custodial sentence handed out to Allan Titford – a sentence greater than that given for  murder,   where parole is a possibility  after 10 years – or any other serious charge. This book examines the charges levelled against Titford, and the possible corruption involved. The extraordinary sentence handed out to this man, originally apparently as a result of what was private property being targeted with apparently opportunistic claims by local Maoris, shocked many, given conflicting evidence. 

With too many titles to list here, I can only recommend that readers themselves access  Tross Publishing where these and other such timely  books as Andy Oakley’s “Once We Were One: The Fraud of Modern Separatism”, One Treaty, One Nation” “Twisting  the Treaty” put paid to the propaganda, and indeed actual lies, now being told about the “Treaty of Waitangi.”  Like so many other treaties of the past, for the sake of the future of this country, and of the vital concept of one law for all – there’s a very good case for arguing it should also be consigned to the dustbins of history. 

© Amy Brooke

 See my book “100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand …what has gone wrong, and how we can control our politicians.” Available through my BOOK Page at www.amybrooke.co.nz, or at Amazon’s Kindle.

 

 

Trust Stuff newspaper chain? Why would you!

https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/08/kiwi-life/

 

Government versus the people of New Zealand

I recall it being reported fairly recently that  Labour Minister Andrew Little doesn’t read information presenting points of view he finds unwelcome.

I think we’ve all realised this for some time. Little apparently has the bit between his teeth…

So much for government of  the people, with the consent of the people. Instead,  we now have government against  the wishes of the people…

The overwhelming number of submissions in relation to the  ominous pro-euthanasia legislation opposed this…for very good reason.

The movement below making more New Zealanders aware of just how damaging this legislation is – also, of course ,strongly supported by the far Left, and the very determined  Jacinda Ardern – deserves our support.

I’m more than happy to forward it as sent to me.

Please do help them if you can – and at least send this email on to make what is happening more widely known.

New Zealand is so now past the crosswords with regard to the activist lawmaking not supported by the majority of so-called ordinary New Zealanders.

And only individuals beginning to stand up to be counted can reclaim this country…

It is claimed that those who do nothing cost us all…

True or false..?!

 Please read below- to help.

 

Amy Brooke – Convener,  The 100 days. Claiming Back New Zealand http://www.100days.co.nz

 

First, the bad news As you probably know, Parliament didn’t listen to our concerns, nor to many raised by medical and legal experts. So in September we’re voting in a binding referendum on whether the End of Life Choice Act should start to operate as law. The bad news is that most New Zealanders are uninformed… 74 % think the EOLC Act would make it legal to turn off life suport. This is already legal.  75 % mistakenly think the Act allows euthanasia only as a last resort, for people in unmanageable pain, after all treatments have been tried.   – Curia Market Research Poll

 

 

We’re not voting on whether ‘assisted dying’ or euthanasia should be legal. We’re voting on a specific version, which is much riskier than overseas assisted dying laws. This Act would make it legal for doctors and nurse practitioners to administer a lethal dose of medication (euthanasia) or to give it to someone to self-administer (assisted suicide) – to die as early as 3 days after receiving a diagnosis… …without having to see a specialist, without trying any treatment first, or being screened for depression… …and without needing to tell any friends or family.

 

 

But here’s the good news! A growing groundswell of people are hearing about the problems in this Act and are voting “no”. A professional, nationwide campaign is being rolled out soon to reach the wider public. This campaign will encourage a “no” vote without promoting any organisation. However, donations and volunteers are needed urgently to make this happen in time. Would you please chip in, as generously as you can afford? Could you please forward this email to friends and family who may be keen to help too? Thanks!

 

 

Please donate You can make a donation to: Account: 38-9014-0763579-00 Name: Euthanasia-Free NZ Reference: “donation” Please add your email address Or deposit cash anonymously Or donate via PayPal or cheque » Please volunteer Helpers are needed nationwide to: Put up signs on their fences Put up signs in their area Put up posters Donate timber for signs Deliver flyers to letterboxes Register your interest here »

 

 

Thanks again! Renée Joubert Executive Officer Euthanasia-Free NZ

 

 

Don’t all lives still matter?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/06/do-all-lives-still-matter/

Yet what was the leading cause of death worldwide in 2019? 

Reverse racism now runs riot, with destructive mob rioting being deliberately promoted  –  and civilised standards,  behaviour and debate now lost. 

And heaven help those brave conservative Black Americans trying to stand up to what has become an all-pervasive evil…

 *

Are you supporting us fighting now to reclaim our country? If you can help, even a little, please do!

We very much need donations, too, to help get our message of hope even further.

See the DONATIONS page www.100days.co.nz

 

© Amy Brooke, Convenor, The 100 Days.  See my book “100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand …what has gone wrong, and how we can control our politicians.” Available through my  BOOK Page at www.amybrooke.co.nz, or at Amazon’s Kindle.

 

 

Do we care about the corruption of little children?

Do we care about the corruption of little children?

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/new-sex-ed-teaches-new-jersey-minors-about-sodomy-and-how-to-consent-to-it?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com&utm_campaign=9b9c701525-Daily%2520Headlines%2520-%2520World_COPY_770&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_12387f0e3e-9b9c701525-401642341

Make no mistake –  it has also begun here in New Zealand.

Don’t think it hasn’t – and only individual parents at last standing up to the teachers who support the  Ministry of Education (long invaded and taken over by destructive Marxist infiltrators) can defeat this actual evil. For evil it is.

The great Times columnist, Bernard Levin, warned us that “ The atrophy of moral judgment is the characteristic disease of our times – the inability to see evil – and the willingness to condone it.”

How many New Zealanders are simply condoning what is happening in all these highly changeable areas?

© Amy Brooke

Are you supporting those New Zealanders fighting  now to reclaim our country? If you can help, even a little, please do!

SHARE or LIKE us on https://www.facebook.com/100daystodemocracy?ref=br_tf

We very much need donations, too, to help get our message of hope even further.

See the DONATIONS page www.100days.co.nz

© Amy Brooke, Convenor, The 100 Days.  See my book “100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand …what has gone wrong, and how we can control our politicians.” Available through my  BOOK Page at www.amybrooke.co.nz, or at Amazon’s Kindle.

–

 

The ridiculous attack on reason…

REFLECTION
The ridiculous attack on reason

by Amy Brooke

News Weekly, May 16, 2020

I remember once coming across a saying that the dead have as much power to influence us as the living, through what they have written. Yet today educationists ignore so much of what our greatest writers and thinkers had to say, with most ”educational” activity no more than a complicated way of inflicting on children little of lasting value.

Plato, however, reminded us: “If a man neglects his education he walks lame for the rest of his life.” Yet the once widely acknowledged fact that teaching each generation how to use their minds well is at least as important as sporting activities, has long been displaced by curriculum subjects incorporating radicalised propaganda. Today we can add our Ministry of Education’s insertion of global warming groupthink into our schools curriculum.

I recall years ago one of my sons remarking that his secondary school was hosting a government-sponsored representative to make sure all students embraced the “correct” thinking in relation to the politically hijacked Treaty of Waitangi. The latter’s simple, straightforward provisions have long been distorted by activists for political advantage.

What was particularly striking was the local newspaper’s picture of this young woman addressing some senior students, and frankly admitting she was there to correct any “wrong opinions” their parents might be passing on to their children.

My son could always hold his own in debate, and I reminded him how important it always is to examine thoroughly both sides of any issue, weigh it up as objectively as possible and then defend his own thinking. After all, I pointed out in my naivety, he would have been taught at school, too, that the most important thing is to follow one’s own conscience with regard to what one thinks is right.

Now, incredibly, this is the last thing children are taught. Rather, that for the sake of social harmony, one should endorse groupthink.

Recently, reflecting on the irrational thinking now given ritual obeisance – with so many conforming to a herd mentality embracing the delusional – I was reminded of Aristotle’s “man is an imitative animal”. The advertising industry knows this well. And it goes a long way to explaining the conviction many individuals now have that the fact they were born biologically male or female is irrelevant. They seem convinced that by feeling differently they really become different. By such logic, if I feel I am a child again, not an adult, then I am. Or an elephant, if the feeling takes me.

And we are now being asked to endorse, with the capitulation of the hierarchies, allowing males claiming to be females to participate in women’s sports, to use women’s private facilities, toilets, changing rooms — to be lodged in women’s prisons where incidents of rape unsurprisingly result. But why this acceptance of groupthink – of insisting that self-delusion is acceptable?

One well-respected English writer, using the pseudonym of Alpha of the Plough, maintained: “There is a large part of the public, possibly the majority … born to be fooled, which will believe anything because it hasn’t the faculty of judging anything but the size of the crowd, and will always follow the ass with the longest ears.”

DISCOURAGING THE ‘FOOL’

One of the books I most treasure is Unended Quest, by Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper, who lectured for a time in New Zealand at the University of Canterbury, where my father sat in on his lectures. Popper gave this autographed copy to Dr Margaret Dalziel, in 1982.

Before she became Emeritus Professor, I had Margaret as a tutor at the University of Otago. She passed the book along to me. In it the author of The Open Society and its Enemies discusses an issue long puzzling me: the nature of intelligence.

In my time working as an independent consultant to a think tank in Wellington, particularly in relation to education and treaty issues, I became increasingly struck by the fact that many highly regarded individuals, having achieved outstanding marks in scholarship and other national examinations, were puzzlingly rigid in their thinking. I came to realise that very “clever” individuals, some holding positions in Treasury, others with leadership roles in political parties, were by no means deeply intelligent. They, too, took their cue from the intellectual fashions of the day.

Popper clarifies this, distinguishing between the dogmatic and the critical methods of thinking. He writes that the dogmatic way of thinking comes first, due to an inherent need for regularities, preceded by learning – first in the sense of discovery, then by imitation and by practising.

He postulates, however, that it is the critical thinking of a minority of individuals, examining and attacking presuppositions, that is particularly valuable. He argued that what characterises their creative thinking, apart from the intensity of interest in a problem, is a much more rare ability to break through the limits of the range of dogmatic thinking.

Given the sheer irrationality with which we are now faced at every level, and the aggressive attack by the now dominant left, perhaps it is time to reflect on George Bernard Shaw’s assertion that the future depends upon those whose laughter discourages the fool — a word that we understandably tend to avoid — rather than encourages him. Today we can certainly add her!

In fact, there is an important battle now under way. So is “risus est bellum” (“laughter is war”) a reality we are overdue to embrace?

Amy Brooke is an award-winning New Zealand children’s author, commentator and critic.

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Amy Brooke convened The 100 Days – www.100days.co.nz with the support of a core group of colleagues  from the annual Summer Sounds Symposium.    See her book “100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand …what has gone wrong, and how we can control our politicians.” Available through her BOOK Page at www.amybrooke.co.nz, or at Amazon’s Kindle.

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