[Published in this month's Capital Magazine—believe it or not at their instigation! They have printed every word I wrote, as I wrote it, aside from their putting my "gutless in thrall to the clueless" line inside the Mike Moore quote. I am agreeably astonished. Is the blacklist finally at an end?]
The Real Dirtiness in Politics
“Every election” said H. L. Mencken, “is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” Elections, we may agree, are a process whereby loot is exchanged for votes, to gratify the power-lust of sub-humans who crave control over real humans.
Our 2014 election campaign kicked off with a frenzy of auctioneering that would have startled even Mencken. Tens of millions here, hundreds of millions there—in reckless indifference to where it might all come from and flagrant contempt for the Other People whose Money it is.
Reacting to Labour’s multi-trillion dollar health package, outgoing Health Minister Tony Ryall was moved to note, “The bidding war between parties on the left is now out of control.” Was it ever under control? Did National ever behave any differently? The best that might be said of National is that its bribery has been marginally less irresponsible than Labour’s.
What is especially ominous about this latest bribery epidemic is that it takes place against a backdrop of the most dumbed-down electorate ever. Our latter-day child-molesters of the mind, the education bureaucracy and the teacher unions, have seen to that—in faithful obeisance to their unacknowledged mentor, Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who enjoined communists the world over to destroy Western Civilisation not by overt revolution but by stealth, a “Long March through the Culture,” infiltrating and mortally corrupting all core institutions and organisations.
When Jamie Whyte expressed dismay at how “communistic” the views of his protagonists were in the minor parties’ debate on TV3, he was 100% correct; Gramsci is indeed coming to pass. Even more disturbing, however, is that probably a majority of voters, especially new voters, no longer know what “communistic” means … or would care if they did know. Their conceptual faculty, the capacity for abstract thought which they would ordinarily employ in discussing questions such as the role of the state and the rights of the individual, has been crippled by their Gramscian molesters so decisively that coherent conversation on such matters is now impossible. Raise subjects like this and you’ll simply draw blank stares and an outbreak of quacking (girls) and droning (boys) that the molesters have promoted in place of clear and cultured speech. Voting is purely a question of: who is offering me the biggest bribe? No politician, Jamie Whyte excepted (and bless him for providing the fresh air that he does), has the courage to take this on. Conviction politics has become extinct. “Opinion polls,” Mike Moore once admitted, “have made cowards of us all.” Politics is: the gutless in thrall to the clueless. Therein lies its real dirtiness, not in the machinations, grubby though they may be, revealed in equally grubby Nicky Hager’s latest dump of stolen e-mails.
What to do? Well, it’s possible the drooling beast will destroy itself by its own fashionable incapacity to get motivated about anything. A recent report on Stuff.co.nz projected that the turn-out of under-30s at this election will be the lowest ever. “Three out of five young Kiwis didn't bother voting last election, and even fewer will bother this time.” This is most encouraging. One should do nothing to dissuade the molesters’ little monsters from just staying at home and texting “awesome” and “cool” to each other all day.
Methinks this is not enough, however; there are proactive steps we could take to ensure that the heads that are counted on Election Day have something in them.
Disenfranchising the molesters—the propagandists who masquerade as teachers, and the education bureaucrats— would seem an appropriate place to begin. This group, more than any single other—in brazen betrayal of its sacred duty—has been responsible for the destruction of literacy, conceptual, oral and written, that is now so catastrophically apparent. How else could someone whose “speech” is as mangled as any drawling teenager’s become the most popular Prime Minister in recent memory?! It seems only fitting that this group, having done so much to turn the vote into a thing of menace, should be denied access to it. Further, the indoctrination centres known as teacher training colleges should be closed down. These are nothing more than seething cauldrons of primitivism, where thought, science and learning are dismissed as “Eurocentric” and the worship of ancient, barbaric superstition is made mandatory.
Journalists, too, should be made to experience some intimation of what life is like under the totalitarian regimes so many of them so uniformly admire, where there is either no right to vote or only one party to vote for. Far from being guardians of free speech and open debate, members of the Fourth Estate have become its annihilators. For neutral reportage they have substituted their own subjective, state-worshipping ejaculations, steeped in the bromides of the above-mentioned primitivists. When Winston Peters called them “Politically Correct Nazis” he probably thought he was being semi-flippant; in fact, his description is entirely correct. Journalists have become the self-appointed Thought Police of our time, going about their inquisitions with the ferocity of a Savonarola. As champions of the Culture of Umbrage, they are continuing Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian mission by non-military means. When meaningful (or even meaningless) debate threatens, it is enough for someone to say, “I’m offended” for that debate to be shut down and the offender sent off for “sensitivity training.” Freedom of speech has given way to the soft tyranny of Political Correctness, where no one dares say anything for fear of offending someone. In fact, it’s worse than that—we’re talking hard tyranny here. It’s not widely realised that Peters could, under law on the statute books right now, go to jail for his “two wongs” quip. Journalists have done much to engineer this disgraceful state of affairs. They want dictatorship? They should be given it!
Of course, it goes without saying that politicians should be barred from voting, except for those rarities like Dr Whyte who go into politics to get the creatures out of our lives. Power-lust and control-freakery are pathologies, and it’s already recognised that the mentally incapacitated should not vote.
Aside from these specific prohibitions, it must be possible to devise a political literacy test to establish that would-be voters know for whom and for what they’re voting and to bar those who don’t. Is it too much to expect of voters that they be informed? Much as we quite rightly expect would-be motorists to acquire certified driving skills before being let loose on the roads, may we not with equal impunity demand that would-be voters demonstrate a certain level of political awareness, about New Zealand politics at least, before being let loose in the polling booth, where their actions, as on the road, could be lethal to others?
I make this proposal in the expectation that informed voters are more likely to be responsible voters, and we might thus be spared the calamitous, communistic consequences of yet more “advance auction sales of stolen goods.” Enlightened Wellington voters have little to fear from such a test. I’m confident that many capital residents—and readers of this magazine in particular—would pass it with ease. Untold Aucklanders, by contrast, would have congenital difficulty with it; it’s unlikely any hyper-caffeinated Ponsonby poseur would get to vote at all. There must be something to be said for that!