On almost every ‘culture war’ controversy in New Zealand politics, I find myself feeling deeply frustrated. We live in a pseudo-democratic country. The loci of power and information, purportedly in service to the New Zealand public, are dominated by a class of persons who are ideologically invested in a foreign worldview which deeply conflicts with the interests of the majority of ordinary people on almost every level. The media, in particular, traffic in the gaslighting, gatekeeping of discussion and institutionalised abuse of the unique position they hold in society, in aggressive promotion of a worldview the majority find repellent.
And so it is with the current ‘debate’ on the proposed new history curriculum. Once again, I am figuratively shouting into a black void, denied participation in a genuine collective discussion with other New Zealanders by a system bent on enforcing a contrived ‘consensus’.
As is the pattern now, the system aggressively and without organic prompting proclaims a sudden ‘need for change’; in this case, the history taught in schools. The limp-wristed conservative ‘opposition’ throw up infuriatingly inadequate protest (looking at you, Paul Goldsmith), perhaps aware of their role to provide a pressure-release valve for the anxious silent majority. The conservatives lose, the system wins; their inevitable victory fraudulently window-dressed as an unlikely triumph against the ill-defined ‘reactionary underbelly’.
And so in this vacuum of genuine debate created by a coercive system, independently-minded individuals are left to articulate their own takes on current events, in the absence of any public figure courageous enough to forthrightly represent them. Here is mine.
The System’s Narrative
The Ministry of Education, Chris Hipkins, Jacinda Ardern, and the extended arm of their PR operation commonly known as Stuff and the New Zealand Herald have deployed the following spin:
The current secondary school history curriculum is inadequate. It doesn’t adequately address New Zealand’s “histories” (the new buzzword – get with it, bigots). It leaves, in the words of Jacinda Ardern, “too much to chance”.
Put differently, schools aren’t using the latest ideological firmware update from the ivory towers of Wellington in the way they teach history. What Ardern is afraid is “left to chance” is the possibility that some schoolkids could be leaving school without some crucial piece of programming having been adequately drilled into their heads, despite the current social engineering. Hence the need for centralisation to make sure kids are safely inculcated with the elite-approved consensus before they reach adulthood and the associated exposure to dangerous, alternative ideas.
As someone who left school two years ago, I can assure the older reader that the current social engineering conducted through the social studies curriculum as it stands is profound and pervasive.
That’s what I can’t emphasise enough and is why I find this new push so disturbing: parents who went to school decades ago really have no idea just how politicised the curriculum as it stands is. If the system is wanting to ramp it up, the change must be to shift the paradigm significantly.
And that’s exactly what this curriculum does.
From Misrepresenting History, To Fabricating History.
The crucial change effected by the overhaul of the history curriculum is to fundamentally re-position where certain New Zealanders feature in our national identity. Its logic follows a backwards sequence: it is designed carefully to provide specious validation to the post-modern, post-1990s, elite-concocted construction of New Zealand identity, a construct I call Plastic Kiwiness. Both past events and the broader picture of our national development generally, beginning in the pre-Maori era and extending to the present time, are retrofitted to make them conform to a seamless narrative which at its terminus neatly paints the status quo as an inevitability. In common with every other coercive, Orwellian system, our domestic iteration is not above stooping to historical negationism and context denial to justify both the status quo it seeks to protect and the future programme it seeks to advance.
As I will explain, the first piece of post-modern dogma which this draft curriculum seeks to condition unquestioning acceptance of is the notion that New Zealand’s being a predominantly European-Maori nation state, and the sequence of events by which this reality came about, is an aberration from the ‘moral arc of history’, a development of which we ought to be ashamed and embarrassed.
To this end is the first plank in the three teaching elements the draft proposes: “Understand”. The two others are “Know” and “Do”. Under the “Understand” element come all the substantive changes to curriculum content, which makes this element the most important.
In “Understand”, there are three “Big Ideas”. The first is that Maori history is the foundational and continuous history of New Zealand. Already here, the true reality that Europeans dominated the cultural, social, and economic development of this country from the 1860s (for better or worse) is bluntly and boldly denied. Most New Zealanders accept the longstanding notion that Europeans and Maori are dual partners in our national story, even if in truth the Maori people have comprised a statistically small part of the population for a very long time. So to assert that New Zealand’s history revolves around the Maori story exclusively both undermines the understanding of most New Zealanders of our bi-cultural identity, and is in brazen contradiction of even the most accommodating interpretations of historical fact.
The second sacred cow of the elite consensus in defence of which historical fact is abused and contorted is the above-mentioned construct of the “Plastic Kiwi”. The notion that (like all Western nations, and only Western nations), our destiny is to be a “multicultural” society. Kiwi identity no longer has an ethnic element. The unique Anglo-New Zealand identity, and the cultural artifacts this produced – think Fred Dagg, etc – are now either outdated and kinda racist, or were a mythical “construct” to begin with.
(They can’t decide which right now. One of their many internal contradictions).
[Plastic] “Kiwiness”, of the Stuff and Labour Party brand, looks much different. It just as easily encompasses the Hong Kong-looking parts of Auckland as it does the woolsheds of the Wairarapa in its new, culturally relativistic construct of who we are.
New Zealand’s demographics are changing rapidly and this is eagerly seized on to make the point that our national identity has therefore “evolved” and that our understanding of it must change. But Jacinda isn’t leaving it to chance, remember? To….‘assist’ us stubborn common folk on our enlightenment journey, the history curriculum comes in once again.
The curriculum will address the rapid change to our demographic makeup in the last 25 years as follows (in fact, it already does this): instead of being a consequence of law changes to the immigration system in 1987 which removed preference for ‘traditional source countries’ and established a ‘meritocratic’ system in its place, along with sustained government policy of maintaining staggeringly high annual migration inflows, the curriculum will sanctify the current demographic shifts with a veneer of historical inevitability. The actual policy mechanisms by which these changes have and are occurring will be occluded, as will the reality that there was and is significant dissatisfaction amongst the public to this direction of government policy.
No – the Plastic, Rainbow Kiwi was always going to happen, so kids will be told. Principles of democracy and national self-determination are irrelevant to issues like demographics. Despite being a lightly populated, more-or-less monoethnic, far-flung island country on the bottom of the world, by some metaphysical law of history this particular development is both inevitable and, especially, morally unquestionable.
This is the second “Big Idea”:
Colonisation and its consequences have been central to our history for the past 200 years and continues to influence all aspects of Aotearoa New Zealand society.
This is, on the face of it, true and uncontroversial. But only the most naïve would fail to foresee the true intentions the writers of this document betray in this statement. Regrettably, in 2021 even the most banal is political. A hint can be gleaned with the use of ‘consequences’. Clearly, colonisation – the settlement in New Zealand of European people on a large scale – will be presented negatively. Not just those events of history familiar to us all which we universally regard as tragedies (think Parihaka).
The very sequence of events which led to this country being majority European will be presented as illegitimate, immoral; with the tacit implication being for contemporary white people that their presence here is likewise iniquitous.
Of course, a forbidden fact is that colonisation and settlement which occurred among non-white peoples throughout history has been achieved through means far more barbaric than anything which happened in New Zealand. The descendants of these colonisations don’t seem to have much guilt over the fact. Somehow, I doubt a student raising such a fact would come within what the Ministry of Education calls “critical thinking”. It’s not a “histories” that is convenient for kids to know.
The third “Big Idea”:
Aotearoa New Zealand’s history has been shaped by the exercise and effects of power.
True! I’m sure white students will hear all about how their ancestors maliciously wielded a clout of oppression against Maori in the colonisation era and every other non-white race through the evil restricted immigration system.
And what about now? What group(s) in the 21st century is favoured and disfavoured? Who now wields power? Which groups are allowed to engage in political activism based on the interests of their ethnic group, and which are not? What groups are deprived of the very language with which to articulate their interests, and the moral conviction to do so, by a system which at every opportunity reminds them of their supposed inherent and collective guilt?
But I doubt the Ministry’s interpretation of “critical thinking” encompasses such hatethink. You couldn’t seriously expect the powerful to encourage critical examination of their power, could you?
What’s Missing?
In the construction of their fatalistic upward arc into the enlightened, multicultural present, they have difficulty in contending with those crucial events of the 20th century which shaped us as a nation but serve no useful purpose to the new narrative. The strategy seems to be to sidestep these episodes entirely. Forget Julius Vogel, the first Labour Government, the economic crises of the 70s – that’s Pakeha history: irrelevant to the story of the New New Zealand. These events are to be mentioned only insofar as there is an opportunity for a further hammering home of white guilt and reaffirmation of our “inevitable” transformation into Plastic Kiwi.
For someone of my generation, it’s hard to know what’s missing in this new curriculum because a lot of New Zealand’s real history hasn’t been taught in decades. But for a few chance discoveries occasioned through a years-long journey of private research, I’d be as ignorant as the current crop of students about our true history.
In the last year or so, I’ve discovered some of the wonderful documentaries produced by the old New Zealand Film Unit in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Documentaries such as these are the only opportunity for someone of my generation to get a glimpse into the authentic New Zealand way of life (as it was then) and into the unique, organic national spirit which our few centuries of shared experience on these islands has cultivated. It’s rare to get such an insight into the true New Zealand which the modern institutional gatekeepers of information are so desperate to obscure. Such an honest and uncritical style of informational broadcasting is nonexistent now. It’s politically inconvenient; it conflicts with the elite programme. An honest self-reflection would prompt dangerous questions.
I was likewise fascinated to discover dad’s old notebook from his history class in the 70s. It canvassed knowledge of past events and figures now obscure to my generation. It strongly featured political history. It was balanced and fair. There was a noticeable lack of hyper-ideological, racialised spin and preoccupation with fringe social movements. How refreshing.
The silence of modern teaching on these topics is deafening. It is also deliberate. The concealment through omission of inconvenient parts of history is the hallmark of a system with a socially engineering agenda.
In Conclusion
This curriculum is an insidious, demoralising, racially malicious, counterfactual and revisionist fraud.
It will create a generation of New Zealanders whose conception of identity begins around 1990. They will have the scantest idea of what their immediate ancestors lived through, and anything they do know about the past – aside from Maori grievance history – will be permitted to be known only for the purpose of cementing in their psyche the contrived, plastic, rainbow Kiwi identity. Sanitised of any underlying ethno-cultural underpinnings, this construction of the 21st century academic elite serves well in paving the way for the next chapter in New Zealand’s predetermined story.
By now you should have no doubt about the true purpose and object of this change, and you now have an answer if you questioned, like I once did, why the media, politicians, the bureaucracy, and the Wellington Twitterati all come together in universal and aggressive endorsement of this kind of change every time.
Do not be fooled: The slick PR, the soothing assurances and the trendy buzzwords belie the true objective of this draft curriculum. It is to psychologically condition, by generational indoctrination, the majority European people of New Zealand to accept the governing elite’s future vision of New Zealand in which Europeans – one of the two founding peoples of post-1840 New Zealand – are a systemically disfavoured group, barred from any identification with their heritage or their past, and accepting of their mandated slide into minority status.
The Ministry of Education is currently inviting public submissions on the draft curriculum. Submissions close on 31 May 2021.
I encourage you to have your say .
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