First, if you haven’t already done so on The BFD, read the superb speech by the Leader of the Opposition, Hon Judith Collins, to the conference of the Northern Region of the National Party on Saturday.
Second, if you share my dedication to protecting our right to freedom of speech in New Zealand, along with our other freedoms, join me in registering as a member of the Free Speech Coalition (and making an appropriate donation). Do this before the would-be dictators currently passing themselves off as a government carry out their threat to make whatever they deem to be ‘hate’ speech into a criminal offence.
Third, if you haven’t yet had the wisdom to ensure your access to the truth about what’s happening in our country, sign up for a subscription with The BFD (Brash, Focused, Dedicated).
Fourth: if you didn’t read what Chris Trotter wrote on The BFD on Monday, do it now. (* Silver subscription required)
All of which leads me to my promise in last week’s column of a new word to replace “woke”.
It was probably that superb left-wing analyst and commentator Chris Trotter who first introduced me to the word “woke” as a descriptor for the waffling wankers who want to re-make the world into a domain in which they exert their demented socialist State control of everything that moves, including us.
Dunedin cartoonist Garrick Tremain added this touch of humour to the “woke” definition:
I confess to a problem with “woke” which is a synonym for “roused”, as from a state of slumber, and indicates a condition of wakefulness – awareness of what’s going on around you, preparedness for whatever may eventuate and a hopeful expectation of good or interesting things about to happen. In fact, the very opposite of what the “woke” wankers want to impose on us. They want us to be quiet and submissive to whatever it is they think may be good for us; that is, when they stop talking about it and get around to actually doing something.
That other superbly perceptive Kiwi analyst, Dr Muriel Newman, in a recent edition of her weekly New Zealand Centre for Political Research (NZCPR) newsletter and on the other side of the political divide from Chris Trotter, wrote about the agenda of the Ardern administration (I can’t call such a moribund but talkative outfit a “government” – even to call them an “administration” is somewhat hyperbolic) to turn New Zealand into a totalitarian state:
The dictionary defines totalitarian as: relating to a system of government that is centralised and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
Within my lifetime, however, the term totalitarianism, at its worst, has been redefined by three of the most evil characters in recent world history – Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot – to equate with deliberate cruelty on a massive genocidal scale. Whereas the worst that can be said about the Ardern brand of “kindness and transparency” is that it is astonishing in its misrepresentation, its naivety and its inability to transform high talk into any kind of meaningful action, let alone effective solutions. Think, housing, homelessness, poverty, vaccination roll-outs, and so on down the long list of unfulfilled promises.
So “woke” doesn’t work for me, and totalitarian is both too long and too over the top.
Hence, I have arrived at “totalism” with its culprits as “totalists”, as in total wreckers determined to inflict total harm on our freedoms and what we say and think.
Do any of you have any other ideas?
Final thought for this week:
I read somewhere the other day about Maori Party MP Rawiri Waititi ranting on about “colonialism”. I couldn’t resist posting a comment that there was no more obvious example of “Europeanisation” (aka colonialism) than the Stetson-like hat he persists in wearing inside the Parliament chamber. I don’t think his voyaging tupuna who paddled their canoes across the Pacific Ocean from Hawaiiki to become the first settlers of the islands we now know as New Zealand wore hats of any kind, let alone those broad brims so beloved of Texas.
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