Let us just imagine for one moment, if the Vikings, who left Scandinavia during the Dark Ages and travelled to a number of countries, pillaging and conquering wherever they went, had never integrated into the societies that they conquered. Where would we be, 1,400 years on, if they had chosen separatism rather than integration? What if all sects had decided to settle, but not to integrate?
In all likelihood, we would still be fighting. Angles and Picts would be fighting Scots, Northumbrians would be fighting Vikings, as would the Normans, and we would have been in a state of constant war for the last 1,400 years. Lancastrians and Yorks would still be at war, and let’s not even start with the English and the French…
Would we have separate parliaments, one for Vikings and one for everyone else? Separate health systems? Separate beaches where only Vikings can go, because they have some customary claim from 1,400 years ago? Viking-only bars? One side of the street for Vikings and one for everyone else? Viking-only schools and universities?
But the Vikings didn’t behave like that. They integrated. Within a couple of generations, there was no discernable difference between Vikings and others. And that is the way the world has been for a long time. Sure, different countries try to protect themselves from invasions. But when invasions happen, for the most part, integration will follow.
Not always, of course. Americans brought blacks to the US and kept them as slaves. Even once slavery was ended, blacks didn’t fare so well. They had white-only bars and white-only schools, and blacks had to stand on buses if whites wanted their seat. But the uprising in the 1960s took care of that. People – dare I say it, even white people – wanted an end to the segregation and system of second-class citizens, and they got it.
There is a difference between racism and equal rights. Some people are just plain racist. There will probably always be people who think like that, but this is on an individual level. A society that is divided by racial groups, with some getting more rights and privileges than others, is quite different. That is not racism. That is apartheid.
We all know about apartheid. South Africa operated such a system for decades. It was a dreadful system. To its credit, New Zealand caused ructions in 1981 with the uprising against the Springbok Tour. New Zealanders had not liked the way their Maori players had been allowed to play in South Africa as ‘honorary whites’. Our Maori people are not ‘honorary’ anything. They are New Zealanders. They were in 1981 and so they are today. When he heard that the game between the All Blacks and the Springboks in Hamilton had been cancelled, Nelson Mandela claimed that he felt as if “the sun had come out”. Such was New Zealand’s impact on apartheid in the 1980s.
What a wonderful country, that rejected racism and treated everyone equally. One citizen, one nation. We were an example to everyone.
Flash forward 40 years, and we are now an example of nothing. The Maori that New Zealanders rioted to protect now want separatism. In other words, we are facing apartheid within our own shores.
As always it is a minority that are driving the narrative, but where are the descendants of Maori who were there in 1981, who remember how many ‘wai popo’ stood up for their rights? As always seems to happen, the decent majority stays silent until it is too late.
For all the screams about ‘partnership’, we know exactly where this is going. It is separatism. One group will have more rights and privileges than others. Remember George Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”? We are on the long march to oblivion and we are watching it happen.
We seem to live with a mentality that we cannot bring one group up without bringing another group down. This is nonsense. We must all be equal in every way, regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The rest is up to the individual to look out for themselves. We have achieved that in New Zealand: an almost perfect Utopia, and now we are about to screw it all up. Royally.
I just wonder what the Vikings would say about such separatism. After all, they were the masters of invasion… and also the masters of integration. If the Vikings understood all this 1,400 years ago, why are we going for separatism now?
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