The adage ‘From the mouths of babes comes truth’ is so old and common to every culture that it even appears some 3,000 years ago in the Old Testament.
Lying isn’t an instinct: it’s a learned behaviour, created on the horns of honesty’s somewhat uncomfortable dilemma betwixt conscience and consequences.
While learning to lie is part of growing up, teaching youngsters to lie is not just bad form, it’s considered almost immoral in this society and many others.
What do we make then of forcing youngsters to regurgitate a lie. Not just any lie, but the mendacia-maxima: The biggest lie ever told in the short history of New Zealand?
Worse still, when that lie is promulgated by our most powerful – government – to be imposed on our most vulnerable – our school children – in the proposed ‘Aotearoa New Zealand Histories’ curriculum.
As such, it is not education, it is blatant propaganda. It is as clearly wrong as it is purely political and, by said foul acquaintance, a pernicious evil, since it is not just an incorrect statement; it is a deliberately incorrect statement. A very Big Lie.
This is the lie that our children, by their early teens, will be expected to repeat about this nation’s founding agreement, the Treaty of Waitangi:
“It is clear that Maori did not cede their mana to the Crown, and that they signed in the belief that it would give them power to govern in partnership with the Governor”
Before we dismantle the statement and prove its falsity we need to question why it was created.
In my view it seems very clear the lie has been created to give effect to the racially-divisive dual-governance plan outlined in the ‘He Puapua 2040’ document endorsed by Jacinda Ardern. A document she conveniently kept hidden from Cabinet when it included the ‘handbrake’ on all things racially-separatist – Mr Winston Raymond Peters and New Zealand First.
Ardern’s glib, dishonest ‘It hasn’t even been to cabinet’ dismissal of He Puapua and her distancing herself from it reeks of disingenuousness. Keeping the document from Peters’s eyes was obviously deliberate and calculated.
She is not to be trusted with New Zealand’s Constitution; she is Machiavelli writ large, but twice as dishonest.
It was Ardern who positioned herself as the spokesperson to announce that New Zealand history was to be taught in our schools under compulsion. It is she who bears responsibility for the lie, the propaganda, the radical-academic diktat and the brain-washing that the big lie is fully intended to be.
Ardern is, to all intents and purposes, the Big Lie personified.
In exposing the lie we also have to look at how it was created. The lie, like the treaty, has a preamble and a conclusion. Let’s look at the preamble:
“It is clear that Maori did not cede their mana to the Crown”
This statement is a false premise, an obfuscation and illegitimate: All.
The seeds of this particular pettifog were sown by avid researcher and historian Ruth Ross in an unusually cynical article published in the 1972 sixth volume of ‘The New Zealand Journal of History’.
Under the title ‘Te Tiriti o Waitangi, TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS’, she reminds readers quite correctly, that the treaty is a Maori language document, and clashes exist between the English version (the translation from the document in Te Reo back to English), which in her view may have been avoided, and that may, for that reason, be the subject of ongoing animosity and revisionist argument about the document’s ambiguities. Ruth, it appears, was prophetic as well as scholastic.
The article begins with her revelation that Te Tiriti does not contain any guarantee or even a mention of forests or customary or historical fishing rights for Maori. That would tend to dampen the spirits of today’s hopeful Te Tiriti claimants. It has, curiously, been largely ignored by those acolytes.
Her hypothetical discussion posits that the word ‘mana’, as used in the Declaration of Independence of the Confederated Tribes of New Zealand in 1835, should and would have been a better substitute for the word ‘Kawanatanga’ that was used in Te Tiriti.
The word was meant to convey the concept of ‘sovereignty’ over these islands and all its peoples by the Queen of England and her appointed representatives, forever.
Ross further implied that the omission of mana was deliberately deceitful, while ignoring the fact that the Declaration and Te Tiriti were proposed for different reasons and under different circumstances.
Her assertion that the single word mana was the only word that may have conveyed the meaning correctly is simplistic and, sadly, jaundiced in her implicit slander of good friends to the Maori. Those she describes as the “Protestant missionaries” including “Te Wiremu” himself: The Rev Henry Williams.
“It is difficult not to conclude that the omission of mana from the text of the Treaty of Waitangi was no accidental oversight.”
Ruth Ross, 1972.
Her hyper-critical inter-textual conspiracy theory doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny, even by her own standards, since Kawanatanga appears in the 1835 Declaration in the context of a governing authority and the specific prohibition of such unless requested/approved by the united chiefs party to the Declaration.
The very obvious parallel and contextual relationship of Kawanatanga in both documents is not one that Ross addresses in her controversial argument; she simply averts her eye. Her seriously flawed assertion that mana and only mana could convey the sense of an over-arching legitimate and law-making authority encompassing all of New Zealand and her peoples, was ignored for many years before falling under the eyes of radical historical revisionists and agitators. They seized upon it as manna from heaven and leavened it for all it is worth.
So why is the product of a cynical supposition, not widely accepted, originally related in a slanted argument – one first mooted well over a century after Te Tiriti’s signing – now being presented as a ‘fact’ in the teaching of ‘New Zealand history’ to our young?
Why: Because it’s part of Ms Ardern and her radical bedfellows’ revisionist agenda, where facts are whatever they deem, or dream, or pretend them to be.
In Parts Two, and Three, we’ll throw more light on the Big Lie; focus on the fib, if you prefer.
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