The mandate protest: a counterview

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

There has been conjecture that what is occurring at the Parliament precinct and immediate surrounds is driven primarily by those with fascist ideologies and dangerous motives.

It is all too easy to sit behind a keyboard from afar and offer commentary on proceedings, without witnessing them first-hand, so I’ll leave it up to the four ladies in the following interview — conducted on Monday after they had just spent five days in prison, having been arrested at Parliament grounds last Thursday — to speak their truth; from there you can decide for yourselves what exactly you think it is that motivates them.

https://www.facebook.com/ChantelleBakerNZ/videos/323534943038510/

My message to the seemingly perpetually outraged and self-proclaimed morally superior media and opinion class cling-ons is, look to Nietzsche’s warning that: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

Frederick Dolan, Professor, UC Berkeley explains further:

“Nietzsche makes his remark about the abyss (in Beyond Good and Evil §146) just after cautioning the reader that someone who fights monsters risks becoming a monster himself.

“That can happen to the man of ressentiment. He’s convinced that his various disabilities are caused by someone or something out to get him and that if only the scourge were eliminated from the world all would be well.

“If this is your attitude, Nietzsche is saying, you’re going to get really good at ferreting out the nasty parts of life, wherever they might be hiding, and you’ll uncover one hitherto unrecognised injustice after another: first racism, then structural racism, then elitism, then heteronormativism, ableism, lookism, microaggression . . . . You may get to the point where you can see nothing but monsters.

“Someone who sees nothing but monsters can’t fail to develop an affinity with monsters. You may become the kind of monster known as a moral saint.”

Richard Whitley