On the other hand, my Maori ancestor Hongi Hika would be called a war criminal today; unprovoked attack, murder of captives and slavery. Not good. That connection makes me an oppressor, right? But you're saying the Maori is a victim.
Look Wally, there is no future in raking over the past looking for injustice; a journey down that road is absurd, and quite possibly highly dangerous.
Wally moves on to an extraordinary attack on Christianity, and lays the blame for everything from world war to slavery at its feet. Hitler hated Christianity as well, a religion that has, at its core, the principles of forgiveness, mercy, self-responsibility and, above all, the sanctity of life and the divinity of man.
He was, on the other hand, quite fond of Islam (the so-called Religion of Peace) and its long history of offensive war and endemic cruelty.
The history of the rise of Western civilisation is well documented, it's basis in Christianity, the extraordinary rise of scientific method and the flowering of art, political freedom, the rule of law, personal property rights, philosophy and justice during the Enlightenment.
Don't tell me it isn't the most amazing progression of society in every respect - look at the millions of people from elsewhere willing to risk everything, even life itself, to get there if you need any confirmation.
Last century has some very powerful lessons for us today, as we face many of the same dangers. The Marxists and Fascists both used the promotion of victimhood and the suppression of dialogue in their hideous quest for power. Their regimes resulted in unimaginable suffering and the murder or starvation of over a hundred million innocent people.
Stalin promoted the view (just like you Wally) that someone's success must have been at the expense of another, and encouraged or facilitated the murder and imprisonment of the best farmers, the Kulaks.
These were people that were little more than peasants themselves. The result was the most appalling famine, with 6 million dead in Ukraine alone. They had signs up telling people not to eat their own children.
The tragedy was repeated later in Mao's China with the catastrophic Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. No sane person wants a rerun of that, Wally.
Unfortunately we have people today with no grasp of history, no knowledge of the roots of our civilisation, its religion or its morality and who appear to believe that their concepts of justice and liberty just arrived from nowhere.
These are the cultural Marxists, and, like Islamic fighters surrounding themselves with women and children, they have their cultivated victims arranged as cover for their real purpose - to tear down the structures of society, the family, community, freedom of speech, our concepts of justice and the Christian religion.
Islam is given a free pass despite being almost entirely at odds with the core tenets of the social justice warrior purely on the basis of its active malevolence towards Western civilisation. Please, don't go there!
If you really want to help yourself and everyone around you (to paraphrase Jordan Peterson), don't be a damned victim, take responsibility, speak the truth, try and be a better person, and try and act as if you believe that God exists.
DAVID GEORGE
Kerikeri
