Your Views: Readers' letters

Colonial history

Mike Lally (letters, February 6) comments on "the commemoration of the land wars" as a commercial operation.

But this reasoning could be as wrong, as is his denial that it was illegal to confiscate the whole of Taranaki for European settlement. He thinks this was in accord with the Treaty. He is wrong, the Treaty is crystal clear on Maori property rights, and they must be "willing sellers".

Further, the confiscation was illegal in the terms of the very legislation permitting them "for settlement purposes only" -- but the actual confiscations covered the whole [even unto the mountain top).

Mr Lally suggests Maori should not perceive it as ethnic cleansing because it was not on the scale as practised today -- but how does that make it feel different? Wrong again, because the land taken was not "given back at some later dates" -- and this and the resulting aftermath, is the injustice Potonga Neilson (letters, January 4) writes of.

John Robinson (February 6) also rebuts Potonga Neilson and details "the great efforts made to bring an improved form of Government to all ... New Zealand". True, the British administration made some effort, starting with the Treaty in 1840 and the earliest Local Body Act 1852. But these efforts to include "all the people" in its governance were quickly sidelined by our settlers' administrations.

John has his own facts to justify colonisation without consent. They appear to be of the highest moral order, to bring an end to wars and slaving. But most of us know that it was the earlier Christian missionaries who had the greatest impact on slavery -- that the musket wars died out in the decade before 1840 -- and the biggest impact on Maori numbers was from European-introduced diseases.

It is hypocritical cant to suggest that his is the only way "to come together as one people" when his many books are all about there being only one people anyway and how Maori culture does not count.

H NORTON
Kaitoke

Porangi

At Pakaraka around 1943, a kaumatua stood on the marae and said, "Look around you; all the land as far as the eye can see was stolen from us. All the way to that mountain and beyond it was our country."

Seventy years later, when I drive through Taranaki and see the great wealth we have lost, I am reminded of that speech.

My dad told me that when he started school at Maxwell in 1920 he and his cousins were informed that they were not allowed to speak Maori at school. They thought that the teacher was porangi (mad). All land that was "awarded" to the Taranaki tribes after the unjust confiscations was under individual title.

This was the deliberate dismantling of a culture and the destruction of a protection mechanism which had worked very well up to that time.

Communal rights to occupy and utilise the land were branded "beastly communism", but no individual had the right to sell land, not even the so-called chiefs.

As with all other cultures, 100 per cent of the occupants had to agree to any alienation of the tribal lands. Or conquer the occupants and permanently occupy their lands, none of which ever took place in Taranaki after 1840. Maori incorporations and Treaty Settlements are just more of the same old colonial practices of assimilation and social engineering.

In early February 1840, the vast majority of the "natives" of Taranaki were living on and gaining sustenance from their ancestral lands.

Now very few have that right.

If all of the above, and much more, is not ethnic cleansing, then what is?

POTONGA NEILSON
Castlecliff

A little logic

A comment on John Haakma's letter (January 7). In such arguments a little logic is a dangerous thing, and as neuroscientists are finding, emotional reaction from the reptilian brain precedes and underpins later and more reasoned response.

That said, there is little excuse for berating Mr Evans for using such terms as "despotic" ("I am the Lord thy God -- and thou shalt have no other gods but me") or "vengeful" ("Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord, "I shall repay").

In these and other "quotations" from the earlier books of the Old Testament, God portrays aspects of his nature/persona in direct or reported conversation. He commands his chosen people, "Thou shalt not kill", but in Leviticus gives an extensive list of capital offences. He leads the Israelites into an ethnic cleansing battle in search of the already occupied Promised Land.

There's more. Humanity (his make? his design?) is such a disobedient disappointment that it must be destroyed. He moves from ethnic cleansing to genocide via the Great Flood. There are survivors, but he stops talking directly to them -- an early indicator of personality change concurrent with a shift in literary style and religio-historical content. There are three such major shifts across the Old Testament.

The New Testament faith is based on the bald assertion that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son ..." Despite Mr Haakma's claim to the contrary, this slight volume suffers from considerable lapses of consistency and the questionable veracity of eyewitness accounts, especially regarding the marvellous and miraculous.

There is also the promise of life after death. Sadly, our species' gullibility more than matches its curiosity and search for evidential truth, a fact well understood by all priests.

Biblical literalists prefer to believe God moulded the first man out of clay in his own image and invented invasive surgery to construct the first woman from Adam's rib, rather than believe the more taxing proofs of evolutionary science and the confirmed truths of the age and origins of the universe and our solar system. That is to prefer ignorance to knowledge. (Abridged)

RUSS HAY
Whanganui

Faith and belief

Paul Evans should know that all belief systems require both faith and evidence. It is how the believer judges the available evidence that determines their belief, whether in scientific creation or evolution.

No one has ever come up with a better way to live than that demonstrated by Jesus Christ (love God and love others), and no one but God was present at the creation of all matter from no matter by God's voice (sound waves).

As David Gash so ably pointed out, the questions of: origin -- Where does life come from?; meaning -- What is the purpose of life?; morality -- Why do all people everywhere have a sense that some things are right and others wrong?; and destiny -- What happens to us when we die? cannot be answered by evolutionary thinking, only by consulting our creator.

MANDY DONNE-LEE
Aramoho

French film ban

France, land of liberty, equality and fraternity, has denied all of those to one group of citizens.

Recently the French State Council upheld a French Broadcasting Council decision to ban a short film from being broadcast in France. The film, Dear Future Mom, was made to celebrate World Down Syndrome Day, a day promoting the human rights of people with Down syndrome. It consisted of young people with Down syndrome from around the world talking about their lives, and was meant to help alleviate the fears of prospective parents who have been told they may be having a Down syndrome child.

Why was the film banned? For showing people with Down syndrome happy and smiling, because it might upset people who have aborted their own children in case they had the condition?

In the first half of the 20th century, eugenics -- the controlled and selected breeding of people -- was a very popular idea. Some proponents called for the end of all unfit people, i.e. those with physical problems like blindness or Down syndrome. Hitler sought the elimination of "lesser" races, and after World War II eugenics was a dirty word.

However, in many countries a high percentage of pregnant women, told their children may have Down syndrome, have abortions.

In Europe the average is 90 per cent, while in France it is 96 per cent.

It has been suggested this resembles a deliberate screening and elimination process of people with Down syndrome, mirroring the goals and methods of the eugenics proponents of the 20th century. Meanwhile, merely showing these people happy has become unacceptable.

This judicial act to ban the image of smiling children smacks of the kind of propaganda control the Nazis were famous for. (Abridged)

K A BENFELL
Gonville