1 As if Garrick Tremain's joke about Samoa were not bad enough, Bromhead has published this cartoon in the Herald. As odd as it sounds, Bromhead is not the first Pakeha to allege a spurious connection b/n Maori culture & European fascism. (thread)
2 When NZ went to war against Germany in 1914 & '39, media & politicians quickly began to attack the Kaiser & Hitler's regimes as 'barbarous' & 'savage'. Germans were called 'the red Indians of Europe', & 'Mongolianised Europeans'.
3 The language used against the Germans drew on colonial NZ's fear & loathing of indigenous peoples. Te Kooti's violent resistance to colonialism in the 19th C made him a sort of precursor to fascism, in Pakeha consciousness.
4 In 1943 the Auckland Star explained to its readers that the stiff-armed salute of Europe's fascists had also been pioneered by Te Kooti, who had named his religious movement Ringatu, or the upraised hand, after a gesture members used in worship.
5 During World War One the prophet Rua Kenana was accused of being a German agent by journos & politicians. Tonga's govt, which delayed declaring war on Germany because of commercial ties, was likewise condemned as an ally of the Hun.
6 During World War Two Princess Te Puea was accused so often of Nazi sympathies that she eventually asked the Fraser government to make a statement condemning such rumours. Te Puea's Pai Marire religion & Maori nationalism were linked, in many Pakeha minds, to Hitlerism.
7 In the 1970s & '80s activist groups like Nga Tamatoa & gangs like The Stormtroopers & the Mongrel Mob were called brown Nazis by conservative Pakeha like Ross Meurant & Barbara Faithfull. The haka party riot of 1979 was presented as a Nazi-style street brawl by Auckland's media 
8 As the Maori Renaissance & the Treaty settlements process quickened in the late '80s & '90s, the comparisons b/n Maori culture & fascism continued, but took on a different tenor. John Ansell's propaganda reflects the change.
9 Earlier racists had connected what they saw as the volatility, irrationality & violence of 'savage' Polynesians with the behaviour of the Nazis. But as he railed against a supposed conspiracy by Maori to take over NZ, Ansell focused on a different aspect of Nazism
10 During his 'Treatygate' lecture tour of NZ, Ansell displayed a huge portrait of Hitler, & talked of the Nazis' manipulation of minds. Ansell claimed a parallel b/n the Nazis' bureaucratic might & NZ's s'posed 'Treaty industry'. Both were vast, calculating, cynical.
11 With his bathetic cartoon for today's NZ Herald, which compares iwi employees to the footsoldiers of the Nazi state, Bromhead is echoing John Ansell's Treatygate rhetoric. Disappointing stuff, for a cartoonist who once lampooned absurdities.
