1/7 MAGA is melting down as the movement's lumpenproletarian base rages against tech bros' talk about American mediocrity & the superiority of migrant workers. I'm reminded of a story Tongan-based American sociologist Maikolo Horowitz told me about Trumpism.

https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1872420261108367669

2/7 Horowitz grew up in NYC's Trotskyist community; Allen Ginsberg was a playmate. Later he hung out with Warhol & Lou Reed & turned down a job managing the Velvets. He was too busy helping run legendary protest group Students for a Democratic Society.

22/30 No one familiar with the history of Aotearoa in the 1840s could take the bill's claims seriously. One only has to read William Colenso's notes of the discussions in Waitangi to see the absurdity of the idea that Maori surrendered all claims to sovereignty in 1840. 23/30 No chief talked about giving up sovereignty. Rangatira talked obsessively about the chaos & land loss caused by Pakeha settlers in the north, & the need for Hobson to control his people. But Act's bill is not about history. It is about psychology.

1/30 Te Pati Maori's haka in parliament has been greeted with disgust, anger, & fear by many conservative Pakeha. Like Act's Treaty Principles Bill, this response to the haka is the expression of a massive, long-brewing identity crisis. 2/30 Since the 19thC Pakeha have shown an intense ambivalence towards Maori culture. Lacking a culture unique to these islands, we have alternately suppressed and appropriated Maoritanga.

1/4 Act could help settle the debate about the Treaty of Waitangi by republishing & circulating this little book by William Colenso, which contains his detailed notes on the speeches Maori chiefs made at Waitangi in 1840. But the debate wouldn't be settled the way Act wants. 2/4 Act claims the chiefs inexplicably ceded their sovereignty to a handful of Brits at Waitangi, but anyone who reads Colenso's notes will notice that the chiefs never mention doing that. Nearly all the korero focuses on the problems caused by settlers in the north.

1/60 Martin Phillipps contained multitudes. He leaves an oeuvre that is vast & varied, & that can be interpreted in various ways. I see him as someone who extended & updated a distinctively Pakeha cultural tradition. 2/60 Like the music of Douglas Lilburn, the poems of Ruth Dallas, Charles Brasch & Allen Curnow, & the paintings of Bill Sutton & Rita Angus, many of Phillipps' best songs are powerful responses to the land & seascapes of southern NZ.

1/3 Sean Plunket is promoting a 15 year old who gave a speech about Oswald Spengler's theory of the decline of the West. Since neither Plunket nor the kid seem to have bothered to read Spengler they won't be aware how silly they look. Spengler has some very bad news for them.

https://twitter.com/secondzeit/status/1820298877624582321

2/5 Plunket & his young protege are culture warriors, who think Western societies have been rotted by immigration & liberalism & transgender-friendly bathrooms & so on. They think a good dose of red steak conservatism can fix things. Spengler would shake his head in despair.

1/11 When I saw a photo of Farage posing with Union Jacks I thought about an interview James Belich gave about a decade ago. Belich observed that Britishness was one of the most effective ideas in history, but that it was withering in the 21st C. Farage symbolises that decline. 2/11 Britishness is a modern idea. Linda Colley has traced its emergence to the early 19thC Napoleonic Wars, when Britain faced off against a revolutionary France. British identity spread through the world during that century. It was capacious.

1/4 Altho the problem seems to have gotten worse lately, the misuse of Nazi history by politicians & media began even before the end of WW2. Winston Peters was named after the man who fought the UK's '45 election by comparing Labour's proposed welfare state to Nazism. 2/4 Nor is the problem confined to the right, as this appalling cartoon from the Key era shows. The tragedy is that NZ appeased & collaborated with Nazi Germany & fascist Italy in the '30s, & that we may be on the way to making a similar mistake today.

1/5 I find the eliminationist rhetoric that's entering NZ politics from Trumpian America disturbing. We're hearing the rhetoric from the right at the moment, but I've also heard it from the odd person on the left in the past. I've got a graphic to show to NZ's eliminationists.

https://twitter.com/secondzeit/status/1765162373088956919

2/5 This is a graphic of NZ's 1902 election, when Seddon's Liberals triumphed over Massey's Conservatives. In the 122 years since, NZ has been divided into left & right blocs. They aren't going away, because they're rooted in sociology & history.

1/7 Imagine that settler govts had not denied Maori the vote, that there had been no wars & confiscations, that Maori & Pakeha had come together in a hybrid culture. This might sound like a plot for an alt history novel, but in a remote part of NZ it was reality.

2/7 These precise & exquisite maps are part of Kaye Dragicevich's book about the gumlands of early 20thC Northland, which I acquired yesterday. Amidst the swamps & hut villages on these maps a new, Slavic Polynesian people was born.

1/7 The debate about the meaning of the Treaty shouldn't be settled by partisan politics or polls. It should be settled by historical evidence. Here are 5 reasons why I believe David Seymour's wrong when he claims the Maori who signed the Treaty 1840 gave away all sovereignty. 2/7 The reason is the speeches the chiefs made at Waitangi. If they wanted Britain to take away their authority, why did not one of them say that? The chiefs talked obsessively about the negative impact of British settlers in the north, & the need to control those settlers.

1/10 A number of people who don't read poetry have pronounced Tusiata Avia a bad poet. How can we judge for ourselves? Back in the days when I used to edit literary publications, & often had loads of poems to accept or reject, I had two tests. I think Avia passes both. 2/10 The first test involves imagery; the second involves sound. One of the jobs of the poet is to renew the worn out, cliched imagery that we tend to use in everyday life. Bad poets will use cliches. Their seas will sigh or shine; their mountains will be mighty.

1/17 Brian Tamaki has led haka in support of Israel. 6 of the 14 nations that backed Israel in a UN vote were in the Pacific Islands. What is the reason for the significant, tho not overwhelming, support for Israel from indigenous Pacific peoples? The answer lies in the 19th C. 2/17 Grant Wyeth has attributed Pacific support for Israel to the strength of pentecostal, End Times Christianity in the region. Wyeth has a point, but he ignores the fact that a significant number of Pacific people see themselves as descendants of Jews.

1/5 I posted yesterday about the way Ben Couch & Winston Peters internalised white supremacist ideas in spite of their brown skin. Another case of the same phenomenon was the Samoan Nazi Party, which grew in the late '30s, & hoped that Hitler would throw NZ out of Samoa. 2/5 These startling photos have been publicised by Michael Field. Interestingly, many 'pure' German Samoans spurned the Nazi Party, preferring the more socially elite Concordia Club. A lot of party members had mixed German & Samoan heritage. A few were Jews.

1/9 'Don't listen to Julian Batchelor, he's not an expert. Don't listen to me, I'm not an expert. Go to the experts.' These rare & precious words were spoken by Pere Huriwai-Seger, at the last meeting of the Kaipara District Council. The meeting was a shambles. 2/9 If you order clowns, you get a circus. The circus started when Julian Batchelor addressed the council. Mayor Craig Jepson claimed Batchelor had approached him & asked to speak, but Huriwai-Seger showed the meeting an e mail that proved Jepson had invited Batchelor.

1/15 Jill Bender teaches history at the Uni of North Carolina. She's dived into NZ archives, & returned with a story about alliances between Maori & Irish anti-imperialists in the 19th C Waikato & King Country. Bender has also found an old, long-forgotten, potent name: Piniana. 2/15 Bender gives us new facts about the small Fenian army that formed in Thames & sent men into Te Rohe Potae or the King Country, then an independent state, in 1869. The army appears to have been carefully organised, with ranks, sashes, & flags.

1/4 I've got a simple question for Julian Batchelor. It's about this man, James Busby, who along with Hobson drafted the Treaty of Waitangi. According to Batchelor, their true version of the Treaty was suppressed. 2/4 Batchelor says that the authentic Busby and Hobson text and its Maori translation were hidden by sinister forces shortly after the February 6 1840 signing, & a phoney, much more pro-Maori text was substituted.

1/10 Yesterday was the 171st anniversary of the Constitution Act, the most tragically neglected law in NZ history. Created by Britain as NZ prepared for self-government, the law concretised the 'two people, two systems' pragmatism of early governors, especially FitzRoy. 2/10 Most early governors had allowed iwi wide autonomy, except where their activities clashed with those of whites. Early laws like the Juries Act had established separate systems for Maori & Pakeha. Section 71 of the Constitution Act allowed iwi self-government.

1/9 This property was the stronghold of two Pakeha capitalists. One thrived in the 19th C, the other in the 21st. Both saw the property as the model for a new & sinister society. Both hoarded art here. Both uprooted communities of less fortunate NZers. & both suffered vengeance. 2/9 I'm talking about Thomas Russell & James Wallace, & the property named Pah Homestead. Russell was the founder of the Bank of New Zealand & a string of less successful business institutions. He entered politics, & was part of the govt that invaded the Wakato Kingdom in 1863

1/5 In 1852 Robinson Crusoe became the first novel to appear in Maori. According to an Elsdon Best article I've just read, the story had quite an impact on a group of Manawatu Maori. They launched an expedition to search for Crusoe. 2/5 Crusoe's would-be rescuers searched for him at the mouth of the Manawatu, where were there are small islands. Best mocks the Maori who went searching for Crusoe as 'primitive'. But weren't they simply assimilating a new story to their worldview?

1/4 I feel overwhelmed by high culture here in Warkworth. Today the NZ String Quartet turned up to give a concert in the same hall where Pasifika dancers performed on Friday. They performed a piece by Shostakovich, who is surely a composer with new relevance in the era of Putin. 2/4 At the end of April the NZ Symphony Orchestra will be performing Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, where he dared to portray the dictator who tormented him for decades. The symphony's furious noise is an attempt to convey Stalin's brutal paranoia.