National Party campaign designer John Ansell and Invercargill-based racist Louis Crimp are planning a $2 million campaign to whip up racial hatred between Pakeha and Maori. I don’t think people will be fooled, even if anyone publishes their material. We’ve moved past the Owera days. Everyone will see this is about NACToids’ privilege, not Maori privilege.
In shades of Key’s failed attempt to divide Maori – for the Pakeha audience – between the ‘good’ Iwi Leaders and ‘ bad’ Maori Council, Ansell wants to delegitimise any attempts for justice and advancement for Maori by saying there are ‘grievers and achievers’ among Maori.
The fundamental objective, of course, is to get Pakeha angry at Mori, rather than angry at the tiny rich elite who are getting richer while the rest of us get poorer. Ideally, he would like a Tea Party situation where poor whites blinded by racism fight for the privileges of rich whites.
Ansell says there’s nothing racist about wanting equal rights for all. And there’s not. But that’s not what he and Crimp want. They want the Crown to dishonour a treaty it signed. They want to foment the myth of Maori privilege. They want to stoke up racial division. Crimp and Ansell’s public comments are laden with racism. Ansell came up with the most racist National Party political campaign since the 1970s.
If they really spend $2 million, I think it will inevitably have an effect on people. Although I doubt that the mainstream media will run the level of overtly racist material that Ansell is hinting at when he refers to when he says that he wants to “enrage the public”. That’s not just because media bosses have some standards or because of the BSA and press council consequences – it’s because New Zealanders aren’t as racist as Ansell would like us to believe, or as racist as we once were, and media that run racist ads risk losing customers.
Finally, a wee smack for Farrar. He wrote a post of this so-called ‘Treatygate’ campaign without criticising it. That can only be taken as a tacit endorsement. Now, do I think Farrar’s a racist? No, not an active one. A passive structuralist one, perhaps, but not an active one. But he knows that many of the Right’s hardcore are racist – just look at the comments section below his post. And he knows that the point of encouraging racism in the masses isn’t the racism itself but the distraction and protection it brings for the elite. So, he draws attention to Ansell’s racism without condemning it.
Farrar’s quandary is also a problem for National. Will Key come out and condemn racism from his former ad-man? Or will he be seen as endorsing it?
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