Political Class Activism Eclipsed Quarantine priorities
Identity politics submerged climate change as the overriding moral issue in New Zealand, often considered a global weather vane of moral causes.
Mass marches switched from the extinction-rebellion climatic catastrophe ones to those vilifying the colonial era and those seen as benefiting from it, then and now.
The political-class rendition of this mild-mannered, fair-minded, and considerate nation as being in fact the repository of a bigoted, tyrannical majority, the kindest categorisation being racist, often delivered in the local dialect as “rashe-ist,” writes National Press Club president Peter Isaac.
This followed on the heels of the extinction-rebellion marches which saw city councils actively encouraging demonstrations seeking to portray a nation dedicated to hygiene, method and order as one of feckless polluting and contaminating.
This U-turn in causes was theatrically-defined by the mea culpa proclamation of the governing coalition’s cabinet who, in one instance, saw one of its members in front of an audience flagellating himself for having enjoyed what he saw as the advantages of being from a white middle class and thus pitifully unfair background.
This hair shirt exhibition was only one of many bizarre such displays as the political establishment turned itself inside out to signal its support of the freshly supercharged identity campaign in which for example senior police representatives were encouraged to attend in mufti solemn ceremonies of atonement.
Greens, by now suffering from acute publicity deprivation, seek to wrestle climate back on the agenda: notably by encouraging the mainstream media to make connections between Covid-19 and man made climate change.
Identity politics in washing man-made climate change out of the popular forum has given agribusiness an opportunity to regain a front foot at a time when its productivity is crucial.
Identity’s subsuming of the political class’s backbone cause of causes, the climate one, in another opposing interpretation has left this particular wing of the media political class, the climate one, pretty much free to implement its agenda, and do so unseen.
The centrepiece of this agenda is to hobble with international-grade show boating political correctness the nation’s underpinning primary and extractive industries.
In the shorter term, few doubt that the media and political class take-up of identity causes and the vitriolic righteousness inherent in this accelerated mass guilt transfer diverted official attention from the myriad details involved in the administration of the nation’s Covid 19 quarantine management.
The viciousness with which this same class, sensing blood, now turned upon elements of public health administration and on the prime minister Jacinda Ardern was itself a lesson on how virtue in its eyes becomes transformed overnight into villainy.
The prime minister and her officials who had successfully implemented a campaign that thrust the nation into the top rank of the Covid-free must have felt a bit like the primary producers who delivering year after year a successful economy, find themselves denounced as threats to human survival.
To what extent did the United Nations’ preoccupation with the Greta Thunberg campaign divert it and, so fatally, its agency WHO from the true threat: the looming one in the form of Coronavirus?
To what extent did the aftermath of this United Nations-sponsored extinction campaign, the one which so hypnotised this same media political class, devalue the meaning of “emergency?”
There followed the regional climatic emergencies, the ones which otherwise responsible local governments, egged on by the equally gulled mainstream media, fell over themselves to endorse and support.
This particular round of institutional mass hysteria has been eclipsed by the real thing, a true emergency in the form of the pandemic.
Moral movements exert a strange force, one of extreme excitability, on otherwise sober sectors of New Zealand society.
Authority figures such as politicians once sought public gatherings to promote themselves. Now, however, in these new-era collective guilt gatherings, these same politicians still do this, but do so in reverse.
They heap guilt upon themselves, about their skin colour, the advantages bestowed upon them by the accident of birth….the word “privilege” recurs…..
They pepper this with selective statistics designed to underline this undeserved head start.
The personal outpouring is a litany starting at the apology which is for being a thoughtless contributor to the destruction of civilisation (climate). It is for being a man (feminism). It is for being white (identitarian). It is for being middle class (poverty).
It is subtle self-praise of the type in which this class excels.
The impression is conveyed that the apologists in their penitence are, or have been, in a position to influence all these. That they have striven to alter the drift of mankind but, having been caught in the tide and that they have been unable to turn it back. That their lives certainly mattered, still matter. Will matter even more.
More such movements will wash up on these shores to be swiftly taken up by the political class whose representatives will turn themselves inside out in self-abasement with finely turned apologia which as we have seen is simply a reverse form of big noting.
Mass guilt transfer movements with their nurtured hysteria will continue to be imported here, and they will continue to arrive at times when nerves are under strain as they are now, by a pandemic and the economic consequences of it.