Methinks Thou Dost Protest Too Much

By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 18/06/2020

Protesting too much – now there’s a hot topic.

Shakespeare exposed this phoney practise through the character of Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, when she comments wryly on a play inside of a play.
  
Vehemently insisting on insincere overacting shows that the opposite of what one is protesting is probably the truth. 

Take George Floyd’s death for example.

This was a moment where everyone who saw that awful snuff film were unified in their disgust and feelings of wanting to see justice be served to the psycho-killer-cop, Chauvin.  
 
But then what happens? 
 
As if a Black man’s murder in their midst is spectacularly unusual, Black Americans descended into openly criminal acts to draw attention to what they claim killed Floyd – not Chauvin, but the conveniently abstract “systemic racism.”

​They managed to take the crime away from the individuals who actually perpetrated it and place it collectively onto the heads of innocent people who had nothing to do with it whatsoever.

Then they repeated a lie over and over again:  “Police keep killing black men, police keep killing black men.”  The lie then feels like the truth – but it’s not, it’s a pernicious lie. 

In America, black men who die by homicide are almost always murdered by other black men who are not cops but criminals.  But nobody cares for facts anymore. Only feelings seem to count. 

The protesting mobs are yelling that they protest “systemic racism” and the collective “system” is what is deemed to be at fault.  But the truth is, what is at fault is the amount of black people conducting too much of the crime with no remedy in sight.

Bringing this into a New Zealand context, Andrew Little, another one who doth protest too much, says in a recent interview: 

“When well over half of the men in our prisons are Maori, when nearly two-thirds of women in our prisons are Maori, that tells you there is something wrong with the system.”

How tiresomely mindless.

No, Mr. Little, it tells you there is something wrong with Maori.  Stop trying to ingratiate yourself with our Maori brethren to alleviate your own wilfully chosen white guilt.
 
On the back of the imported, copy-cat protesting too much, a Maori man with his blood up came out of the woodwork and threatened to again vandalise the statue of Captain John Fane Charles Hamilton (naval commander and captain of the 43rd regiment at the Battle of Gate Pa in Tauranga during the New Zealand Wars in Hamilton).

Mr. Taitimu Maipi openly acknowledged he was going to break the laws of the land and engage in the vandalising of this statue, as he has done before.
 
That is partly why far too many Maori men are in prison.  By his threats, which are certainly not idle ones, Mr. Maipi sets the example of an elder to younger Maori men that to be a vandal and show outright disrespect for property is not only okay, it’s right.  

Mr. Maipi said that Captain Hamilton was “a murderous arsehole” standing in the city as though he was a hero.  “How can that be?” he said, “How can we accept that he’s a hero when he’s a monster who led battles?”

So rather than arresting this unthinking man, who is so clearly full of hate toward our white forefathers that even statues to their memory are threatened with his primitive vandalism – the council kowtowed to his threats and had the statue removed nice and neatly themselves to avoid any trouble.  That’s called appeasement. 

What a ridiculous joke to hear Mr. Maipi talking with a straight face about “murderous arseholes” and “monsters who led battles,” when those of us who read, know New Zealand history and are also fully aware of the utterly savage behaviour of the famous 19th Century Maori chief, Te Kooti, during the NZ Wars – a native boy so wild his own father tried to kill him when he was a teen – who grew into a notorious guerrilla fighter who murdered many men, women and children who were both Maori and white.

Let’s not also forget old Hongi Hika, as Mr. Maipi obviously has, another chief who was highly skilled at preserving the severed heads of his tribal enemies to say nothing of cooking and eating their butts with leaves and salt, while keeping their wives and children as slaves (and as a fresh food supply). 
 
A Star newspaper article from the 21st September 1907, by E.M Dunlop, a column which took pains to remember the unvarnished truth about New Zealand’s famous Maori Chiefs, wrote of Hongi Hika:

“As soon as his preparations were completed, Hongi set out on a terrific raid to try the power of the weapons he had acquired, and for many years the whole countryside was DRENCHED IN MAORI BLOOD. 

[With one hand he]… shielded the missionaries, with the other he spread death and destruction among the tribes of his enemies, and revelled in slaughter and cannibalism.  His enemies were completely at his mercy, for he had firearms and they had none…. 
He sailed up the Waikato and Thames Rivers in his war canoes, desolating and ravaging the country; he dragged his canoes across the Auckland isthmus and sailed down the Manukau, and slaughtered the inhabitants of the West Coast by many thousands.” 

Speaking from the same Waikato which Hongi drenched in Maori blood, Mr. Maipi would do well to remember history with a bit more balance than his ignorant complaint of “my people good, your people arseholes” lack of mental acuity allows for. Honestly, that this even needs to be said in the Information Age smacks of pathos.

What if some enraged white person who’s had a gut full of this one-sided race-baiting – goes out on a chainsaw massacre of Maori carvings and Pouwhenuas in the name of the violent vandalism now being dished out to our heritage monuments – of Hamilton, of Cook and the rest – our venerated ancestors. What then? 
 
Will Mr. Maipi’s ilk consider that utu?  I doubt it, but I would. So would many other Kiwis who are watching people protest too much about what happened in a far off place called Minneapolis to a poor black man named George Floyd. Tosh!
This isn’t about Floyd at all.  They know it. Something far more local and sinister has found the excuse it needs to feel emboldened to be violent – and it’s wrong. 

If this is what some Maoris genuinely want done to just the memory and image of our ancestors, imagine what they must want to do to us living today, and our offspring?

Smashing up historic monuments is a new level of low that tells a tale on a present desire for bloodshed. The vandalism of our historical legacy is a hostile, destructive crime that shall be noted and remembered as such.
  
Maori and New Zealand Pakeha, like Black Americans and White Americans, have often fought on the same side of nobler wars together in conflicts against real slavery, i.e, the Confederates and the Nazis, and all the smaller wars of the 20th Century.  We did this because the best of us were all patriots – lovers of the land, lovers of freedom, lovers of the past and future generations and the natural struggle to improve our standard of living and camaraderie.  I think most Kiwis still feel that way, if we were ever asked.  

This current attention-seeking opportunism detracts in an insincere manner from the human values which have often united us as one people, and that’s why methinks thou dost protest too much. 

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"