By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 02/07/2020

​Why do people care so much about being called a “racist”?

What is it about the term that gets people so worked up and determined to prove they’re not one?

Why does the term have such a moral hold over people that we consider it much worse than being called an ignoramus, a bitch, a ho, a sod or a selfish bastard?
I just don’t get why people care so much about it.
 
If the term is levelled at us, why don’t we just shrug and reply, “Fine, call me what you want for it doesn’t make it true of me,” like we do when we’re called other horrid names?

Instead, people defensively retort, “I’m not a racist!  How dare you call me that!  I have lots of friends from other races – in fact my second-to-last boyfriend was a Raro!”

It reminds me of the 18th Century, when one of the worst slurs to fling at somebody was to call them an “atheist.” To stand accused of not being a Christian was to be anathema to civilisation and decency.

American revolutionary hero Thomas Paine was often accused of being an atheist – especially after he wrote his Deistic book The Age of Reason, which saw him severed as a friend by all his former, respectable compatriots in America, except for Thomas Jefferson. During that time, a Deist was considered to be easily as bad as being an atheist, since it denied the existence of an interventionist God and did not take supernatural miracles literally. To be an atheist meant that others perceived you to be a person of absolutely no virtue or morality. 

Thomas Jefferson was known to get quite touchy if people asked him if he were an atheist. It was a question he refused to answer outright as if an honest answer to the wrong person might cast him in a bad light that would shred his reputation.  To disparage him as a “vulgar, profligate atheist” was a favoured habit of his Federalist political enemies, especially during elections. 

Today, being seen as, or rumoured to be, any kind of racist seems to be the new immoral equivalent of being seen as an atheist in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  How a person feels about another race is entirely a matter of private choice and we shouldn’t care too much about it.  Anti-discrimination laws are already well and truly on the books and have been for some time, so it’s not as if folks can regularly practise hostile actions that stem from feeling racist against another individual or group. 

What is particularly ludicrous at this moment is that the Black Lives Matter movement, which actually is an openly racist identitarian hate-group, scream out in accusation that everyone who doesn’t agree with their claims, their demands and their hate, are racists. They regularly mark these accusations with acts of extreme vandalism toward statuary and private businesses and violence toward real people. Then liberals on both the Left and Right, who are trying so hard to not be seen as racists, get gripped with paranoia and end up completely enthralled to, and kissing the feet of, the loudest racist group that is active in our time. The irony here is just too absurd not to mock.

We shouldn’t care a whit if people call us racists, anymore than we should care if they call us atheists or anything else. Sticks, stones, names, and all that.

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

By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 25/06/2020

A cultivated woman. Now there’s an expression from a by-gone era. When I think of what it means to cultivate oneself during this rather short lifespan of three-score years and ten – if we’re lucky, it strikes me what a dull, undeveloped spectacle most women allow themselves to remain during our time.
 
My grandmother used to have a term for ugly speech and ill-bred manners in a female – a “guttersnipe.”  A guttersnipe was the very opposite of a cultivated woman. But it’s not just the lack of vocal beauty or manners where my criticism about my own sex originates, it's the abject neglect of developing discerning taste and a strong intellect.
 
I remember a conversation I once had at a dinner party with a woman of around 40 years of age who was complaining about her boyfriend’s lack of attentiveness towards her. “He just doesn’t spend enough time with me,” she whined, “I want him to find me interesting.”  So I replied, “Are you interesting?”
   
She ran a small kitchen-design business, was capable and well-travelled – a solidly practical type of woman who could talk all day about the finer points of kitchen lay-outs, interior colour schemes and what she ate and drank on a riverboat cruise up the Rhine. She was also very much into spiritual “self-development” books, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle – the Power of Now – all that Boomer New Age stuff. She thought herself to be very interesting. At the time, the last concert she went to was Lady Gaga. In the last election, she voted for the Greens.
 
A cultivated woman presents herself to the world as a well-bred, walking work of art and she is a far-cry away from anything dull.
 
The cultivated woman is aware that she creates an impression on other people with whom she comes into contact and she gives that fact some consideration, but not too much.  Rather than obsessing about what anyone may think of her, she is mainly concerned with her chosen purposes and development. She is highly aware that her life matters greatly and she has things to do, things to achieve, things to enjoy, but not just any old things, i.e, the mortgage, the holiday, the gas bill etc, the cultivated woman concerns herself with a high standard of things, for quality matters and quality requires discerning judgement. 

A cultivated woman develops her thinking objectively so as to be guided by reality and not by range-of-the-moment, fluctuating emotions. Facts matter more than feelings, though feelings ought not to be discounted. The cultivated woman owns her feelings as a matter of habit and examines their origin, but she doesn’t let them dictate her decision making in an unconscious, whimsically subjective manner. She knows that truth is not a relative concept.
 
A cultivated woman develops her intellect through a quest for knowledge, realising her life did not come about in some vacuum but is the present product of a long history of human life.  She knows a good chunk of that history and understands its significance to who she is – from her ancestors to the current workings of her civilisation. Comprehending her own times in the context of what has come before gives her a realistic perspective and a depth of worldly understanding. This gives a cultivated woman insight into the nature and effect of current events and popular ideas. She doesn’t run with the herd ever, she runs on well thought out personal convictions. This makes her wise and brave.
 
Because excellence matters to the quality of her choices, a cultivated woman makes it her business to tune her senses, and therefore her mind and soul, into the greatest works that culture has produced in art and music. She knows the difference between Mozart and Chopin, between Wagner and Puccini and can recognise a Rembrandt over a Holbein, a Bouguereau over a Tadema. To her, the quality of artistic expression is paramount because she knows that great art is the most pure and powerful nourishment for her soul.
 
When a cultivated woman complains about things, she tries to do so with humour, wit and a measure of entertainment value, so as not to burden those listening to her unduly by being a giant bore.  She’s perfectly capable of bitching, swearing, stomping her feet and raising her voice, but will only do so about things that matter, not just from the habit of having a stroppy, histrionic temperament.

When you are in the company of a cultivated woman, you will be entertained by the quality of her conversation and maybe a little intimidated too. She has a great mind which means that primarily she wants to discuss ideas, not just events which hold the attention of average minds, and not just people which is the preoccupation of small minds.  She understands civilisation and loves it, thus she will often discuss the ideas which give rise to it, or which ruin it, as if they are personal to her, for that is exactly as she feels it and knows it to be.
 
When a cultivated woman speaks she is articulate and can draw on an excellent vocabulary because her mind has been developed by quality literature and meaningful concepts. She is easy on the ear and her words are clearly understood.  She doesn’t squawk or constantly cackle like a kookaburra showing off to the parrot in a neighbouring tree. She thoughtfully tends to her speech and vocal beauty matters to her as much as physical beauty – perhaps even more so, which shows not only a high degree of self-respect, but also a respect for those who have to listen to her.

The cultivated woman is a breed of female that is almost extinct. She was once an ideal portrayed in books, plays and films, or an example set by our more refined mothers and grandmothers, if we were lucky.
 
If I were to draw on examples from film I would highlight Maria Callas in the documentary film Maria By Callas – a highly authentic, cultivated woman if ever there were one; Karen von-Blixen in Out of Africa (played by Meryl Streep); Katharine Clifton in The English Patient (played by Kristin Scott-Thomas – who happens to have the most beautifully crisp elocution I’ve ever heard); Grace Kelly in every film she starred in and Audrey Hepburn, whose portrayal of Eliza’s transformation from guttersnipe to something of a cultivated woman in My Fair Lady is gold! 

In this particular film, when Henry Higgins first encounters Eliza’s speech, his response as a discerning man is:
 
Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter,
Condemned by every syllable she utters
By right she should be taken out and hung,
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue. 

Now we have the repulsive phenomenon of widespread “vocal fry” to contend with, which is actually a speech disorder according to vocal pathologists.
 
The lack of any strong ideal along the lines of developing ourselves and our daughters into truly cultivated women is directly parallel to this ugly vocal epidemic. Speech comes straight out of the mind and an undeveloped mind constantly delivers grotesquely undeveloped speech.
 
Becoming cultivated is not about being a vain snob, it’s about being an interesting, intelligent human being who is worthy of the interest and attention of other intelligent human beings. 

But here’s a little lesson on the scourge of vocal fry, which the presenter points out makes girls sound “world-weary.” If your daughters do it, pull them up on it pointedly – it’s our job as mothers to help our daughters cultivate themselves properly not sound like air-head valley girls trying to sound popular. I’m not saying they’re going to like you for it, but be brave and take the heat and thus be an example of motherly resilience. 

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"