Judith Collins, and the National Party, just doesn’t seem to get the picture. The removal of the Sir Winston Churchill painting has nothing to do with “Nazis” and the Greens are informed about history. However, they want nothing to do with Western cultural history.
They are cleaning the slate. This is the same as Nazis burning books, Stalin removing imperial icons, Mao prosecuting the abolition of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, culture, habits, traditions and customs), Pol-Pot resetting Kampuchean history to April 1975, North Korea disestablishing all mementos of their past back to the beginning of the reign of their “Glorious Leader” (Kim Il-Sung) and the Taliban blowing up revered statues of Buddha. Whether the political agenda be Fascist, Socialist, Communist, Totalitarian, plain barking mad or Theocratic – in all cases the objective is to disestablish, discredit or (preferably) reframe the past – to establish your version of history (the new education agenda), your icons, your ideology. To constantly demoralise and delegitimise the opposition.
It doesn’t help that Judith (and I lump the whole of the National Party into this ‘collective’) uses the language of the Socialist Left. Fighting the fight on their linguistic battlefield.
National seems stuck in the 90s. Wake up – politics is downstream from culture and you guys are losing the cultural battle. If the best you can do is “…not fight the Greens on the beaches”, then look on the removal of the painting as ‘National’s Normandy’; save what you can, regroup and re-invent yourselves – and please, don’t say ‘re-imagine’.
Dr Mike Schmidt, Sunnyhills
Fighting words
