GUEST POST: Harmless window dressing?

Guest post by Reuben P. Chapple

New Zealand’s recent adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is not binding and lacks an enforcement mechanism. Nonetheless, this document is far from harmless.

The Declaration’s high-sounding phrases on the rights of indigenous people to self-determination, to maintain their own languages and cultures, to protect their natural and cultural heritage, and manage their own affairs, will surely embolden the Maori Sovereignty movement.

All ideas have a pedigree. The ideological underpinning of both the UN Declaration and the Maori Sovereignty movement lies in the early 20th Century writings of Communist revolutionaries Lenin and Stalin on something they called “The National Question.”

Communists specialise in creating social discord to divide an existing society into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups. They work tirelessly to persuade the supposedly downtrodden that they have a grievance then promise to help them get what they want.

Around 1905, Lenin and Stalin noted that Tsarist Russia consisted not just of ethnic Russians, but upwards of 80 formerly tribal subject peoples, conquered by the Czars over the preceding 500 years and forcibly Russified. To expand the Bolshevik support base, these peoples were promised “the right to manage their own affairs,” “the right to self-determination,” “the right to speak, read, write, use, and be taught in their own language” etc. It is this more than 100 year-old Communist cant that now surfaces in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.


After World War I the multi-ethnic empires of Austro-Hungary and Czarist Russia to which the National Question was first applied to stir up revolution were no more. Lenin and Stalin then directed the National Question towards undermining the hold of European nations over their colonial possessions, so as to deprive them of sources of cheap labour, raw materials, and markets for finished goods.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Communists all over the world were instructed to promote the independence aspirations of minority ethnic groups in order to bring them into conflict with the status quo, thus undermining social cohesion, breaking up nations and dependencies into warring factions, and leading to eventual socialist control.

After the creation of the UN in 1945, Communists on its various committees and workgroups began to drip-feed National Question ideology into the fabric of the organisation. By 1960, the UN General Assembly had adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Indendence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. This stated that all peoples have a right to self-determination and proclaimed that colonialism should be brought to a speedy and unconditional end.

Locally, the Communist Party of New Zealand (“CPNZ”) soon identified a minority strand of Maori opinion centred on the Tainui and Tuhoe tribes that had always favoured reversion to tribalism rather than engagement with the modern world. The CPNZ ran in the 1935 General Election on a platform that included “self-determination for the Maoris [sic] to the point of complete separation.” Again, you heard it here first.
In the 1930s, the CPNZ had little success with this line. Maori were a predominately rural people and had little contact with Communists, who were mostly found in urban areas with a substantial manufacturing base.
This soon changed. Over the period 1945 – 1975, Maori underwent what University of Waikato demographers Pool and Pole describe as “the most rapid urbanisation of any group of people, anywhere.”
This brought Maori flooding into the universities and trade unions, the CPNZ’s main recruiting grounds. The Communists who’d begun colonising the nation’s universities in the 1930s as a deliberate project had by the early 1970s achieved critical mass in many departments, especially those specialising in the study of society.
Their growing dominance on faculty hiring committees allowed them to systematically exclude anyone holding alternative views.

Controlling the universities was based on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, yet another disreputable Communist held up as an intellectual icon by the academic Left. In the 1920s, Gramsci realised that the western democracies were too attached to the benefits of individual rights, patriotism, and Judeo-Christian culture. These ideas were deeply embedded and would not be easily surrendered.

Revolution must therefore first take place on the level of consciousness. Gramsci’s adherents sought control over culture, organised religion, media, education, and other areas where intellectual discourse takes place. The goal of these self-appointed “agents of social change” was to colonise, then subvert the institutions of the system they sought to destroy.

Starting in the 1930s, western university students have been increasingly subjected to systematic brainwashing by Gramsci’s disciples using the universities as a factory for ideological reproduction. They were told they were learning “progressive” new ideas about race, gender and class, not Communism. They were programmed with all the principles of Communism without the label then flattered for their cleverness in accepting the programming. If you told them they were Marxists or Communists, they’d respond with a pitying smile, roll their eyes, and accuse you of “seeing Reds under the bed.” 

After graduating, these useful idiots slithered forth from the academy into the media, education system, trade unions, Labour Party, entertainment industry, churches and other institutions that shape society’s governing ideas. Our universities thus served as a transmission belt into wider society for a raft of Communist narratives, including that of Maori as an “oppressed” people. As a result, the political centre of gravity has moved steadily leftward over several generations.

Just a few decades ago anyone peddling ethnic nationalism would have been regarded as dangerously deluded. Now, through the Communist tactic of “pressure from above” by the UN and “pressure from below” by ethnic nationalist groups within member-states, the topic has been successfully mainstreamed.
All so-called “Maori” alive today are actually of mixed European-Maori descent.  Although the Maori phenotype tends to predominate in one’s appearance, the vast majority of those claiming to be “Maori” actually possess more of the blood of the colonisers than that of the colonised.

The presumptions within the UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights, that such individuals are entitled to separate, different, or superior rights because some of their ancestors were here first can now be seen for what it is: a long-running Communist-generated subversion strategy designed to substitute UN-brokered group rights for the individual equality in citizenship that guarantees national sovereignty and a free society.