"...politico-pop New Zealand history."

"We are being exposed to new politico-pop New Zealand history.
    "It is not an organised conspiracy, but the cumulative assertion of a particular ideological-moralistic perspective, which meets little contradiction....
    "This form of history has two particularly pernicious characteristics.
    "First, history is used as a whipping boy. Today's values and social policy ideals are imposed upon the past.
    "The past is found wanting and thus condemned. There is no attempt made to understand the past in terms of its own values and perspectives.
    "Somehow the notion of history as an evil in itself has come to prevail. Who has committed the greatest abuses? Who is the victim? Who will atone? History equals grievance.
    "Secondly, no effort is made to convey the incredible complexities of the past. Instead, a simplistic binary world, now divided by gaps, is constructed - Maori-Pakeha, urban-rural, rich-poor, possessed-dispossessed, holistic-materialistic, healthy-sick. Colonialism was bad; post-colonialism is good. Maori were destroyed; Pakeha flourished....
    "I am not advancing an argument against acknowledging human suffering or injustice, or the imbalances of power relationships of the past and present.
    "But I am making a plea that history should be about acknowledging and trying to understand the complexity of the human journey, rather than a moralising mission....
    "New Zealand was the last part of the habitable world to be settled by humans.
    "In less than 700 years it has been the site of events that in most other parts of the world have been developing for tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands of years. Let's not become too pompously myopic."

~ historian Kerry Howe, from his 2000 op-ed 'Making history our whipping boy'