Thanks to the Panama Papers whistleblower, some of the fantastical delusions that most of the world holds about New Zealand, are finally falling to pieces.
While trust lawyers market us to foreign capital, Tourism New Zealand has spent the last 17 years proclaiming us to be “100% Pure New Zealand“.
Although there was a time when New Zealand had a pristine and untouched environment, it is long past.
Yet the assertions to the contrary are deliberately constructed, tailored and manicured by marketing and advertising gurus who, with wheels freshly greased by public funds, then impress them upon the global public.
Exactly how much public money is spent on maintaining the facade, no one knows.
According to this brilliant article by Stuff.co.nz, titled “100% Pure Fantasy? Living Up To Our Brand”:
“The national tourism agency can’t put a dollar figure on the total cost of 100% Pure over its [then] 13-year run, citing commercial sensitivity…”
Indeed the Tourism Authority, which publishes its Three Year Marketing Strategy, has redacted the entire budget allocation section. It is the only segment which has been blacked out.
Astonishingly, the leader of New Zealand likened the country’s tourism marketing to, of all things, a McDonalds meal and infers that the advertising should not be taken seriously. Stuff.co.nz reports:
Prime Minister John Key compared New Zealand’s global “100% Pure” tourism marketing campaign to a fast food ad. “It’s like saying ‘McDonald’s, I’m lovin’ it’ – I’m not sure every moment that someone’s eating McDonald’s, they’re loving it… it’s the same thing with 100% Pure,” he said.
“It’s got to be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt.”
The Panama Papers is a prime example of the Prime Minister applying this ‘with a bit of a pinch of salt’ attitude to the international image and reputation of New Zealand .
Now the world is beginning to rub its eyes and awaken from the dream that has become a nightmare: ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ is as pure as a Big Mac Combo.
New Zealand Is A Big Mac
According to McDonalds.com a Big Mac contains:
“A double layer of sear-sizzled 100% pure beef mingled with special sauce on a sesame seed bun and topped with melty American cheese, crisp lettuce, minced onions and tangy pickles.”
According to Fooducate.com, a Big Mac contains over 80 ingredients, the vast majority of which are human-manufactured chemical compounds, including:
So this is what our Prime Minister’s political agenda and spin has reduced us to. A Big Mac combo. Looks good and safe in the posters, but it can kill you.
Unfortunately there is a whole lot more under the surface than just dodgy hamburger ingredients. The damage that has been wreaked upon the land, particularly after the last 8 years is vast, profound and potentially irreversible.
It is overdue for us to examine how precisely the Land of the Long White Cloud was so thoroughly desecrated – when, why and who by.
The Big Picture
The 1% run a transnational operation and they collect countries like baseball cards. Once consumed those countries exist in name and our memories only. They are added like stocks to a portfolio, run by the real bond traders – a conglomerate of intelligence agencies that, where New Zealand is concerned, operate under the auspices of the Five Eyes (FVEY).
The countries are asset stripped, resource depleted, socially degraded, legislatively homogenised, privatised, and usually dressed in a worthless rag called ‘democracy’, although in the most lucrative examples, far less savoury, authoritarian regimes are either instituted or welcomed into the Empire’s club.
The only countries that aren’t welcome are those that want to retain their sovereignty, their resources, their societies and their heritage. They then become targets, viewed as ripe for hostile takeover.
Tiered, like a twisted wedding cake in reverse, FVEY holds the vast majority of all the world’s electronic data. A two-way waterfall, it vacuums up everything it can off all those below it, with or without their co-operation, then trickles a portion of it back down over the tiers, in quantities that reflect their diplomatic priority or favoured status.
The harsh truth is that for the countries who have been sucked into this arrangement, there are effectively no governments. The entire charade of politics is precisely that – a pantomime. You could turn the sound off and it would make no tangible difference to the political course of the country which, except in extremely rare circumstances, is not charted by the citizens.
Those extremely rare circumstances are what intelligence and police agencies are in fact hell-bent on avoiding. They are tasked to expend great resources mitigating the risk of actual democracy occurring. Because democracy is the greatest undelivered promise of the 20th century. Which is why the mask of Western civilisation is set askew by any exercise of democratic rights to dissent – by any mass movement of the people – be it Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, or any other.
The gloves come off. The veneer is shattered. Grotesque, state-sanctioned, publicly funded violence, censorship, suppression, oppression, repression, corruption. On naked display.
Democracy in name only.
Our heads of government are civil servants only in the sense that they maintain a public veneer of civility and they are indeed servants – to people who we seldom know the names of and have never voted for.
Who Does New Zealand Belong To, Anyway?
New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key frequently accuses Kiwis who oppose his policies of being “anti-American.”
But the truth is, he is pro-American.
In his May 9th press conference about the Panama Papers revelations, he stated:
“Our relationship with the United States is in the best shape it’s been in for a very, very long time.” – John Key
This is unsurprising given that a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has been in charge of our country for the last 8 years.
According to Wikipedia, the FRBNY is ‘the most important of the banks‘.
…
So first we get a Prime Minister with a U.S. Federal Reserve seal of approval, then next thing we know, American National Security Agency facilities are revealed on New Zealand soil.
Despite the obvious lack of any foreign bases operating on American soil. Because funnily enough, the Americans do not allow foreign countries to operate bases on their soil.
As I once discovered by reading Bob Woodward’s books, you can often learn more from those who disagree with you than from those who agree. It’s amazing what slips through the cracks. While full of imperial apologism, this link is an absolutely fascinating anatomy of the justifications for US military hegemony that are used to indoctrinate much of the First World.
I highly recommend that you take the time to read the full discussion. There are countless edifying morsels. Also many contradictions. The various reasonings for American global domination include:
- It’s just to save global trade from pirates and criminals
- It’s because other countries can’t defend themselves
- It’s so other nations don’t have to spend so much on their own military
- It’s because “America cooks the dinner and Europe does the dishes“
While more than 90% of the conversation is pro-Empire, eventually the excuses lessen and there are some pretty major insights.
Which indicates that the exercise of US power is less about stopping pirates or protecting trade routes, but actually involves outright malicious invasion and subterfuge to the detriment of its perceived enemies.
Here is another worthy link on the same topic but with a different angle.
The author opens with:
“The US military is that house guest of dubious benefit, questionable timing, faulty manners, but impeccable credit. “
What has never been sufficiently explained either in rhetoric or in law is how a Commonwealth Country like New Zealand, supposedly beholden to the British Crown, has American military facilities and direct political influence, seemingly more so than British.
New Zealand is, after all, a corporation. Registered to the Queen of England. So if any foreign nation is to go planting military facilities on our land you’d think it would be hers.
Or that they would be at least mildly affronted when another sovereign nation – the United States of America – is so heavily involved in one of their territories.
Yet Britain ostensibly didn’t bat an eyelid at the Edward Snowden revelations about New Zealand. Which suggests that, as with arguably more than 100 other countries, the U.K. has also been thoroughly compromised by the United States. That from a military perspective, they function as one. That their national interests are aligned.
But this is not how we were raised. We were raised to believe we are a sovereign nation that, when necessary, stands up to the superpowers and exerts an independent foreign policy, even if that comes at a diplomatic or political cost.
Yet how could we ever again engineer and assert a differentiating foreign policy now? With the infrastructure of global oppression present on our soil, hoovering up the private communications of all our citizens, in complete irreverence for our Bill of Rights?
We have to go back 30 years to get a glimpse of a Prime Minister prepared to take personal risks on principle.
One who not only stood against the Americans, but even against the Commonwealth itself, when Prime Minister David Lange went to England to publicly defend our anti-nuclear stance.
From the documentary, “Revolution“:
David Lange: “Margaret Thatcher sent a note through her High Commissioner, which he delivered to me, asking me not to do it and that sealed it as far as I was concerned. I told him what I thought of him, and of his new hair dye and various other things like that! And I decided definitely to go, and we settled the terms of the debate. It was one of those interesting occasions when Foreign Affairs were put to the test. I went to the UK without any Foreign Affairs official. It was the only time a Prime Minister has ever travelled out of New Zealand, without a Foreign Affairs official.
Interviewer: “Was that because they disapproved…’
David Lange: “Oh, they disapproved completely. ”
Interviewer: “Did they try to talk you out of it?”
David Lange: “They did… It was unbelievably fraught with danger and yet had such potential for advantage, and I was attracted to it.”
There was of course, despite the risk, a happy ending. Lange’s performance was historic and compelling; he received a standing ovation from both sides of the debate at the Oxford Union – an occurrence the President of the Union said he had never witnessed in 25 years.
In that very debate, Lange spoke to the United States’ reaction to New Zealand’s exertion of its own sovereignty.
Lange: “We are in fact, to be made an example of! We are to be ostracised! We are to be convicted of some form of heresy and put on probation. We are to be kept there until we are compelled to resume our seat in the dress circle of the nuclear theatre.”
The debate was a huge win, for which Lange was internationally lauded. Yet it was soon followed by an act of terrorism on New Zealand territory, when French agents bombed the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, killing a New Zealander and sinking the vessel.
David Lange: “It was a defining moment for me because I knew that was the end of any New Zealand commitment to the so-called Western alliance. It was not when it was sunk that I knew, it was when we knew who’d sunk it that I knew. Then the overwhelming silence from Great Britain. Margaret Thatcher was prepared to condemn Gaddafi for everything but the French could go and kill people in our harbour. [Australian Prime Minister] Hawke never said anything. Ronald Reagan pretended total indifference. We never had a peep out of those people that we were allegedly in a Western alliance with, those people who fought for democracy.”
So the UK was silent when an ally committed an act of “state-sponsored terrorism” on its own Commonwealth territory. What a remarkable object lesson.
New Zealand, however, was not cowed. It upped the ante and passed its nuclear-free legislation into law and was promptly kicked out of the ANZUS defense agreement.
Yet we stood tall and defiant.
David Lange: “The great irony of the last fifteen years of foreign policy, has been that our foreign policy stance had the seeds of its change.. in my government… it was nurtured and watered by the American reprisals, but it was set in a hanging basket by the French. It was all their own work.
Thus the bullying of New Zealand had the opposite of its intended effect.
This short video discusses the impact of New Zealand’s past political independence.
As Marianne Elliott from ActionStation.co.nz says:
“…it reminds me that it is possible to completely shift a political narrative and to arrive at a political outcome which seemed radical and impossible at the beginning.”
And Peter Douglas:
“…New Zealanders are very proud of the fact that they live in a country that was small but brave enough to make those sort of pronouncements and to suffer the consequences of them at that time.”
The American political and military subjugation of New Zealand that has occurred in this new millennium would once have been considered a literal invasion.
Their bases being present on our land, an act of war.
Yet John Key’s government, awash in and drunk on the conspiratorial secrecy of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, has been complicit in playing down the extent of the American infiltration and projected a nonchalance in the face of the recent revelations.
It has openly accelerated our very obvious transition into American vassalage and despite there being no legal precedent outside of various secretive military co-operation agreements, New Zealanders are supposed to ignore or accept the corrosion and ultimately the loss of their natural rights and their national identity.
Patriotism: A Foreign Concept
We are suffering attack after attack on hard-won liberties and allowing the agenda of the global American Empire to dominate all domestic considerations.
An Empire that literally consumes everything it touches. Sucks out all worth and value, asset-strips and impoverishes. Privatises gains and socialises losses.
Kiwis watch in horror as our food is poisoned and we are not even allowed to grow and trade our own anymore; as our oceans are violated; our military is used to suppress lawful protest; our reserve land is raped; our water supplies endangered and/or outright sold; our people become homeless in our own land and our children starve.
While banksters gorge themselves on our heritage, our inheritance and applaud.
We battle for sovereignty, by opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, and many other encroaching initiatives that ultimately are intended to strip New Zealand of its lawful authority and jurisdiction, or to supersede it. But with foreign countries dominating our defense landscape and controlling our government by proxy, we have no sovereignty.
Our country is but a hollow shell, relegated to nostalgia.
A country where patriotism has become a foreign concept – a luxury only afforded within the bounds of American Exceptionalism – and even then, the only true loyalty is to capital.
A country where the desecration of our land and the blood and pain of our people is the price of our enslavement to the global 0.00001%.
Where humanitarianism is depicted as a dirty word and empathy ill-advised; a privilege; one with strings attached, that attracts blowback.
In a world where narcissists brand the courageous narcissistic; and call the learned naive. Empaths, they call us. They spit it. As if to care about others is the most dirty, heathen concept imaginable to them.
All the while communities are fractured and uprooted and culture is either commercialised or eradicated.
The Most Peaceful Country On Earth
New Zealand has, at various times, been determined to be the most safe, the most peaceful, and the least corrupt country on Earth.
The problem is of course, that that is total bullshit.
Bullshit because the impotent indexes themselves are inherently flawed. They prop up a myth that ‘somewhere is OK!’ and provide false hope to the global populace.
But I call bullshit mostly because New Zealand is in fact, unsafe, not at all peaceful, and corrupt.
It is however, accomplished at hiding it, and trades on a reputation that is extremely outdated, if not outright misleading.
Street fights are a norm in the central business districts at night, but also happen in broad daylight and in schools.
The fighting is not limited to men.
Women are frequently sexually assaulted in New Zealand and when they complain about it, they are more likely to be smeared by the Police than protected.
This appalling website has an almost endless list of the small percentage of incidents that are publicly acknowledged, and states:
The E2NZ website catalogues first hand experiences of migrants.
Tourists are ‘often targeted’ in New Zealand.
Children are not safe in New Zealand either – there are countless instances of horrific child abuse.
Poverty is on the rise. Homelessness is on the rise. Domestic violence is at epidemic levels.
Domestic break-ins and petty theft, white-collar fraud abound.
Austerity measures target the physically and mentally disabled, as well as re-victimising rape victims. Sexual abuse is also at epidemic levels in New Zealand, which has the same tacit tolerance of the subjugation and degradation of women as other colonised nations.
Massive co-ordinated civil unrest is now a routine occurrence. Each time the will of the people is thwarted and a social movement ignored, the next movement grows larger.
Political corruption is rife. On the rare occasion that it is exposed, it is effectively whitewashed and enabled to continue.
It is inevitable that something has got to give.
What They Didn’t Show You In ‘The Hobbit’
A legacy of John Key’s predecessor, Helen Clark, is the absolute mountains of money spent on international P.R. during the making of Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord Of The Rings’ movies, to promote an image of New Zealand befitting the scenery of the movies: wholesome. Green. Natural. Untouched.
The decades of unregulated fracking of New Zealand farmland makes a mockery of that image.
As did the Rena oil spill.
The lifting of sanctuary status from our precious marine reserves, for oil exploration.
Not a single shot of the movies features effluent run-off poisoning the waterways.
Soil poisoned by chemicals, on land earmarked residential and sold to unsuspecting home-buyers.
Nor did they show you Hobbits committing suicide at record rates.
John Key’s National government, is drilling the hell out of Middle Earth.
Yes, in this, the most peaceful, safe and least corrupt country in the world. Where “thousands” of people queue to apply for the same supermarket jobs. At a supermarket that sells meat that has been injected with controversial growth hormones. New Zealand factory farms are notorious for appalling conditions.
Child obesity going through the roof. Adult obesity going through the roof.
Citizens who dare protest the above conditions, are being interfered with, stalked, harassed, maligned, abused, assaulted and exiled by the domestic security agencies.
All this under the auspices of the Five Eyes.
The Five Eyes Is Actually The Four Eyes… And The Three Eyes…
Herein lies the great inequality of the intelligence sharing agreements with the United States that New Zealand citizens have been subjected to.
For while we are told that through the FVEY, we are ‘partners’, which supposedly is of significant enough value to justify spying on our entire domestic citizenry and handing all that intelligence over to FOREIGN NATIONS…. it turns out that actually, FVEY is not the top-tier of that twisted, reverse wedding cake.
There is in fact:
Kiwis refusal to allow nuclear-powered US warships in our waters led to the creation of the Four Eyes, a new military intelligence-sharing tier and explicitly excluding us.
Then when the Canadians had a crisis of conscience, quite rightly as history shows us, and refused to join in the destruction of Iraq in 2002, they too effectively got kicked from the club, and the Three Eyes was born.
Making the US, the UK and Australia the top tier of the wedding cake. Right?
Well, actually, no.
The Two Eyes
According to a commenter on electrospaces.net:
Cost Vs Benefit
Given all the above, we have to ask ourselves.
What is New Zealand really gaining by our alignment with Empire?
There is clearly no risk of piracy, or of hostile military invasion.
Or just about power?
Was it the price of our appointment to the greatest warmonger’s club of all – the UN Security Council?
Where then, would our allegiance lay, if the long-predicted implosion of the American economy and thus empire, were to occur?
It is widely accepted that the castle is built on sand; that a return to the Gold Standard or the end of the petrodollar could soon herald an economic collapse that would make 2008 look like the good old days.
No matter what happens, Prime Minister Key can always retire to his mansion in Hawaii. Or his mansion in London. Or his mansion in Aspen, Colorado. If he doesn’t stay in his mansion in Auckland’s Parnell. Or his Omaha beach house.
New Zealanders have no such luxury – they are sleeping in garage and tents.
While inevitably, study after study will come out claiming that we are a Utopian paradise.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
If the country in its current form really is the best this world has to offer – we have utterly failed ourselves, this planet, its peoples and our future generations.
For the desecration of New Zealand continues to be tolerated domestically and concealed internationally.
The picture is really bleak and will remain so, until we accept responsibility and rise to change it.
I pray to one day be able to report on how we reversed the trend.
But that will take courage, unity and action.
Foresight, commitment and integrity.
Written by Suzie Dawson
Twitter: @Suzi3D
Official Website: Suzi3d.com
Journalists who write truth pay a high price to do so. If you respect and value this work, please consider supporting Suzie’s efforts via credit card or Bitcoin donation at this link. Thank you!