Reality and the Past

There is None That Does Good--No, Not One

Over the past couple of years or so we have witnessed ideological cadres of the Left wanting to tear down all societal monuments and reminiscences of those who are now deemed impure.  In the United States, for example, public monuments to Robert E. Lee, the great Confederate general, are under attack--literally.

Some New Zealand academics have started a "me-too" dance.  Got to keep up with our brothers and sisters in the US.  A junior lecturer at Massey University has discovered that William F. Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand (1912-1925) was a flippin' racist.  (Please excuse the academic jargon).  Therefore, said activist has argued, Massey University (named after the errant PM) bears guilt by association.  The name of the University should be changed.

A racially-charged debate is igniting over research that has revealed "white supremacist" comments made by the prime minister Massey University is named after.  Now, almost a century on, a top academic is calling for the university to consider a name change.  The controversial call comes from Massey lecturer and recent PhD scholar Steve Elers, who was startled to uncover blatantly racist comments made by William Ferguson Massey.  [Stuff]

Elers has discovered the following sentiments expressed by Massey:

 Some of Massey's quotes presented included: "New Zealanders are probably the purest Anglo-Saxon population in the British Empire. Nature intended New Zealand to be a white man's country, and it must be kept as such"; and, "I am not a lover or admirer of the Chinese race. I should be one of the very first to insist on very drastic legislation to prevent them coming here in any numbers, and I am glad such is not the case."  During Massey's lifetime many people freely expressed views considered unacceptable today, Elers said. However, any justification that his comments were made "a long time ago" and in another context was "irrelevant".

The existence, even prominence, of such ideas in the early twentieth century is not unexpected.  After all, Darwinism had become widely popular throughout the UK and the US--and Darwinism very definitely teaches that the human race is not homogenous.  Just as there were more advanced primates, some further along the evolutionary tree than others, so amongst human beings.  Some are simply less evolved than others.  We now call this racism.  But back then it was ordinary, everyday science.  As it is to this day, despite the modern embarrassment over such ideas.

That's why every US President in the first half of the twentieth century appears to have adopted some form of racial prism by which they divided the human race into more and less evolved strands.  Woodrow Wilson--that doyen of Progressivism--for one.   Many in the UK would have nodded when Hitler allegedly stated that New Zealand consisted of a land populated by savages living like apes in trees.  The entire eugenics movement--widely popular in the UK and US during the thirties and forties-- was riddled with racism.  Sterilize the blacks in the US and cockneys and gypsies in the UK, and society would take a great leap forward.  The call was to work with evolution and co-operate with it, so as to advance the human race and Western society more quickly.  What could be wrong with that, eh?  Modern Darwinist acclamation of notions such as universal human rights remain a fundamental contradiction to Darwinism itself.  But that's what you get when you become devotees of a dumb scientific theory.

In Australia, in the nineteenth century public debates were being held as to whether Aborigines in that country had souls or not.  The general consensus amongst more than a few that they did not, justified their extermination in the same way that one would shoot and cull wallabies and kangaroos.  This, dear reader, is not an exaggeration.  It really happened.

Evolutionism has closed the book on these atrocities done in its name.  Too embarrassing.  However, it cannot explain why its earlier devotees and advocates were wrong.  To this day Planned Parenthood in the United States mostly aborts black, Latino, and other non-white babies.  Margaret Sanger--leader of the eugenics movement in the US in the early twentieth century--would have applauded lustily.  (Hillary Clinton, let it be noted, celebrates Sanger as a personal inspiration and professional example in her rabid advocacy of abortion.)

We do not in any way support renaming Massey University.  It's all just far too "PC".  Trying to erase the past in a drive for pseudo-purity is the sort of ignorance that leads ISIS on its cultural pogroms, blowing up archaeological sites.  It also smacks of the "trigger outrage" moment in the United States another "Ground Zero" purist movement.  Sure, William Massey was a racist--as were most of his contemporaries.  Thankfully, we have been able to unshackle much of that--although not the pseudo-religion of evolutionism upon which it grew and blossomed in the West.

Above all, we must not cut ourselves off from our past, our history.  It teaches us of good and evil.  Prime Minister William F. Massey was a flawed human being, a creature of his time, as we all are to one extent or other.

We need to remember all of it--the good, the bad and the ugly--whilst we strive to walk humbly with our God.